Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  “Very interesting,” said Bwl!x. “Now I see what you mean by the—ah,—creeps.” He noticed his visitor’s state and became solicitous. “How careless of me! I hadn’t realized that, for one of your mentality . . . Mm, I believe I have a chemical restorative here somewhere.”

  He rummaged in his electrical rat’s nest and came up—not to the sheriff’s surprise, for the sheriff was past surprise—with a squat, familiarly-labelled bottle and a couple of glasses; he poured both of them generously full and handed one to the Sheriff, then sipped his own appreciatively and smiled a tailor’s-dummy smile.

  “This—” Bwl!x tapped his own chest condescendingly, “is merely a secondary entity, but it has certain simple pleasures of its own, inherent in its—ah—construction. I shall partially regret giving it up.”

  SEEGER drained his glass and mutely accepted a refill. He put half of that one away, too; then he recovered his voice, and demanded hoarsely, “What’s die big idea?”

  “The idea . . . of my activity here? I fear inability to transmit the idea.”

  “What do you mean—Hey!” Seeger sat up in some alarm. “This ain’t some of that government secret stuff, is it? Because if it is, I don’t want no—”

  “Secret? No, no imposed communication-blocks.” Bwl!x smiled faintly as if at a manifest absurdity; then he grew thoughtful. “Perhaps I should try—the attempt might yield useful data . . . Ah—more restorative?”

  “Restorative, hell,” said the sheriff. “That’s good drinking liquor. I’m almost sorry I got to run you out of the county, Mr. Bullock.”

  He gave the little man a mellowing, confidential look. “The fact of the matter t is, Mr. Bullock, the movie-business around here is sewed up tight. Myself, I sort of enjoyed your show—” he faltered, remembering the still-incomprehensible and soul-shaking repetition of a few minutes ago, but took another gulp of Whisky and went on, “and far as I’m concerned, you could go on holding ’em. But Jesse Hupsman won’t stand for nobody coming in and setting up like this.”

  The perfect dummy’s head nodded gravely. “I see. There was much the same trouble in Piatigorsk. But my—ah—movies are not a business; they are merely a sideline, an investigative technique.”

  “Huh?” The sheriff’s suspicions floated to the surface again; he thought, confusingly, of dope rings, spy rings, and—“investigation”—of hush-hush Federal bureaus. “What you up to, then?”

  “Actually, my business is—ah—insurance. I believe your subculture uses that term for the collectivization of risks.”

  “I didn’t see you selling no insurance policies.”

  “I am not a salesman; my role . . . Let me illustrate, if I can, by familiar analogy. The Owner of a certain piece of Property, who is holding it in the expectation of developing it for use at a later date, applies to—ah—my company for a policy covering the risks of loss or damage in, the meantime. Naturally, before issuing such a policy we must examine the Property in question. Upon doing so in this case, we discover that while lying undeveloped and neglected by its Owner it has become—ah—infested. We are compelled to carry out a more searching and scientific investigation, in order to ascertain the exact nature of the infestation and arrive at an estimate of its probable seriousness . . .

  “Or, to take another partially valid analogy: a Person applies to us for coverage of the economic hazards of illness or injury. Physical examination discloses a small growth which may or may not be dangerous; it is necessary for a specialist to examine a few cells from this growth to determine whether they are those of a harmless tumor or of-a malignancy that threatens the Person’s life.

  “This secondary entity of mine has about completed its task as investigator; when you came in I was working on the actuarial treatment of the data . . . Of course, when I return home it will be possible to subject these data—my collection of records such as that which you reexperienced just now—to a more thorough analysis and obtain a more reliable estimate of the negative-entropy rate and so forth; but the portable analyzer”—Bwl!x tapped the silenced apparatus at his elbow—“is a remarkably effective device.

  THE SHERIFF had not understood a great deal of this explanation; later he would rack his brains over fragments of it and wish that he had questioned the talkative little man, “secondary entity”, or whatever he was, further. At the moment, though, something in the last remarks had made him put two and two together, and the answer was alarming and infuriating. The sheriff leaned forward, whisky sloshing out of his glass: “Hey! You mean you got a record of . . . of me?”

  Bwl!x was going on: “. . . so it already appears certain . . .”

  “Hold on!” snapped Seeger. He rose erect, his brain burning with the memory of that playback experience, and with a budding suspicion that Mr. Bullock’s true business might be blackmail. His eyes flashed round the crowded cubicle—noting for the first time that its walls, and the door by which he had come in, were all metal—but failed to locate anything that looked recognizably like a phonograph disk or record spool; that left only the direct approach. He said thickly, “You better give me that record!”

  “. . . that we cannot afford to issue a policy in this case,” finished Bwl!x sadly. “The Owner will be disappointed.” He stared, startled, at the Sheriff. “What? No, I can’t give you the original Perhaps a copy—”

  With a motion that looked awkward but was really very quick, Sheriff Seeger drew his revolver. “All right, then,” he said grimly. “I’m onto you now. You’re coming down to my jail—”

  “—and think it over.” The sheriff gulped and fell silent; he was standing, gun still in hand, halfway across the deserted parking lot, facing toward his car.

  He turned unsteadily and stared back at the lightless mass of the theater; the drizzle had stopped and there was moonlight. He noted dazedly that his own footprints led across the muddy ground to where he now stood, hesitating among fear, anger, and sheer bewilderment.

  The decision as to whether to retrace those unremembered steps was spared him. There was a momentaneous glare like a flash bulb, and he had the impression that something tore explosively upward through the building’s roof and vanished instantly in terrific velocity. Splinters of wood showered lazily down, and over the theater a red glow expanded and flames began licking up.

  The sheriff stood there a while, Watching the fire take hold. Tomorrow he could tell Jesse Hupsman that he could stop worrying about the competition; and tomorrow he would have to come out or send a deputy or two to poke through the ashes, but he had a feeling they wouldn’t find anything interesting . . .

  “Wonder if Bwl!x had any insurance on the place?” the sheriff muttered to himself.

  THE FISHERS

  I’ll venture the guess that readers of the not too distant future will think most of our stories of spaceship flight as limited and meatless, as fiction, as we would find a story which was nothing but the detailing of a trip in an automobile. What matters in fiction is what happens to people, not the vehicle in which they happen to be traveling. But the spaceship may (like the ship or the airplane) occasionally produce an absorbing study in people, their emotional interplays and psychological reactions, which could not be written in any other setting—as Robert Abernathy shows in this powerful novelet of a space yacht, a financial dynasty . . . and a subtle, soul-destroying terror that lurks in the Asteroid Belt.

  THEY HAD BEEN QUARRELING, in the luxurious central salon of Mrs. Loran Jordan’s golden-hulled space yacht, Morgan le Fay. The Morgan was drifting lazily along, at about 60 miles per second, somewhere a little north of the plane of the ecliptic; she was in the neighborhood of the forbidden Asteroid Belt, but none of the passengers was worrying about that.

  “All right!” snapped Harry Burk, stuffing knotted fists deep into the pockets of his expensive tan jacket. “You put it up to me? OK: the money goes into the Tethys development. Outside of a damn fool tradition, there’s no reason why we should stay on Mars.”

  Mrs. Loran Jorda
n’s face looked poutingly dubious, as well as it could through obliterating fat. Burk was quite certain, though, that she had wanted all along to unload the decision on him.

  But—his gaze flickered from his mother-in-law to his wife—Ilena could be trusted to take up the cudgels. A disagreeable smile twitched the corner of Burk’s mouth.

  Ilena Burk had listened silently; now she sat up straight in her chair, her dark face revealing nothing. “The issue isn’t tradition,” she said levelly. “At best, an investment in Tethys is a long shot. Not that we can’t afford to lose the money—but we’ve got the Company’s credit to think about. Have you considered that, Harry?”

  Burk knew better than to believe in her air of reasonableness. The look he shot at his wife’s composed, impassive face—“statuesque,” he’d called her in the days before he’d fallen out of love even with her money—was one of deep and time-tested suspicion. Ilena was no fat old woman contented with trying to squander as much as possible of her wealth before she died, no fatuous old woman glad to hand over a billion-credit corporation to the first adventurer who contrived to marry her daughter. Ilena was coolly intelligent, and more and more definitely she was Harry Burk’s enemy. So far, at times like this, it had ended with Burk and Mrs. Jordan on one side, Ilena on the other. He had to keep it like that.

  The child that was to be born wouldn’t upset that situation. On the contrary. Burk could calculate to a nicety the effect on old Mrs. Jordan of knowing that Harry Burk’s son (it had scarcely occurred to him to expect other than a man-child) would be her eventual heir.

  But the funny thing was that he couldn’t even make a good guess at the reaction of Ilena, who was going to be the mother of his son. . . . She was, if anything, more withdrawn and clueless than ever. Of course, though, they’d only known since shortly before this voyage began. In time, perhaps—

  Mrs. Jordan’s lips were quivering. Ilena hastened to deny her mother the relief of expressing her rearoused misgivings. She spoke again to Burk, on an almost placating note this time: “You’re a gambler at heart, Harry. The long shots fascinate you. But you can’t take chances with anything as big as—”

  “You’ve often told me,” he said to her as if they two were alone in the salon, “just how close you were to your father before he died, how much of his business sense you think you inherited or picked up. Maybe so, maybe not . . . Anyway, I know what your father was: just a hardworking guy that never saw the color of his own money. And I’m cast for his unworthy successor. Well, I like to see the color of my money; and as long as I’m managing Jordan Enterprises, we’ll put 200,000,000 credits in Tethys!” He wondered if he was laying too many cards on the table, but a growing conviction that this was a showdown spurred him on to recklessness.

  Mrs. Jordan’s massive bosom was heaving with apprehension. She said, “What do you mean about the Company’s credit, Ilena?”

  “We have the liquid assets,” said Burk angrily. “There’s no need for borrowing.”

  “I mean,” said Ilena, ignoring him, “that the Company’s credit is very much involved. If we sink all that capital in a wild venture, everybody will think we’ve thrown away our only asset that isn’t listed in the Commercial Register—management sense.”

  Well done, damn you! thought Burk. He had an uncomfortable feeling that Ilena understood his motives very well—he’d never been one to fence or pretend—while he was largely in the dark about hers. . . .

  Things had changed, and he was not easy about their changing. He’d married Ilena mostly, as he acknowledged to himself now, because a devil-may-care life on the planetary frontiers had netted him, financially speaking, nothing. Chance, the luck of Harry Burk, had thrown an heiress in his way, and he’d seemed to see the finger of Fate pointing to a life of security. Then the thought that he was already 31—not old, certainly, but well past a spaceman’s prime—had sometimes waked him in a cold sweat. Now he was 35, acting manager of the vast Jordan Enterprises since their founder’s death . . . and of late he had read with brooding envy the news accounts of the first perilous landing on Pluto.

  And Ilena had changed, frozen . . . But then she’d always been a cool sort, on the surface anyway. He didn’t shrink from admitting to himself that she probably did have the shrewdest business head of those present.

  Maybe later, when the baby came . . . a woman was after all a woman.

  Old Mrs. Jordan was pursing her seamed, unskillfully painted lips in an attempt at an air of severe reflection. Finally she raised her voice: “Charles—what do you think?”

  Charles Linforth glanced up, resting the periodical he had been reading on the arm of his chair. He smiled vaguely under his neatly trimmed mustache; his glasses gleamed, hiding his eyes. “I really don’t know, Mrs. Jordan,” he said deferentially. “I’m afraid I haven’t been paying attention. . . .”

  Burk’s eyes followed the others’, to the family group across the salon: Linforth’s wife, a mouse of a woman who seemed overshadowed by her unimpressive husband, and their startlingly vivid blonde daughter, Leoce, who sat at a nearby table absently fingering over selections from the Morgan s film library.

  Burk thought, That man lies like hell. He’s had his ears propped back till it hurt. Linforth he knew for a clever man in devious ways, very clever—or he would never have been able to keep fast hold on Loran Jordan’s coattails when the latter began his meteoric rise to the pinnacles of colonial finance. Even so, Jordan had almost shaken him off. He’d shaken him from junior partner to assistant treasurer—leaving him always the economically worthless title of friend of the family.

  Ilena was saying cautiously, “We were discussing the Tethys scheme, Mr. Linforth. My husband has decided that he is strongly in favor of it.”

  Linforth folded his magazine carefully and laid it on the table at his elbow; he stared at his meticulously groomed fingernails for a moment or two. “Frankly, Mrs. Burk, I do not feel qualified to judge. Practically my only connection with the company at present is the collection of my quarterly dividend.”

  “But, Charles . . .” said Mrs. Jordan on a tone of weak remonstrance.

  The door to the vertical emergency shaft to starboard—vertical, that is, in relation to the comfortable false gravity kept up by the idling power of the Morgan’s afterdrive—was glass-paneled like the one on the opposite side, though only the latter shaft housed an elevator.

  The man who came climbing up the emergency shaft, clinging to the steel ladder, threw a worried glance over his shoulder into the bright-lit salon. Charles Linforth’s eyes, behind their thick glasses, caught the motion; he saw that the man was the ship’s electrician, and that he was festooned with wires which trailed behind him down the shaft.

  Linforth nodded quietly, significantly to Harry Burk, who turned in time to see the man disappearing up the ladder.

  “What’s up?” Linforth’s eyebrows inquired. Burk shrugged.

  “You know, Charles,” Mrs. Jordan was saying plaintively, “this idea is—it means risking quite a lot of money. We must have your opinion. My husband always relied on your judgment.”

  Indeed he did, thought Linforth bitterly, down in the well-lidded cauldron that was always seething at the bottom of his mind. He relied on my judgment to betray me, because I wasn’t as shrewd as he was, nor—then—as ruthless. As soon as he smelled the possibilities in the Martian developments, he tied me up hand and foot before I realized what had happened. To be sure, I’m worth a couple of million now—but Loran Jordan made billions, and half of it should have been mine. He was a brilliant man, and I admired him intensely, still admire him almost as much as I hope that fiends are roasting his guts in Hell. . . . But you, you fat sow, you never knew where the money came from nor where it went after it ran through your fingers. And now you turn to me; you invite me to cruise Saturn’s moons in your golden yacht, and to help you guide your golden ship of fortune . . . to shipwreck.

  Harry Burk said abruptly, “Excuse me,” and went with long strid
es toward the nook that housed an intercommunication phone.

  Linforth smiled inwardly. He liked Burk. Burk was a tool which that fat female fool and her daughter had placed in his hands, a lever that he would use to bring down the house that Jordan had built. . . . Always he was thinking of that coming destruction in concrete terms, as of things falling, breaking, exploding. Sometimes in the night he realized that he would never truly be satisfied, for Loran Jordan was dead and couldn’t die again.

  “Well, Mrs. Jordan,” he said studiedly, once more examining his fingernails, “if you insist on a snap judgment—One can’t escape the fact that times are changing. Jordan Enterprises were built on the fact of colonial expansion. We’ve pushed the frontier forward with our capital and have reaped corresponding rewards. But Mars is no longer a frontier; in our own time the wave of colonization has moved on to the Jovian system and is currently overflowing the moons of Saturn. That we were anticipated by other interests in the Jupiter settlement might well appear now as the result of an unfortunate conservatism on our part. At present, we seem to face a choice: either of embracing the opportunities for investment in the Saturnian system, or of making fundamental readjustments in the Company’s established modus operandi.”

  Ilena Burk spoke up, with her incisive manner which Linforth would have genuinely feared save that he depended on the emotional wreck of her marriage to render her harmless in the end. “A good point. However, if the Company needs new frontiers, it also needs to use intelligence in selecting them.”