The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  It took a long time—since the year one, that is—but Gene Chromosome fixed it up, with Grandpaw's help. So Junior Pugh ain't a pain in the neck no more, so to speak.

  But I got to admit he's an awful cold in the haid.

  The End

  Thresholders

  (1950)*

  (as by Lawrence O'Donnell)

  Contents

  PROMISED LAND

  Heir Apparent

  -

  PROMISED LAND

  Thresholders 01

  Astounding Science Fiction – February 1950

  People got out of Fenton's way as he walked scowling through the palace, heading for the great steel doors that only half a dozen men in the Unit knew how to open. Fenton was one of the half dozen. The pale scar that made a zigzag like lightning across his dark cheek pulled his face awry a little as he snapped an angry command into the intercom.

  A voice murmured apologetically out of it: "Sorry, he's busy rit now. If you'll—"

  Fenton slapped his palm with ringing fury against the metal beside the intercom. The echoing metallic boom rang like thunder down the hall behind him, where courtiers, diplomats and politicians waited their chance for an audience with the Protector of Ganymede.

  "Open these doors!"

  There was another pause. Then the voice murmured something again, and the great steel doors slid softly apart a few feet. Fenton stalked through, hearing them thud together behind him, shutting off the sound of whispering, angry and curious, that had begun to fill the hall.

  He went through an antechamber and into a tall-columned room shaped like a well, with a dome of starry sky very far overhead. (It was day outside, on Ganymede, and thick, eternal clouds shut out the sky, but if a man is wealthy enough he can arrange to have the stars reflected into his palace if he wants them.)

  In the center of the room, under the sky dome, stood the Protector's water bed where his five-hundred-pound bulk wallowed luxuriantly. Like truth, the monstrous man floated at the bottom of his well and watched the stars.

  He was not looking at them now. Great billows of lax flesh stirred on his cheeks as he grinned cavernously at the newcomer.

  "Patience, Ben, patience," he said in his deep rumble. "You'll inherit Ganymede in due time—when it's habitable. Be patient, even—"

  Fenton's angry glance dropped to the man sitting on the raised chair beside the water bed.

  "Get out," he said.

  The man stood up, smiling. He stooped a little, standing or sitting, as though his big-boned frame found even the scanty weight of flesh it carried burdensome. Or maybe it was the responsibilities he carried. He had a gaunt face and his eyes, like his hair, were pale.

  "Wait," the monster in the tank said. "Byrne's not finished with me yet, Ben. Sit down. Patience, son, patience!"

  Fenton's right hand jerked doorward. He gave Bryne a cold glance.

  "Get out," he said again.

  "I'm no fool," Bryne remarked, turning away from the water bed. "Apologies, Protector, and so on. But I'd rather not be in the middle. Ben seems upset about something. Call me when it's safe." He shambled off, was lost behind the pillars. The sound of his footsteps died.

  Fenton drew a deep breath to speak, his dark face flushing. Then he shrugged, sighed and said flatly: "I'm through, Torren. I'm leaving."

  The Protector raised an enormous hand. Gasping with the effort, he let it fall back into the dense, oily liquid of his bath.

  "Wait," he said, panting. "Wait."

  The edge of the bath was studded with colored buttons just under the water level. Torren's gross fingers moved beneath the surface, touching buttons deftly. On a tilted screen above the tank snow fields flickered into view, a road threading them, cars sliding flatly along the road.

  "You've just come from the village," Torren said. "You've talked to Kristin, I suppose. You know I lied to you. Surprised, Ben?"

  Fenton shook his head impatiently.

  "I'm leaving," he said. "Find yourself another heir, Torren." He turned away. "That's all."

  "It isn't all." The Protector's deep voice had command in it. "Come back here, Ben. Patience is what you want, my boy. Patience. Spend thirty years in a water bed and you learn patience. So you want to walk out, do you? Nobody walks out on Torren, son. You ought to know that. Not even my inheritor walks out. I'm surprised at you. After I've taken so much trouble to change a whole world to suit your convenience." The vast cheeks wrinkled in a smile. "It isn't thoughtful of you, Ben. After all I've done for you, too."

  "You've done nothing for me," Fenton told him, still in the flat voice. "You picked me out of an orphanage when I was too young to protect myself. There's nothing you can give me I want, Torren."

  "Getting dainty, aren't you?" the man in the water demanded with what sounded like perfect good humor. "I'm surprised at you, Ben. So you don't want the Torren empire, eh? Ganymede wouldn't be good enough for you, even when I make it habitable, eh? Oh, Ben, come to your senses. I never thought you'd go soft on me. Not after what you've been through."

  "You put me through plenty," Fenton said. "I grew up the hard way. It wasn't worth it, Torren. You wasted your time. I tell you I'm finished."

  "I suppose the light of a good woman's eyes has reformed you," Torren mocked. "Pretty little Kristin changed your mind, I suppose. A charming creature, Kristin. Only a foot taller than you, too, my boy. Only a hundred pounds heavier, I expect. But then she's young. She'll grow. Ah, what a pity I never met a really good woman when I was your age. Still, she'd have had to weigh five hundred pounds, to understand me, and such women never really appealed to my aesthetic tastes. You should have seen the charming little things in the Centrifuge, Ben. They're still there, you know—the ones who haven't died. I'm the only Centrifuge baby who got out and stayed out. I made good. I earned enough to stay out."

  The monstrous head fell back and Torren opened his vast mouth and roared with laughter. The oily liquid in the bath heaved in rhythmic tides and echoes of his mirth rolled along the pillars and up the well toward the stars, rolled up the walls that had imprisoned Torren since his birth. They were walls he himself had burst apart against odds no man had ever before encountered.

  You grew up in a hard school," Torren laughed. "You!"

  Fenton stood silent, looking at the monstrous being in the bath, and the anger in his eyes softened a little in spite of himself. The old respect for Torren stirred in his mind. Tyrant the man might be, ruthless autocrat—but had ever man such reason to be pitiless before? Perhaps in very ancient times when, for profit, skilled practitioners warped and broke the bodies of children to make them valuable freaks and monsters for the entertainment of royalty. Perhaps then, but not again, until the planets were opened for colonization three hundred years ago.

  Fenton had seen the Threshold Planetaria, back on Earth, the fantastic conditioning units where eugenics, working through generation after generation of selected stock, bred humans who could sustain themselves in the ecology of other worlds. He knew little about these remarkable experiments in living flesh. But he did know that some of them had failed, and one such Planetarium had held Torren—thirty years ago.

  "Thirteen generations," Torren said deliberately, drawing the familiar picture for him again, relentlessly as always. "Thirteen generations one after another, living and dying in a Centrifuge that increased its rotation year after year. All those treatments, all those operations, all that time under altered radiations, breathing altered air, moving against altered gravity—until they found out they simply couldn't breed men who could live on Jupiter, if they took a thousand generations. There was a point beyond which they couldn't mutate the body and keep intelligence. So they apologized." He laughed again, briefly, the water surging around him in the tank.

  "They said they were sorry. And we could leave the Centrifuge any time we wanted—they'd even give us a pension. Five hundred a month. It takes a thousand a day to keep me alive outside the Centrifuge!"

  He lay back,
spent, the laughter dying. He moved one vast arm slowly in the fluid.

  "All right," he said. "Hand me a cigarette, Ben. Thanks. Light—"

  Holding the igniter for him, Fenton realized too late that Torren could have got his own cigarette. There was every possible convenience, every luxury, available to the water bed. Angrily Fenton swung away, paced to and fro beneath the screen upon which the snow fields were reflected. His fingers beat a tattoo on his thigh. Torren waited, watching him.

  At the far end of the screen, without turning, Fenton said quietly: "So it was bad in the Centrifuge, Torren? How bad?"

  "Not bad at first. We had something to work toward. As long as we thought our descendants could colonize Jupiter we could stand a lot. It was only after we knew the experiment had failed, that the Centrifuge was bad—a prison, just as our bodies were a prison."

  "But you'd shut the Ganymedans up in place like that."

  "Certainly," Torren told him. "Of course I would. I'd shut you up, or anyone else who stood in my way. I owe the Ganymedans nothing whatever. If there's any debt involved, the human race owes me a debt that can never be repaid. Look at me, Ben. Look!"

  Fenton turned. Torren was raising his gigantic arm out of the water. It should have been an immensely powerful arm. It had the potential muscle. It had the strong, bowed bone and the muscles springing out low down along the forearm, as the Neanderthaler and the gorilla's did. And Torren had a gorilla's grip—when he did not have to fight gravity.

  He fought it now. The effort of simply lifting the weight of his own arm made his breath come heavily. His face darkened. With tremendous struggle he got the arm out of the water as far as the elbow before strength failed him. The uselessly powerful arm crashed back, splashing water high. Torren lay back, panting, watching his sodden cigarette wash about, disintegrating in the tank.

  Fenton stepped forward and plucked it out of the water, tossed it aside, wiped his fingers on his sleeve. His face was impassive.

  "I don't know," he said. "I don't know if that debt ever can be discharged. But, by God, you're trying hard."

  Torren laughed. "I need the money. I always need money. There aren't enough Ganymedans to develop the planet. That's all there is to it. With the ecology changed, normal humans can live here within ten years."

  "They'll be able to live here in another hundred and fifty years anyhow, if plantings and atmospherics follow the program. By then the Ganymedans will adapt—or at least, their great-grandchildren will. That was the original plan."

  "Before I got control, yes. But now I give the orders on Ganymede. Since Jensen isolated Jensenite out there," and he nodded toward the snowy screen, "everything's changed. We can speed up the plantings a hundred percent and the air ought to be breathable in—"

  "Jensen's a Ganymedan," Fenton broke in. "Without Jensen you'd never have been able to break the original agreement about changing over. You owe the Ganymedans that much for Jensen's sake alone."

  "Jensen will get paid. I'll finance him to an ambulatory asylum on any world he chooses. I owe the others nothing."

  "But they're all in it together!" Fenton slapped the edge of the tank angrily. "Don't you see? Without the whole Ganymede Threshold experiment you'd never have had Jensenite. You can't scrap every Ganymedan except Jensen now! You—"

  "I can do as I please," Torren declared heavily. "I intend to. Ganymede is an unimportant little satellite which happens to belong to me. I hate to mention it, son, but I might say the same thing about you. Benjamin Fenton is an unimportant young man who happens to belong to me. Without my influence you're nothing but a cipher in a very large solar system. I've invested a lot of money and effort in it and I don't intend to throw it away. Just what do you think you'd do if you left me, Ben?"

  "I'm a good organizer," Fenton said carefully. "I know how to handle people. I've got fast reflexes and dependable judgment. You toughened me. You gave me some bad years. You arranged for me to kill a few people—in line of duty, naturally—and I've done your dirty jobs until I know all the ropes. I can take care of myself."

  "Only as long as I let you," Torren told him with a faintly ominous ring in the deep voice. "Maybe it was a whim that made me pick you out of the asylum. But I've invested too much in you, Ben, to let you walk out on me now. What you need is work-hardening, my boy." He cupped water in his hand and let it drain out. "Who was it," he inquired, "that said no man is an island? You're looking at an island, Ben. I'm an island. A floating island. No one alive has any claim on me. Not even you. Don't try me too far, Ben."

  "Have you ever thought I might kill you some time, Torren?" Fenton asked gently.

  The colossus in the tank laughed heavily.

  "I ran a risk, making you my heir," he admitted. "But you won't kill me to inherit. I made sure. I tried you. You were given chances, you know ... no, I don't think you did know. I hardened you and toughened you and gave you some bad years, and some men might want to kill me for that. But not you. You don't hate me, Ben. And you're not afraid of me. Maybe you ought to be. Ever think of that, Ben?"

  Fenton turned and walked toward the door. Between two pillars he paused and glanced back.

  "I nearly killed you thirteen years ago," he said.

  Torren slapped his palm downward, sending a splash of liquid high.

  "You nearly killed me!" he said with sudden, furious scorn. "Do you think I'm afraid of death? When I wasn't afraid to live? Ben, come back here."

  Fenton gave him a level look and said, "No."

  "Ben, that's an order."

  Fenton said, "Sorry."

  "Ben, if you walk out of this room now you'll never come back. Alive or dead, Ben, you'll never come back."

  Fenton turned his back and went out, through the anteroom and the great steel doors that opened at his coming.

  -

  Stooping above the open suitcase on his bed, both hands full, Fenton saw the slightest possible shadow stirring in reflection on the window before him and knew he was not alone in the room. No buzzer had warned him, though the full spy-beam system was on and it should have been impossible for anyone to pass unheralded.

  He lifted his head slowly. Beyond the broad window the snowy hills of Ganymede lay undulating to the steep horizon. The clouds that blanketed the world were blue-tinged with Jupiter-light, reflecting from Jupiter's vast bright-blue seas of liquid ammonia. Between two hilltops he could see one of the planting-valleys veiled in mist, dull turquoise warm by contrast with the snow. The reflection swam between him and the hills.

  Without turning he said: "Well, Bryne?"

  Behind him Bryne laughed.

  "How did you know?"

  Fenton straightened and turned. Bryne leaned in the open doorway, arms folded, sandy brows lifted quizzically.

  "You and I," Fenton said in a deliberate voice, "are the only men who know most of the rabbit-warren secrets in this Unit. Torren knows them all. But it had to be you or Torren, obviously. You know how I knew, Bryne. Are you trying to flatter me? Isn't it a waste of time, now?"

  "That depends on you," Bryne said, adding thoughtfully a moment later, "—and me, of course."

  "Go on," Fenton said.

  Bryne shifted his gaunt body awkwardly against the door.

  "Do you know what orders Torren gave me an hour ago? No, of course you don't. I'll tell you. You're not to be admitted to him again even if you ask, which I told him you wouldn't. You're not to take anything out of the Unit except the clothes you wear, so you can stop packing. Your accounts have been stopped. All the money you're to have is what's in your pocket. This suite is out of bounds as soon as you leave it." He glanced at his wrist. "In half an hour I'm to come up here and escort you to Level Two. You eat with the repair crew and sleep in the crew dormitory until Thursday, when a freighter is due in at the spaceport. You'll sign on with the crew and work your way back to Earth." Bryne grinned. "After that, you're on your own."

  Fenton touched his scarred cheek meditatively, gave Bryne a cold glance.<
br />
  "I'll expect you in half an hour, then," he said. "Good-by."

  Bryne stood up straighter. The grin faded.

  "You don't like me," he said, on a note of sadness. "All the same, you'd better trust me. Half an hour's all we have now. After that I pass over into my official capacity as the Protector's representative, and I'll have to carry Torren's orders out. He thinks you need work-hardening. I may find myself finagling you into a slave-contract in the underlands."

  "What do you suggest?" Fenton asked, folding another shirt.

  "That's better." Bryne dropped a hand into his pocket, stepped forward, and tossed a thick packet of money onto the bed. Beside it he dropped a key and a folded ticket, bright pink for first-class.

  "A ship leaves six hours from now for Earth," Bryne said. "There's a tractor car waiting in the gully at the foot of G-Corridor. That's its key. Torren keeps a close watch on all the Corridors, but the system's complex. Now and then by accident one of the wiring devices gets out of order. G-Corridor's out of order right now—not by accident. How do you like it, Fenton?"

  Fenton laid the folded shirt into place, glanced at the money without expression. He was thinking rapidly, but his face showed nothing.

  "What do you stand to gain, Bryne?" he asked. "Or is this one of Torren's subtler schemes?"

  "It's all mine," the gaunt man assured him. "I'm looking toward the future. I'm a very honest man, Fenton. Not direct—no. You can afford to be direct. I can't. I'm only an administrator. Torren's the boss. Some day you'll be boss. I'd like to go on being an administrator then, too."

  "Then this is by way of a bribe, is it?" Fenton inquired. "Waste of time, Bryne. I'm stepping out. Torren's probably rewriting his will already. When I leave Ganymede I leave for good. As if you didn't know."

  "I know, all right. Naturally. I've already been notified to get out the old will. But I'll tell you, Fenton—I like administering Ganymede. I like being cupbearer to the gods. It suits me. I'm good at it. I want to go on." He paused, giving Fenton a keen glance under the sandy lashes. "How much longer do you think Torren has to live?" he inquired.