The Collected Stories

by Earl

  The three of them had dinner together. The talk revolved about topics of mother earth; and the beings who trod her surface. Soderstrom again expressed a desire to resign his position as overseer and go back. Wood and Harrington exchanged guarded looks of grim mirth. The mineralogist described to Soderstrom the appearance of the ore samples of the new claim and intimated that it would probably prove to be one of the richest claims of all times. He had turned over the samples that Pruma had returned to him before they left Kranto to the assaying department and hoped to have a report sometime that afternoon. Harrington confided that now that Harvey Wood was safe and sound, and his mission over, he would leave the moon the next day after a good rest.

  Dinner over, Soderstrom excused himself, pleading pressing work, leaving the other two alone. After a short conversation, they decided to have the show down an hour later in Soderstrom’s office.

  Harrington entered first by agreement. Soderstrom looked up in surprise. “Have a seat, Mr. Harrington, is there anything I can do for you?”

  Harrington idly seated himself, straightened his coat, and then turned unblinking eyes upon the overseer.

  “Mr. Soderstrom, I have a confession to make. The S.L.S. did not send me here to find Harvey Wood . . . alone . . . but also to investigate the Martian priority in claim application, a triple occurrence within the last five moon-days.”

  “As to that, Mr. Harrington, that has bothered me not a little, but I confess the Martian methods of procuring such priority are beyond my comprehension. All I know is that my filing of applications goes on without a hitch, and that any leakage of vital information must occur somewhere in the offices of the council on earth.” Soderstrom attempted to stare right back at the S.I.S. man as he spoke, but found himself forced to drop his eyes to that searching, soul-revealing gaze.

  “Soderstrom, someone in Station No. 7 is the responsible party and I’ve pretty well settled it in my mind who it is . . .” The overseer blanched and wet a pair of dry lips. “Wood . . . come in!” called the S.I.S. agent. Wood entered, he had been right outside the door, and took the seat offered by Harrington. He shot a scornful glance at the overseer as he sat down.

  “Now . . .” Harrington was deliberate, “Soderstrom, when Wood called you the day he disappeared, did he not say he had found a valuable claim?”

  “He did not.” Soderstrom nervously spluttered those three words as Harvey Wood looked at him balefully.

  Harrington spoke again. “Did you not tamper with Wood’s oxygen supply so that he would be forced to go to Kranto after his trip of exploration?”

  “I did not,” Overseer Soderstrom answered sullenly. “Did you not get a call from Pruma by your special radio connection,” Soderstrom looked up in shocked surprise, “that Wood was there and that Pruma wanted your advice as to how to get the location of the new claim out of him?”

  “Certainly not. Look here, Harrington . . . this is maddening! What in the name of truth are you . . .?”

  Harrington cut off the quavering voice of the shaking overseer. “Soderstrom, you are to answer my questions. Explanations will come later.” Harvey Wood had noticed that as Harrington asked each question, he looked at Soderstrom, but when the latter answered, he kept his gaze riveted on something in his hand.

  Harrington now arose, walked over to Soderstrom’s desk and placed thereon a small disk-shaped box with a round lens in the middle of it. Soderstrom stared with worry written all over his face. Harvey Wood watched the S.I.S. agent intently.

  “Soderstrom, and you, too, Wood, listen to this, I have here one of the Service’s most important inventions. It is merely a lens activated by a certain principle of which I myself know nothing. However, it is useful to me in this way: it is sensitive to a person’s thoughts and is capable of indicating when that person’s thoughts are at variance with his spoken thoughts. In other words, if the person before whom it is placed speaks words of one train of thought, and at the same time has other hidden thoughts which do not correspond with what he says, this instrument tells me so. See that single lens? . . . if the person lies . . . it flashes red . . . if he speaks truth it is unexcited and remains blank. This is an infallible lie detector!” Soderstrom, at first trembling with terror, suddenly straightened up with confidence. Harvey Wood stared open-mouthed at the innocent little article.

  Harrington again spoke. “I will not tell you how your other answers turned out, Soderstrom, but I am going to ask ONE MORE QUESTION while my lie-detector is on this desk.”

  Harvey Wood was sitting on the edge of his chair. Harrington motioned to him. “Come here, Wood, so you can see this yourself.” The mineralogist came over and stood on the other side of the desk from Harrington. The eyes of all three men were fastened on that little disk, its single lens glaring balefully like an all-seeing eye.

  “Now for the test, gentlemen,” Harrington broke the tense silence. Suddenly he shot out, “Mr. Wood, are you or are you not responsible for the loss of three claims to Station No. 7?” As Harvey Wood leaped back like a frightened deer, Harrington whirled upon him with his gun. “Wood, come back here and answer my question . . . while the lie-detector weighs you words . . .”

  Under the threat of the gun, the mineralogist returned and stood there shaking like a leaf. “ANSWER,” thundered Harrington.

  With eyes staring fascinated at the lens, the mineralogist said slowly, “I am not.”

  The lens flared red instantaneously. With a groan Harvey Wood sank to the floor.

  Harrington was again in Soderstrom’s office. It was the next day. He was about to leave the moon. He had accomplished his mission. He had broken up the cleverest frame-up he had ever encountered in his numerous commissions. He had been on the moon five days.

  “Yes, Soderstrom, that’s the sad part of it The bigger of the two criminals, Pruma, will get the least punishment. Poor Harvey Wood will be the goat. Believe me, I’m going to do all in my power and that means the power of the S.I.S., to see that Pruma gets something I promised out of it, although, no doubt, most of his guilt will be snowed under by the political forces of the M.M. Sad state of affairs when a damned Ginzie can get away with all that Pruma did, and yet know that his government will make his punishment light. However, I’m sure he’ll have to resign his position as overseer of a moon mine. Well . . . after all Mr. Soderstrom, the claim-jumping is circumvented, and that, you know, was my commission . . . with diplomacy . . .” Harrington mused as to how much he had done could come under the heading of “diplomacy.”

  Soderstrom, relieved of the worry of the past few days, was once again the jovial, pleasant host. The events of the past months had burst about him like bombshells. Unharmed by the pieces, he had felt the concussions. His mind was made up to go back to earth to be fitted by the Bureau of Employment as some other cog in the vast machinery of the socialistic world.

  “There’s one thing I would like to know, Mr. Harrington, how long did suspicion rest on me?”

  “Don’t think hardly of me, Mr. Soderstrom, but you weren’t free from suspicion till my second visit to Kranto. All along I thought it was a fool’s game you were playing, if you were the guilty one, because of the careless way of filing applications so close to those that had been applied for by the Martians. I couldn’t imagine an overseer being a fool, so I decided that somebody was playing a strategic game to get you out of the way so the claim-selling could go on uninterruptedly. I did not really suspect Harvey Wood till I first heard him talk. Then I knew I had the culprit. He was so eager to implicate you, he pointed right at himself.”

  Soderstrom reviewed the events of that last tense scene in his office. “That lie detector of yours, Mr. Harrington, is a remarkable instrument.”

  “Soderstrom, I’m going to test you with it right now.” Harrington pulled it out and held it in the palm of one hand. “Mr. Soderstrom, can you keep a secret?”

  “Yes, certainly.” The lens flared red!

  The overseer’s face turned redder than the lens. H
e looked up at the other in confusion, partly mixed with anger.

  “Please, Mr. Soderstrom, don’t be angry,” laughed Harrington as the other arose hastily. “You see, I kept one hand in my pocket. In there I have another little instrument with a button on it. When I press the button, the lens flashes red!”

  THE END

  [1] “Credits” . . . the paper money of the time.

  [2] “L.W. tests” . . . Lifework Testa given at the age of twelve.

  [3] “S.I.S.” . . . abbrev. for “Special Investigation Service.”

  [4] “Ginzie” . . . nickname for a Martian, considered an affront If used to their face.

  [5] “U.S.R.” . . . abbrer. for “United Socialietic Republic.

  [6] “M.M.” . . . abbrev. for Martian Monarchy.

  [7] The ratio of gravity between earth and moon is more like 5 to 1, but due to the weight of the suit, Harrington carried not quite half the weight of his body on earth.

  MURDER ON THE ASTEROID

  l Mr. Binder is to be congratulated for one thing, even if for no other. He has written of the danger and difficulties of space navigation and exploration with such careful detail that the story springs into life on every page. It is not one of those vague, rambling stories in which the reader must take space travel for granted and be contented with very general descriptions. For in those stories the reader forgets what he reads; he gets no clearcut picture of “what it is all about.”

  So congratulations, Mr. Binder, and come again with more such realistic, colorful tales. We believe our readers are hungry for them.

  l In the dim interior of an ether boat, two men labored over a pile of rock lumps. They were dressed warmly in sweaters and thick skin-tight trousers. The inner sections of an ether boat were hard to keep warm, especially when the vacuum locks to the outside were used frequently. Every time the lock was opened and the air rushed out, the new air that filled the space when the outer door closed absorbed the intense frigidity of the bare metal wall of the lock chamber. Then, when the inner door to the boat proper was Opened, this frosted air swept in and quickly lowered the average temperature. It was all the electric heaters could do to keep the heat up to just past the freezing point of water.

  Consequently, the hands of these two men were blue and lined with white and sometimes red where the sharp stones brazed the skin. Their faces were red and puckered, not only from the coolness they constantly lived in, but also by reason of the many times they had ventured out in vacuum suits. The constant use of these suits was influential in promoting skin troubles and stomach disorders, for they were the acme of stale, uncomfortable, unhealthy confinement. These men used them often.

  But despite their raw, bleeding hands, their sore faces, their frost-bitten skin, and their general ill health, they worked at the stone pile with unmindful eagerness. Each would pick up a rock, turn it over and over in his hands, and examine its surface minutely with a magnifying lens. Then he would put the rock in a steel mortar and pound it with a heavy leaden-weighted pestle till it was pea size or at least broken into smaller lumps. These remains would be fingered and looked over minutely and then thrown away with a gesture of disappointment or sometimes with an audible grunt of disgust. All the discards went in the same place—a big aluminum tub. Because of the low gravity, the material would float rather than drop, into the container.

  The two men constituted a picture of contrast. The one was stout and paunched, fat of face with little piggish eyes that looked over the ore samples with obvious avariciousness. The frown on his smudged forehead and the downward turn of his mouth increased as the unexamined pile grew smaller and the discard larger.

  The other man was slight of build and trembled with a constant ague that was a result of his strenuous and unhealthy labors and habits. A pair of weak watery eyes topped a bright nose that bespoke of his love for the wine-cup. His lips were thin and bloodless. At times he would furtively glance at his companion as the frown deepened, as if afraid of that individual’s reaction to the disappointment in the batch of hard won but worthless rock.

  Finally Egard Hanson, the stout man, tossed away the ground remains of the last rock with an exclamation of anger and disgust. He looked at his companion whose watery eyes were dull with disappointment, and spat noisily into the aluminum tub.

  “A fine mess of rotten filth!” he expressed himself. “Not the slightest sign of anything worth looking for. Not even an atom of silver or gold. Worse yet, no precious stones, not even little ones. Nothing but rot—filthy rot!”

  The red-nosed individual pulled a kerchief from his hind pocket and wiped his watery eyes with trembling hands. He blew his nose sonorously.

  “A month’s back-breaking, freezing, blistering work gone up in nothing,” continued Hanson petulantly. “Look at my hands—cracked and sore. My skin—it’s burning up and every bone in my body is aching and jingling. And what have I got out of it? Nothing but a worthless dirt heap, just a lot of . . .”

  He finished up with a whirl of invectives and epithets, his voice climbing from peevishness to snarling rage.

  Jeremiah Timothy, the smaller man, said not a word but kept an eye on Hanson. Seeing his mood of disappointed anger wax mightily, Timothy carefully arose from the three-legged stool and ambled toward the back of the boat on his unsteady legs, hardly able to keep his balance because of the light gravity.

  Hanson’s enraged bellow stopped him. “Where in hell you going?”

  “Why, I just . . . I just thought I’d have a little drink. My . . . my throat is a little parched from that dust . . . I . . .”

  But Timothy did not continue on the way aft. He turned half sideways so that he could observe Hanson from the corner of his eyes. He was afraid of Hanson and would not dare get that drink of liquor unless Hanson remained silent or grunted in permission. But Hanson did not give that grunt that the little man waited to hear.

  “Timothy, come here and sit down.”

  Rubbing a sore red nose with the back of his hand, Timothy hurriedly complied with the command. After a wistful, longing look at the cupboard on the back wall, he turned his face towards Hanson. But his eyes avoided those of the frowning, angered man.

  “Listen, Timothy,” began Hanson in a voice that crawled with suppressed bestial rage. “Listen—nine months ago I picked you up. You were in Port Monto on Mars in the riff-raff part of town. There you were sitting at a table with a bottle of liquor half empty in front of you, as drunk as you could be. You were so drunk that part of your liquor was running across the table, curling up the varnish, and dripping to the floor. God, but you were drunk!”

  Timothy had been drunk, he knew, but Hanson was just rubbing it in.

  Hanson went on: “I came up. I had just come back from Jupiter where our gang went to collect a fortune in jewels, as that rotten liar of a promoter said. Well, I came back from that plenty disgusted and about a thousand dollars losers. I couldn’t prosecute, or, by Heaven, I would have run that sneak of a promoter off the face of the planet. Stones, he said—big, shining, priceless jewels—just pick ’em off the ground on one of those damned moons of Jupiter. That’s what he told us and like fish we bit, paid into a kitty, and bought the boat and ‘treasure map’ from this scoundrel of a promoter. We left ten men up there at Jupiter and nearly got lost at that, the whole bunch of us.

  “You know what I felt like, Timothy, when I got back to Mars? I felt like taking somebody’s neck and twisting and twisting . . .”

  l Hanson, with a ferocious snarl on his fat face, placed his two hands as if choking a person, and twisted them viciously as he spoke.

  Timothy got a little pale as he saw his companion working into such a towering rage. His red nose shone like a beacon over the white skin.

  “That’s how I felt,” went on Hanson. “Like choking somebody. I always feel like choking somebody when I get real mad. Sometimes I did start choking somebody when I got mad but there would always be somebody around to pull me away, Anyway that was long ago, b
efore I met you.

  “So I met you in Port Monto in a dirty dive. I was still disgusted about the Jupiter deal and decided to drink it off. I happened to sit down at your table. You looked at me with those damned bleary eyes and it took! you ten minutes to realize I was a human being. You looked at me at first like I was something in the way of your vision—like I was spots in your eyes. God, but! you were drunk!”

  The insults bothered Timothy not in the least. He had been insulted, kicked and spurned the better part of his life. He was used to it. He gradually began to breathe in relief, for Hanson was working off his rage, or so he figured.

  “Then what happened?” thundered Hanson. “You know as well as I do. You began to talk like an eternal phonograph. Blab, blab, blab you went with all that liquor furnishing you with inspiration. I got disgusted and was going to move away to get out of range of your voice, when all of a sudden you said something about ‘platinum on an asteroid.’ Being a prospector myself, of course I pricked up my ears. I sat down again and tried to get some more out of you, but you were so filthy drunk I didn’t know whether you were raving or not. But I decided to follow the lead, because you spoke in your drunken ramblings about a fabulous find of platinum ore that you knew about.

  “I dragged you away from that dump and took you to my rooms and put you in my own bed. You were an awful bedfellow with that reeking breath of yours all over and your gurgling snores. I got up in the middle of the night to throw you out in the hall. I felt disgusted that I had brought you there just because you said a couple of words about platinum, words that any drunkard could say without knowing he said them. I grabbed you but just as I did that you muttered that phrase again about ‘platinum on an asteroid’ and ‘I know where it is’ in your sleep and that got me started all over again. So I stayed up the rest of the night and let you sleep off your liquor. I decided to find out what you meant.