We’ve saved a decade at least, the planners say. And the Venusians are doing it for us. They’re feasting themselves into famine on the energy we ripped out of the air for them. They’ll never vanish completely, of course; as the amount of available energy grows less and less, they’ll reduce their numbers and we’ll have more and more of the planet for our use, but we’ll keep some of them alive out of sheer gratitude.
We cannibalized the ship for our huts and shops, leaving only the giant structural members that we’ll be able to work with later—melt them down, I suppose, or cut them up into useful shapes. It’s a tidy little community, each couple with a plot of ground and furniture that doesn’t have to be rolled or folded out of the way. We’re scouting the terrain for sources of metals and minerals, which won’t be senselessly scooped out of the ground, manufactured, used and thrown away; they’ll be restored to the soil or scrupulously collected and reworked. We can’t grow anything yet, but already we have plans for the protection of the rich loam we’ll create.
It’s a Conservationist world, all right, and it makes sense . . . you take what you need from the planet and put it back when you’re through. On Earth, that’s the worst kind of radicalism, of course. Being a copysmith, trained in semantics, I keep wondering how I could get my concepts so tangled that I mistook the epitome of conservatism for wildeyed sabotage, when I know now that any kind of purposeless destruction is almost physical anguish for a Conservationist.
You don’t have to be a prophet to see how Venus is developing into a self-sustaining economy. Kathy figured it out: By the time our first-born is of age, Fowler Schocken’s commercials will have come true.
Make Mine Mars
The life of on interstellar newscast operator on Frostbite wasn’t what Spencer had expected. Yet he couldn’t complain about it. After eleven stingers with a Sirian named Wenjtkpli, he couldn’t kick about anything—at first!
“X is for the ecstasy she ga-a-ave me;
E is for her eyes—one, two, and three-ee;
T is for the teeth with which she’d sha-a-ave me;
S is for her scales of i-vo-ree-ee-ee . . .”
Somebody was singing, and my throbbing head objected. I teemed to have a mouthful of sawdust
T is for her tentacles ah-round me;
J is for her jowls—were none soo-oo fair;
H is for the happy day she found me;
Fe is for the iron in her hair . . .”
I ran my tongue around inside my mouth. It was full of sawdust—spruce and cedar, rocketed in from Earth.
“Put them all to-gether, they spell Xetstjhfe . . .”
My eyes snapped open, and I sat up, cracking my head on the underside of the table beneath which I was lying. I lay down waited for the pinwheels to stop spinning. I tried to it out. Spruce and cedar . . . Honest Blogri’s Olde Earthe Saloon . . . eleven stingers with a Sirian named Wenjtkpli . . .
“A worrud that means the wur-r-l-l-d too-oo mee-ee-ee!”
Through the fading pinwheels I saw a long and horrid face, a Sirian face, peering at me with kindly interest under the table. It was Wenjtkpli.
“Good morning, little Earth chum,” he said. “You feel not so tired now?”
“Morning?” I yelled, sitting up again and cracking my head again and lying down again to wait for the pinwheels to fade again.
“You sleep,” I heard him say, “fourteen hours—so happy, so peaceful!”
“I gotta get out of here,” I mumbled, scrambling about on the imported sawdust for my hat. I found I was wearing it, and climbed out, stood up, and leaned against the table, swaying and spitting out the last of the spruce and cedar.
“You like another stinger?” asked Wenjtkpli brightly. I retched feebly.
“Fourteen hours,” I mumbled. “That makes it 0900 Mars now, or exactly ten hours past the time I was supposed to report for the nightside at the bureau.”
“But last night you talk different,” the Sirian told me in surprise. “You say many times how bureau chief McGillicuddy can take lousy job and jam—”
“That was last night,” I moaned. “This is this morning.”
“Relax, little Earth chum. I sing again song you taught me: X is for the ecstasy she ga-a-ave me; E is for—”
My throbbing head still objected. I flapped good-by at him and set a course for the door of Blogri’s joint. The quaint period mottoes: “QUAFFE YE NUT-BROWN AYLE” “DROPPE DEAD TWYCE” and so on—didn’t look so quaint by the cold light of the Martian dawn.
An unpleasant little character, Venusian or something, I’d seen around the place oozed up to me. “Head hurt plenty.”
“Huh?” he simpered.
“This is no time for sympathy,” I said. “Now one side or a flipper off—I gotta go to work.”
“No sympathy,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He fumbled oddly in his belt, then showed me a little white capsule. “Clear your head, huh? Work like lightning, you bet!”
I was interested. “How much?”
“For you, friend, nothing. Because I hate seeing fellows suffer with big head.”
“Beat it,” I told him, and shoved past through the door.
That pitch of his with a free sample meant he was pushing J-K-B. I was in enough trouble without adding an unbreakable addiction to the stuff. If I’d taken his free sample, I would have been back to see him in 12 hours, sweating blood for more. And that time he would have named his own price.
I fell into an eastbound chair and fumbled a quarter into the slot The thin, cold air of the pressure dome was clearing my head already. I was sorry for all the times I’d cussed a skinflint dome administration for not supplying a richer air mix or heating the outdoors more lavishly. I felt fool enough to shave, and luckily had my razor in my wallet. By the time the chair was gliding past the building, where Interstellar News had a floor, I had the whiskers off my jaw and most of the sawdust out of my hair.
The floater took me up to our floor while I tried not to think of what McGillicuddy would have to say.
The newsroom was full of noise as usual. McGillicuddy vu in the copydesk slot chewing his way through a pile of dpatches due to be filed on the pressure dome split for A.M. newscasts in four minutes by the big wall clock. He fed his copy, without looking, to an operator battering the keys of fte old-fashioned radioteletype that was good enough to serve for local clients.
“Two minutes short!” he yelled at one of the men on the “Gimme a brightener! Gimme a god-damned brightener!” The rim man raced to the receiving ethertypes from rCammadion, Betelgeuse, and the other Interstellar bureaus. He yanked an item from one of the clicking machines and caged it at McGillicuddy, who slashed at it with his pencil and passed it to the operator. The tape the operator was cooing started through the transmitter-distributor, and on all local clients’ radioteletypes appeared:
“FIFTEEN-MINUTE INTERSTELLAR NEWSCAST AM MARS PRESSURE DOMES.”
Everybody leaned back and lit up. McGillicuddy’s eye fell on me, and I cleared my throat.
“Got a cold?” he asked genially.
“Nope. No cold.”
“Touch of indigestion? Flu, maybe? You’re tardy today.”
“I know it.”
“Bright boy,” He was smiling. That was bad.
“Spencer,” he told me. “I thought long and hard about you. I thought about you when you failed to show up for the nightside. I thought about you intermittently through the night as I took your shift. Along about 0300 I decided what to do with you. It was as though Providence had taken a hand. It was as though I prayed ‘Lord, what shall I do with a drunken, no-good son of a spacecook who ranks in my opinion with the boils of Job as an affliction to man?’ Here’s the answer, Spencer.”
He tossed me a piece-of ethertype paper, torn from one of our interstellar-circuit machines. On it was the following dialogue:
ANYBODY TTHURE I MEAN THERE
THIS MARSBUO ISN GA PLS
WOT TTHUT I MEAN WOT THAT MEAN
PLEASE
THIS IS THE MARS BUREAU OF INTERSTELLAR NEWS. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING HORSING AROUND ON OUR KRUEGER 60-B CIRCUIT TELETYPE QUESTIONMARK. WHERE IS REGULAR STAFFER. GO AHEAD
THATK WOT I AM CALLING YOU ABBOUUT. KENNEDY DIED THIS MORNING PNEUMONIA. I AM WEEMS EDITOR Phoenix. U SENDING REPLLACEMENT KENNEDY PLEAS
THIS MCGILLICUDDY, MARSBUO ISN CHIEF. SENDING REPLACEMENT KENNEDY SOONEST. HAVE IDEAL MAN FOR JOB. END.
That was all. It was enough.
“Chief,” I said to McGillicuddy. “Chief, you can’t. You wouldn’t—would you?”
“Better get packed,” he told me, busily marking up copy, “Better take plenty of nice, warm clothing. I understand Krueger 60-B is about one thousand times dimmer than the sun. That’s absolute magnitude, of course—Frostbite’s in quite close. A primitive community, I’m told. Kennedy didn’t like it. But of course the poor old duffer wasn’t good enough to handle anything swifter than a one-man bureau on a one-planet split. Better take lots of warm clothing.”
“I quit,” I said.
“Sam,” said somebody, in a voice that always makes me turn to custard inside.
“Hello, Ellie,” I said. “I was just telling Mr. McGillicuddy that he isn’t going to shoot me off to Frostbite to rot.”
“Freeze,” corrected McGillicuddy with relish. “Freeze. Good morning, Miss Masters. Did you want to say a few parting words to your friend?”
“I do,” she told him, and drew me aside to no man’s land where the ladies of the press prepared strange copy for the (coder sex. “Don’t quit, Sam,” she said in that voice. “I could never love a quitter. What if it is a minor assignment?”
“Minor,” I said. “What a gem of understatement that is!”
“It’ll be good for you,” she insisted. “You can show him that you’ve got on the ball. You’ll be on your own except for the regular dispatches to the main circuit and your local unit. You could dig up all sorts of cute feature stories that’d get your name known.” And so on. It was partly her logic, partly that voice and partly her promise to kiss me good-by at the port.
I’ll take it,” I told McGillicuddy. He looked up with a pleased smile and murmured: “The power of prayer . . .”
The good-by kiss from Ellie was the only thing about the jonmey that wasn’t nightmarish. ISN’s expense account stuck me on a rusty bucket that I shared with glamorous freight like yak kids and tenpenny nails. The little yaks blatted whenever we went into overdrive to break through the speed of light. The Greenhough Effect—known to readers of the science features as “supertime”—scared hell out of them. On ordinary rocket drive, they just groaned and whimpered to each other the yak equivalent of “Thibet was never like this!”
The Frostbite spaceport wasn’t like the South Pole, but it’d be like Greenland, There was a bunch of farmers waiting for their yaks, beating their mittened hands together and exhaling long plumes of vapor. The collector of customs, a rat-faced city boy, didn’t have the decency to hand them over and let the hayseeds get back to the administration building. I watched through a porthole and saw him stalling and dawdling over a sheaf of papers for each of the farmers. Oddly enough, the stalling and dawdling stopped as soon as the farmers caught on and passed over a few dollars. Nobody even bothered to slip it shamefacedly from one hand to another. They just handed it over, not caring who saw—Rat-Face sneering, the farmers dumbly accepting the racket.
My turn came. Rat-Face came aboard and we were introduced by the chief engineer. “Harya,” he said. “Twenny bucks.”
“What for?”
“Landing permit. Later at the administration you can pay your visitor’s permit. That’s twenny, bucks too.”
“I’m not a visitor. I’m coming here to work.”
“Work, schmurk. So you’ll need a work permit—twenny bucks.” His eyes wandered. “Whaddaya got there?”
“Ethertype parts. May need them for replacements.”
He was on his knees hi front of the box, crooning, “Triple ad valorem plus twenny dollars security bond for each part plus twenny dollars inspection fee plus twenny dollars for decontamination plus twenny dollars for failure to declare plus—”
“Break it up, Joe,” said a new arrival—a grey-mustached little man, lost in his parka. “He’s a friend of mine. Extend the courtesies of the port.”
Rat-Face—Joe—didn’t like it, but he took it. He muttered about doing his duty and gave me a card.
“Twenny bucks?” I asked, studying it.
“Nah,” he said angrily. “You’re free-loading.” He got out.
“Looks as if you saved ISN some money,” I said to the little man. He threw back the hood of his parka in the relative warmth of the ship.
“Why not? We’ll be working together. I’m Chenery from the Phoenix.”
“Oh, yeah—the client.”
“That’s right,” he agreed, grinning. “The client. What exactly did you do to get banished to Frostbite?”
Since there was probably a spacemail aboard from Mc-Gillicuddy telling him exactly what I did, I told him. “Chief thought I was generally shiftless.”
“You’ll do here,” he said. “It’s a shiftless, easy-going kind of place. I have the key to your bureau. Want me to lead the way?”
“What about my baggage?”
“Your stuff’s safe. Port officers won’t loot it when they know you’re a friend of the Phoenix.”
That wasn’t exactly what I’d meant; I’d always taken it for granted that port officers didn’t loot anybody’s baggage, no matter whose friends they were or weren’t. As Chenery had said, it seemed to be a shiftless, easy-going place. I let him lead the way; he had a jeep watting to take us to the administration building, a musty, too-tight hodgepodge of desks. A tot of them were vacant, and the dowdy women and fattish men at the others, didn’t seem to be very busy. The women were doing their nails or reading; the men mostly were playing blotto with pocket-size dials for small change. A couple were sleeping.
From the administration building a jet job took us the 20 kilos to-town. Frostbite, the capital of Frostbite, housed maybe 40,000 people. No pressure dome. Just the glorious outdoors, complete with dust, weather, bisects, and a steady, icy wind. Hick towns seem to be the same the universe over. There was a main street called Main Street with clothing ibops and restaurants, gambling houses, and more or less fancy saloons, a couple of vaudeville theaters, and dance bafls. At the unfashionable end of Main Street were some Cum implement shops, places to buy surveying instruments and geologic detectors and the building that housed the Inter-MeQar News Service Frostbite Bureau. It was a couple of front rooms on the second floor, with a mechanical dentist. Wow, an osteopath above, and a “ride-up-and-save” parka emporium to the rear.
Chenery let me in, and it was easy to see at once why Kennedy had died of pneumonia. Bottles. The air conditioning must have carried away every last sniff of liquor, but it seemed to me that I could smell the rancid, homebrew stuff he’d been drinking. They were everywhere, the relics of a shameless, hopeless alcoholic who’d been good for nothing better than Frostbite. Sticky glasses and bottles everywhere told the story.
I slid open the hatch of the incinerator and started tossing down bottles and glasses from the copy desk, the morgue, the ethertype. Chenery helped, and decently kept his mouth shut. When we’d got the place kind of cleaned up I wanted to know what the daily routine was like.
Chenery shrugged. “Anything you make it, I guess. I used to push Kennedy to get more low-temperature agriculture stories for us. And those yaks that landed with you started as a civic-betterment stunt the Phoenix ran. It was all tractors until our farm editor had a brainstorm and brought in a pair. It’s a hell of a good idea—you can’t get milk, butter and meat out of a tractor. Kennedy helped us get advice from some Earthside agronomy station to set it up and helped get clearance for the first pair too. I don’t have much idea of what copy he filed back to ISN. Frankly, we used him mostly as a contact man.”<
br />
I asked miserably: “What the hell kind of copy can you file from a hole like this?” He laughed and cheerfully agreed that things were pretty slow.
“Here’s today’s Phoenix,” he said, as the faxer began to hum. A neat, 16-page tabloid, stapled, pushed its way out in a couple of seconds. I flipped through it and asked: “No color at all?”
Chenery gave me a wink. “What the subscribers and advertisers don’t know won’t hurt them. Sometimes we break down and give them a page-one color pic.”
I studied the Phoenix. Very conservative layout—naturally. It’s competition that leads to circus makeup, and the Phoenix was the only sheet on the planet. The number-one story under a modest two-column head was an ISN farm piece on fertilizers for high-altitude agriculture, virtually unedited. The number-two story was an ISN piece on the current United Planets assembly.
“Is Frostbite in the UP, by the way?” I asked. “No. It’s the big political question here. The Phoenix is against applying. We figure the planet can’t afford the assessment in die first place, and if it could there wouldn’t be anything to gain by joining.”
“Um.” I studied the ISN piece closer and saw that the Phoenix was very much opposed indeed. The paper had doctored our story plenty. I hadn’t seen the original, but ISN is—in fact and according to its charter—as impartial as it’s humanly possible to be. But our story, as it emerged in the Phoenix, consisted of: a paragraph about an undignified, wrangling debate over the Mars-excavation question; a fist-fight between a Titanian and an Earth delegate in a corridor; a Sirian’s red-hot denunciation of the UP as a power-politics instrument of the old planets; and a report of UP administrative expenses—without a corresponding report of achievements.
“I suppose,” I supposed, “that the majority of the planet is stringing along with the Phoenix?”
“Eight to one, the last time a plebiscite was run off,” said Chenery proudly.
Collected Short Fiction Page 177
