by Anthology
Anyway, what happened was that, with a margin of a little more than three decades, Terra depopulated itself by its many thousands of ships to its hundreds of worlds (leaving behind, of course, certain die-hards who died, of course, certainly) and the new worlds were established with varying degrees of bravery and a pretty wide representation across the success scale.
It happened, however (in ways much too recondite to be described in this kind of a science fiction story), that Drive Central on Earth, a computer central, was not only the sole means of keeping track of all the worlds; it was their only means of keeping track with one another; and when this installation added its bright brief speck to the ocean of Nova-glare, there simply was no way for all the worlds to find one another without the arduous process of unmanned Drive-ships and search. It took a long while for any of the new worlds to develop the necessary technology, and an even longer while for it to be productively operational, but at length, on a planet which called itself Terratu (the suffix meaning both “too” and “2”) because it happened to be the third planet of a GO-type sun, there appeared something called the Archives, a sort of index and clearinghouse for all known inhabited worlds, which made this planet the communications central and general dispatcher for trade with them all and their trade with one another—a great convenience for everyone. A side result, of course, was the conviction on Terratu that, being a communications central, it was also central to the universe and therefore should control it, but then, that is the occupational hazard of all conscious entities.
We are now in a position to determine just what sort of a science fiction story this really is.
“Charli Bux,” snapped Charli Bux, “to see the Archive Master.”
“Certainly,” said the pretty girl at the desk, in the cool tones reserved by pretty girls for use on hurried and indignant visitors who are clearly unaware, or uncaring, that the girl is pretty. “Have you an appointment?”
He seemed like such a nice young man in spite of his hurry and his indignation. The way, however, in which he concealed all his niceness by bringing his narrowed eyes finally to rest on her upturned face, and still showed no signs of appreciating her pretty-girlhood, made her quite as not-pretty as he was not-nice.
“Have you,” he asked coldly, “an appointment book?”
She had no response to that, because she had such a book; it lay open in front of her. She put a golden and escalloped fingernail on his name therein inscribed, compared it and his face with negative enthusiasm, and ran the fingernail across to the time noted. She glanced at the clockface set into her desk, passed her hand over a stud, and said, “A Mr. Charli uh Bux to see you, Archive Master.”
“Send him in,” said the stud.
“You may go in now.”
“I know,” he said shortly.
“I don’t like you.”
“What?” he said; but he was thinking about something else, and before she could repeat the remark he had disappeared through the inner door.
The Archive Master had been around long enough to expect courtesy, respect, and submission, to get these things, and to like them. Charli Bux slammed into the room, banged a folio down on the desk, sat down uninvited, leaned forward and roared redly, “Goddamit—”
The Archive Master was not surprised because he had been warned. He had planned exactly what he would do to handle this brash young man, but faced with the size of the Bux temper, he found his plans somewhat less useful than worthless. Now he was surprised, because a single glance at his gaping mouth and feebly fluttering hands—a gesture he thought he had lost and forgotten long ago—accomplished what no amount of planning could have done.
“Oh-h-h . . . bitchballs,” growled Bux, his anger visibly deflating. “Buggerly bangin’ bumpin’ bitchballs.” He looked across at the old man’s horrified eyebrows and grinned blindingly. “I guess it’s not your fault.” The grin disappeared. “But of all the hydrocephalous, drool-toothed, cretinoid runarounds I have ever seen, this was the stupidest. Do you know how many offices I’ve been into and out of with this”—he banged the heavy folio—“since I got back?”
The Archive Master did, but, “How many?” he asked.
“Too many, but only half as many as I went to before I went to Vexvelt.” With which he shut his lips with a snap and leaned forward again, beaming his bright penetrating gaze at the old man like twin lasers. The Archive Master found himself striving not to be the first to turn away, but the effort made him lean slowly back and back, until he brought up against his chair cushions with his chin up a little high. He began to feel a little ridiculous, as if he had been bamboozled into Indian wrestling with some stranger’s valet.
It was Charli Bux who turned away first, but it was not the old man’s victory, for the gaze came off his eyes as tangibly as a pressing palm might have come off his chest, and he literally slumped forward as the pressure came off. Yet if it was Charli Bux’s victory, he seemed utterly unaware of it. “I think,” he said after his long, concentrated pause, “that I’m going to tell you about that—about how I happened to get to Vexvelt. I wasn’t going to—or at least, I was ready to tell you only as much as I thought you needed to know. But I remember what I had to go through to get there, and I know what I’ve been going through since I got back, and it looks like the same thing. Well, it’s not going to be the same thing. Here and now, the runaround stops. What takes its place I don’t know, but by all the horns of all the owls in Hell’s northeast, I have been pushed around my last push. All right?”
If this was a plea for agreement, the Archive Master did not know what he would be agreeing to. He said diplomatically, “I think you’d better begin somewhere.” Then he added, not raising his voice, but with immense authority, “And quietly.”
Charli Bux gave him a boom of laughter. “I never yet spent upwards of three minutes with anybody that they didn’t shush me. Welcome to the Shush Charli Club, membership half the universe, potential membership, everybody else. And I’m sorry. I was born and brought up on Biluly where there’s nothing but trade wind and split-rock ravines and surf, and the only way to whisper is to shout.” He went on more quietly, “But what I’m talking about isn’t that sort of shushing. I’m talking about a little thing here and a little thing there and adding them up and getting the idea that there’s a planet nobody knows anything about.”
“There are thousands—”
“I mean a planet nobody wants you to know anything about.”
“I suppose you’ve heard of Magdilla.”
“Yes, with fourteen kinds of hallucinogenic microspores spread through the atmosphere, and carcinogens in the water. Nobody wants to go there, nobody wants anybody to go—but nobody stops you from getting information about it. No, I mean a planet not 99 per cent Terran Optimum, or 99 point 99, but so many nines that you might just as well shift your base reference and call Terra about 97 per cent in comparison.”
“That would be a little like saying ‘102 per cent normal,’” said the Master smugly.
“If you like statistical scales better than the truth,” Bux growled. “Air, water, climate, indigenous flora and fauna, and natural resources six nines or better, just as easy to get to as any place else—and nobody knows anything about it. Or if they do, they pretend they don’t. And if you pin them down, they send you to another department.”
The Archive Master spread his hands. “I would say the circumstances prove themselves. If there is no trade with this, uh, remarkable place, it indicates that whatever it has is just as easily secured through established routes.”
Bux shouted, “In a pig’s bloody and protruding—” and then checked himself and wagged his head ruefully. “Sorry again, Archive Master, but I just been too mad about this for too long. What you just said is like a couple troglodytes sitting around saying there’s no use building a house because everybody’s living in caves.” Seeing the closed eyes, the long white fingers tender on the white temples, Bux said, “I said I was sorry I yelled lik
e that.”
“In every city,” said the Archive Master patiently, “on every settled human planet in all the known universe, there is a free public clinic where stress reactions of any sort may be diagnosed, treated or prescribed for, speedily, effectively, and with dignity. I trust you will not regard it as an intrusion on your privacy if I make the admittedly non-professional observation (you see, I do not pretend to be a therapist) that there are times when a citizen is not himself aware that he is under stress, even though it may be clearly, perhaps painfully obvious to others. It would not be a discourtesy, would it, or an unkindness, for some understanding stranger to suggest to such a citizen that—”
“What you’re saying, all wrapped up in words, is I ought to go have my head candled.”
“By no means. I am not qualified. I did, however, think that a visit to a clinic—there’s one just a step away from here—might make—ah—communications between us more possible. I would be glad to arrange another appointment for you, when you’re feeling better. That is to say, when you are . . . ah . . .” He finished with a bleak smile and reached toward the calling stud.
Moving almost like a Drive-ship, Bux seemed to cease to exist on the visitor’s chair and reappeared instantaneously at the side of the desk, a long thick arm extended and a meaty hand blocking the way to the stud. “Hear me out first,” he said, softly. Really softly. It was a much more astonishing thing than if the Archive Master had trumpeted like an elephant. “Hear me out. Please.”
The old man withdrew his hand, but folded it with the other and set the neat stack of fingers on the edge of the desk. It looked like stubbornness. “I have a limited amount of time, and your folio is very large.”
“It’s large because I’m a bird dog for detail—that’s not a brag, it’s a defect: sometimes I just don’t know when to quit. I can make the point quick enough—all that material just supports it. Maybe a tenth as much would do, but you see, I—well, I give a damn. I really give a high, wide, heavy damn about this. Anyway—you just pushed the right button in Charli Bux. ‘Make communication between us more possible.’ Well, all right. I won’t cuss, I won’t holler, and I won’t take long.”
“Can you do all these things?”
“You’re goddam—whoa, Charli.” He flashed the thirty-thousand-candlepower smile and then hung his head and took a deep breath. He looked up again and said quietly, “I certainly can, sir.”
“Well, then.” The Archive Master waved him back to the visitor’s chair: Charli Bux, even a contrite Charli Bux, stood just too tall and too wide. But once seated, he sat silent for so long that the old man shifted impatiently. Charli Bux looked up alertly, and said, “Just getting it sorted out, sir. A good deal of it’s going to sound as if you could diagnose me for a stun-shot and a good long stay at the funny farm, yeah, and that without being modest about your professional knowledge. I read a story once about a little girl was afraid of the dark because there was a little hairy purple man with poison fangs in the closet, and everybody kept telling her no, no, there’s no such thing, be sensible, be brave. So they found her dead with like snakebite and her dog killed a little hairy purple and so on. Now if I told you there was some sort of a conspiracy to keep me from getting information about a planet, and I finally got mad enough to go there and see for myself, and ‘They’ did their best to stop me; ‘They’ won me a sweepstake prize trip to somewhere else that would use up my vacation time; when I turned that down ‘They’ told me there was no Drive Guide orbiting the place, and it was too far to reach in real space (and that’s a God, uh, doggonelie, sir!) and when I found a way to get there by hops, ‘They’ tangled up my credit records so I couldn’t buy passage; why, then I can’t say I’d blame you for peggin’ me paranoid and doing me the kindness of getting me cured. Only thing was, these things did happen and they were not delusions, no matter what everybody plus two thirds of Charli Bux (by the time ‘They’ were done with me) believed. I had an ounce of evidence and I believed it. I had a ton of opinion saying otherwise. I tell you, sir, I had to go. I had to stand knee-deep in Vexvelt sweet grass with the cedar smell of a campfire and a warm wind in my face,” and my hands in the hands of a girl called Tyng, along with my heart and my hope and a dazzling wonder colored like sunrise and tasting like tears, “before I finally let myself believe I’d been right all along, and there is a planet called Vexvelt and it does have all the things I knew it had,” and more, more, oh, more than I’ll ever tell you about, old man. He fell silent, his gaze averted and luminous.
“What started you on this—this quest?”
Charli Bux threw up his big head and looked far away and back at some all-but-forgotten detail. “Huh! ‘D almost lost that in the clutter. Workin’ for Interworld Bank & Trust, feeding a computer in the clearin’house. Not as dull as you might think. Happens I was a mineralogist for a spell, and the cargoes meant something to me besides a name, a quantity and a price. Huh!” came the surprised I’ve-found-it! little explosion. “I can tell you the very item. Feldspar. It’s used in porcelain and glass, antique style. I got a sticky mind, I guess. Long as I’d been there, feldspar ground and bagged went for about twenty-five credits a ton at the docks. But here was one of our customers bringing it in for eight and a half F.O.B. I called the firm just to check; mind, I didn’t care much, but a figure like that could color a statistical summary of imports and exports for years. The bookkeeper there ran a check and found it was so: eight and a half a ton, high-grade feldspar, ground and bagged. Some broker on Lethe: they hadn’t been able to contact him again.
“It wasn’t worth remembering until I bumped into another one. Niobium this time. Some call it columbium. Helps make steel stainless, among other things. I’d never seen a quotation for rod stock at less than a hundred and thirty-seven, but here was some—not much, mind you—at ninety credits delivered. And some sheets too, about 30 per cent less than I’d ever seen it before, freight paid. I checked that one out too. It was correct. Well-smelted and pure, the man said. I forgot that one too, or I thought I had. Then there was that space-hand.” Moxie Magiddle—honest!—that was his name. Squint-eyed little fellow with a great big laugh bulging the walls of the honkytonk out at the spaceport. Drank only alcohol and never touched a needle. Told me the one about the fellow had a big golden screwhead in his belly button. Told me about times and places all over—full of yarns, a wonderful gift for yarning. “Just mentioned in passing that Lethe was one place where the law was ‘Have Fun’ and nobody ever broke it. The whole place just one big transfer point and rest-and-rehab. A water world with only one speck of land in the tropics. Always warm, always easy. No industry, no agriculture, just—well, services. Thousands of men spent hundreds of thousands of credits, a few dozen pocketed millions. Everybody happy. I mentioned the feldspar, I guess just so I would sound as if I knew something about Lethe too.” And laid a big fat egg, too. Moxie looked at me as if he hadn’t seen me before and didn’t like what he saw. If it was a lie I was telling it was a stupid one. “Y’don’t dig feldspar out of a swamp, fella. You puttin’ me on, or you kiddin’ y’rself?” And a perfectly good evening dried up and blew away. “He said it couldn’t possibly have come from Lethe—it’s a water world. I guess I could have forgotten that too but for the coffee beans. Blue Mountain Coffee, it was called; the label claimed it descended in an unbroken line from Old Earth, on an island called Jamaica. It went on to say that it could be grown only in high cool land in the tropics—a real mountain plant. I liked it better than any coffee I ever tasted but when I went back for more they were sold out. I got the manager to look in the records and traced it back through the Terratu wholesaler to the broker and then to the importer—I mean, I liked that coffee!
“And according to him, it came from Lethe. High cool mountain land and all. The port at Lethe was tropical all right, but to be cool it would have to have mountains that were really mountains.
“The feldspar that did, but couldn’t have, come from Lethe—and at those prices!—
reminded me of the niobium, so I checked on that one too. Sure enough—Lethe again. You don’t—you just do not get pure niobium rod and sheet without mines and smelters and mills.
“Next off-day I spent here at Archives and got the history of Lethe halfway back, I’ll swear, to Ylem and the Big Bang. It was a swamp, it practically always has been a swamp, and something was wrong.
“Mind you, it was only a little something, and probably there was a good simple explanation. But little or not, it bothered me.” And besides, it had made me look like a horse’s ass in front of a damn good man. Old man, if I told you how much time I hung around the spaceport looking for that bandy-legged little space-gnome, you’d stop me now and send for the stun-guns. Because I was obsessed—not a driving addiction kind of thing, but a very small deep splinter-in-the-toe kind of thing, that didn’t hurt much but never failed to gig me every single step I took. And then one day—oh, months later—there was old Moxie Magiddle, and he took the splinter out. Hyuh! Ol’ Moxie . . . he didn’t know me at first, he really didn’t. Funny little guy, he has his brains rigged to forget anything he doesn’t like—honestly forget it. That feldspar thing, when a fella he liked to drink with and yarn to showed up to be a know-it-all kind of liar, and to boot, too dumb to know he couldn’t get away with it—well, that qualified Charli for zero minus the price of five man-hours of drinking. Then when I got him cornered—I all but wrestled him—and told about the feldspar and the niobium and now the mountain-grown coffee, all of it checked and cross-checked, billed, laded, shipped, insured—all of it absolutely Lethe and here’s the goddam proof, why, he began to laugh till he cried, a little at himself, a little at the situation, and a whole lot at me. Then we had a long night of it and I drank alcohol and you know what? I’ll never in life find out how Moxie Magiddle can hold so much liquor. But he told me where those shipments came from, and gave me a vague idea why nobody wanted much to admit it. And the name they call all male Vexveltians. “I mentioned it one day to a cargo handler,” Bux told the Archive Master, “and he solved the mystery—the feldspar and niobium and coffee came from Vexvelt and had been transshipped at Lethe by local brokers, who, more often than not, get hold of some goods and turn them over to make a credit or so and dive back into the local forgetteries.
