The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “Sorry,” Joe said, calming.

  “It just occurred to me, you might be interested in going down to the surface with me after we land at the skyport. I could show you around at a few Earth spots that I’m sure you’ve never seen. We could get our pictures taken, and have a few interviews.”

  “No, thank you. I’ll be very busy all the time I’m at the skyport. I’m shifting to another ship, and I’ll have to move my collections across—you know, I carry with me some prize specimens of flora from three planets—so I’ll be very busy between ships. Would you like to look at my collections?”

  Joe’s mother had died en route to Earth from Mars, and Joe, less than three months old—born on the space ship—had become an orphan of space. If his mother’s destination had been the United States of America, or any of several other countries, Joe might have been allowed to enter. But the country for which his mother was bound had stiff immigration laws which forbade Joe’s entrance. He had no living parent who was a citizen of this country.

  His father, born on Mars of American parentage, had gone back into the deep hinterlands of Mars with an expedition of frontiersmen—an ill-fated expedition from which only a few returned. Fatherless, motherless, and without a country or a planet, Joe Malette at the age of three months became the charge of a kindly space ship steward.

  The steward was killed in a freak accident at one of the skyports when Joe was four years old. By that time the little lad was well-known by the regulars on the planetary space routes. They were fond of him. They had long since ceased to try to gain special dispensations from immigration authorities. Why, after all, should Joe be forced to take up life on one of the planets when all of his friends were men of space?

  Travelers between planets took a vast interest in Joe’s education. His presence on a ship offered endless diversion, and his progress in mathematics and languages was a natural source of delight to passengers with time on their hands. At the age of eight he would listen with wide-eyed curiosity to tales of life on the planets. He did his best to visualize what it would be like, walking out on a surface of almost unlimited walking space. This was not easy to envision. Although his eyes were full of the spaceman’s view of the planets—for no other child in the whole solar system was so surfeited with these beautiful heavenly spectacles as he—nevertheless, it was difficult for him to think of a planet as more than a very, very large space ship. To walk on the outside of such an object. and to keep on walking as far as one cared to walk, was an idea that he could not fathom. Somehow, he could not make such a thought seem real.

  On the skyports, to be sure, he did do some walking on the outside. But such outside walking was always to be done with caution; always within the protection of space-suits; and always within very definitely limited areas which ended when one came up to the rails, beyond which was nothing.

  To be sure, he was also treated to telescopic views of the surfaces of Earth, or Mars, or Venus; and those elders, who undertook to explain how it was down there on the surface, would supplement their instructions with pictures and movies, to convey the full impression.

  Even so, deep within his subconscious mind, the bogey was there, refusing to be driven out. Walking out on the surface of a planet must be like walking out on the fuselage of an immense space ship—and one who valued his life didn’t walk on the outside of a space ship.

  No amount of thinking and imagining, however earnest and intense, could drive the deeply rooted concepts from Joe’s childhood mind. Surely within such a great spherical ship as Earth, the roar and the vibration must be too powerful for human endurance . . . But one does not walk within Earth—only on the outside . . . Yet how, on the outside, can one cushion himself for the take-off? But Earth is never required to take-off—it never accelerates, it never retards—it just goes on cruising at a theoretically constant velocity, the retardation being too slight to be worth calculating, much less to be felt, ever! Those sickening periods of acceleration and retardation were simply never felt, on Earth’s surface. It was also said that no one, walking on the surface, experienced the slightest fear of loss of oxygen or gravitational insecurity—

  And still, the very thought of walking out on the open surface of the planets continued to prey upon the mind of Joe, the eight-year-old child, as the ultimate terror.

  Again and again he refused offers of friendly passengers or crewmen who wanted to take him down from the skyports onto the surface. By the age of ten, he had developed an independence of spirit that made him very much the master of his own comings and goings. He was perfectly adjusted in space. He had found a thousand ways to make himself useful, and no cruise considered him an expensive luxury—far from it. He more than paid his own way, now, wherever he went, in the services he offered. Already his experience in space was beginning to count for something.

  En route, he was quick to detect signs of illness in untraveled passengers, and the ship’s physician would allow him to state his own diagnosis and make his own best guess as to what medicines or treatments were desirable. He gathered a rudimentary education in chemistry, medicines, and space health, and he found a world of interest in the studies of diets and the space travelers’ reactions to foods. As one of many items which came to-his attention, the passengers from southern Europe, who invariably expressed preference for their own native foods, would grow excessively sluggish after four or five days of their chosen diet. He noticed that they would pep up with a fine return of vitality if they could be persuaded to shift to a diet of the luscious protein vegetables that came from the western continent of Venus. He passed his discovery on to several doctors, and was pleased when one of them wrote a scientific treatise on the subject.

  He was wary of strong drink.

  Occasionally, though rarely, he witnessed the spectacle of drunkenness. The behavior of an inebriated person was not wanted on a space ship, for reasons of safety as well as decorum. But occasionally a passenger would bring liquor, against the rules, and turn to it as an escape from the boredom of long travel. Such a person once persuaded Joe, at the age of thirteen, to sample his bottled goods. It was a breach of faith between adult and youth that Joe never forgot. Long after the humiliation of the incident had burnt out, Joe’s distrust of the sporting suggestions of certain types of American passengers remained.

  Such deeply rooted distrust carried over into other fields of suggestion. The same cruel and stupid passenger, who had forced a sample of drunkenness on him, also tried to persuade him to come along, down to Earth’s surface, to “see the town.” Joe’s resistance deepened. What had been a childhood fear now intensified into a moral stubbornness. The surface of a planet was not necessary to his well-adjusted existence. Privately, he determined that he would live out his life in space.

  Nevertheless, he was fascinated by the various Earth movies which were frequently shown on board during the long sky flights. A few stock travel films were standard equipment for any space liner, and when he was asked to run to the storeroom and get a film—anything at all-—he would choose outdoor pictures—snow covered mountains and the jungled tropics.

  Interested passengers would bring him souvenirs of the various planets from time to time, and he gradually acquired a small collection of plants which he attended with scientific care. In the limited space of his room, under artificial light and atmospheric conditions, he created his own little green world, always a subject of much interest to the passengers. After a few failures he began to have phenomenal success with the prized Venus weebl, and was able to give away a few §hoots at the end of each voyage. Occasionally the ship’s table was decorated with a center-piece of satin red and gold Venus blossoms.

  In a single case he displayed lepidoptera from Earth, and the most comparable winged specimens from Mars and Venus that he could procure. He missed no chance to bargain with passengers who shared such interests, who could be persuaded to bring him a few souvenirs from nature on their return trips. Once, following a take-off from Mars, a live butte
rfly was found to have emerged from its cocoon. To the enlivenment of the passengers, it was allowed the freedom of the ship throughout the voyage, fluttering about as if this were its natural habitat. When the ship landed on Earth’s skyport, newsmen and cameramen were waiting to make the most of the story that had been radioed ahead, and Earth’s television audience was treated to a glimpse, in full color, of “the butterfly that flew from Mars to the Earth.”

  Joe had kept brief diaries from the time he first began to write. Through his teens he added to the value of these records by obtaining the signatures of important persons on board.

  His own handwriting, unhurried and freely ornamental, was compared by some of the doting passengers to shooting stars and swerving comets. They found delight in turning through the pages of his journals, discovering that such and such a senator or ambassador or king had traveled this route only a year or so before them and had obviously been as fond of Joe Malette as they, judging by the inscriptions penned in the journals.

  A particularly friendly official from Venus, on his way to Earth to clinch a big governmental bargain, was inspired to make the promise to Joe that—if his deal was successsful—he would bring back for Joe a gift unlike anything he had ever possessed.

  Within a few months the official made his promise good. He brought Joe a small printing press, a few fonts of type, and enough equipment to make possible the publication of a little two-column, four-page newspaper. Although the facsimile “press” brought in various metropolitan newspapers, the official declared that Joe’s own printed journal was the first genuine space newspaper, written, printed, and circulated in space. When the first issue came forth, Joe, smiling with his thrill of success, washed the ink from his hands and passed out free copies to every one on board.

  The enjoyment of that event was something remarkable. No one aboard would ever forget it.

  Every person on the ship found his own name in the paper, for Joe had discovered something interesting in all of them. The date, the hour, the approximate position in space, all possible official data on the trip, were there in black and white, almost up to the very minute of publication. And less technical, but highly colorful was Joe’s innovation—a column of space lingo, “The Verbal Void.” Twenty-five expressions coined by space voyagers were offered; more would follow in subsequent editions.

  They held a party for Joe in honor of Volume One, Number One. Afterward, he was so keyed up he couldn’t sleep—behaving, as he told himself, like an Earth man having his first deep breath of rarefied Martian atmosphere.

  There was always one dependable way of working off one’s surplus energies on the Red Comet liners. The architecture of the ship provided a space, at one end of the power chamber, where one could exercise to his heart’s content.

  All through childhood, needing an outlet for his pent-up energies, and having no other room for running and climbing as the normal Earth child must, Joe had made the most of the power room space from the shiny railing at the left, down through the square- walled pit, up to the shiny railing on the right. He had developed strong arms in this meager improvised gymnasium, and at sixteen he possessed the agility of a chimp.

  So, following the party, Joe retreated to the power room in his sweat clothing. He swung down over the railing, bounded back and forth through the pit, swung up on the other side. Hanging by hand or foot, fingertips or elbows, he played until he was thoroughly exhausted. After a shower, he fell into an exhausted sleep.

  By the time Joe reached his eighteenth birthday, he probably knew more names and faces of space travelers than any other person in the solar system. By now he had had a turn at piloting, and this had been one of the high thrills of his life. But it was less social, by the nature of the job, than various other functions he had tried. As a permanent thing, he preferred some capacity in which he met and talked with the people on board. To the professional pilot the hours at the control were not the whole of living; they endured their quiet and loneliness with an eye to the in-between times, when they would pick up the thread of what to them had been normal life on one of the planets.

  But this was not true of Joe, for he did not belong to any of the planets. He belonged to space.

  The ship was his world. Its turnover of occupants was his passing society. He possessed no family. He seldom wrote letters to persons he had come to know on the ship. His friends would return now and again, and when they came back, they were again his world.

  His yearning for female companionship often penetrated his hours of quiet thought. Not often did young girls come aboard. They were to be seen at the skyports, in office jobs or in the restaurants. There, too, they occasionally appeared as tourists, taxiing up from Earth’s surface to the floating port for a wistful look into the big space liners.

  Occasionally he would be called upon to guide a party of skyport tourists through one of the Red Comet liners. At such times he would find himself pleased and a little bewildered by the chattering and giggling of the high school or college girls in the party. Mentally he would compare them with certain movie females he had come to know by memory from innumerable showings of certain films. He was glad when young- wives made the Venus or Mars tours with their husbands, or when families with teen-age girls made the voyage. It helped him to develop more confidence in their presence. He needed to get acquainted with their ways.

  It was one thing for them to exclaim in raptures about the marvelous ship, or about his journal or his collections of planetary specimens; it was quite another for him to talk with them of their own interests. Rack of their laughter were curious little whimsies he couldn’t always understand. They had common bonds among themselves in their school life, their clubs and churches, movies and parties—all of which was foreign to him.

  Approaching Earth on one of his voyages, he looked out at it with more fascination than ever before. For on this trip he had made the great decision. This time he would go down. At last his feet were ready to walk upon its surface.

  Not that his old dread of the unknown had suddenly dissolved, for it had not. It spun about him like a vortex of gravitational forces, trying to hold him back. But cubits had been added to his stature since the phobia had first closed about him. The inner urge off the maturing man pounded, fiercely demanding that his fears be conquered and that he seek new experiences.

  The person who had helped him come to this decision was a passenger, Patricia Stevens, a girl about his own age.

  “I hate to see this trip come to an end, Joe you’ve been so interesting. I wish we could treat you, in turn.”

  Traveling with her aunt and uncle, she had been the life of the ship since the take-off from Mars. To Joe she was certainly the most attractive person he had ever encountered in his eighteen years.

  The invitation for him to come down to the Stevens home for a three-day visit may have originated with Patricia’s Aunt Kate. It became a campaign promoted by all three, and Patricia’s uncle, Douglas Stevens, being a man of importance in the world of trade, was accustomed to getting whatever he set out to get. Among them they had discovered Joe’s secret—that he had lived all his life in space.

  The novelty of being the first to entertain him and show him how life was lived on the surface of the planet added the passion of eagerness to their invitation. Joe had become personally fond of all of them, and always there was the thought of Patricia, her dancing eyes and ready laughter. Breathing deeply in his determination to go through with it, he gave them the nod.

  “I’ll go,” Joe promised. “I’ll be glad to go.”

  He added that he’d prefer not to have any encounters with reporters, they always wanted to make such a fuss. This concession was readily made. They wanted Joe for himself, not for the publicity.

  “But one promise I’ll not make,” the buoyant uncle said with a twinkle. “I won’t promise we’ll limit you to three days.”

  “I’ll have only five days stopover, and I’ll need at least two at the skyport.”

 
; Uncle Douglas chuckled. “Joe, you may like it so well, you’ll decide to spend a year, once you’ve made the break. I have offices in a big skyscraper where your experiences would be very useful.”

  Joe smiled. “No, thank you.”

  “Of course you might change your mind after you see how it is.”

  “Three days,” Joe said.

  They landed on the skyport, high above the earth. After Joe had taken care of his work details, they boarded the sky taxi that shuttled between the floating port and the terminal at the edge of the city.

  Now Earth was rising to meet them. Joe watched the surface widen out like a Venetian bloom unfolding under a microscope. The millions of tiny parts spread away from sight, and the view of the universe was presently limited to a close-up of a little patch of landing field.

  The sky taxi came to a solid anchor on the surface, the passengers alighted, and Joe walked out upon Earth.

  Patricia and her aunt walked on one side of him, Uncle Douglas on the other, all of them smiling, asking him how it felt.

  Joe laughed with them. “On one trip,” he said, “we hatched out a batch of little chicks and I remember how they acted. That’s how I feel—a little shaky—as if I’d just broken out of an egg.”

  “Now, Joe,” Aunt Kate protested, “that makes us out to be three mother hens.”

  “Well?”

  “I resent that!” Patricia said. “Anyway you’re much too steady on your feet for a newborn chick.”

  “After all, gravity is gravity. This is the weight I’m used to.”

  “Well, this is the real. Nothing artificial about it.”

  Uncle Douglas couldn’t help taking a proprietary air. This was his world and, as a captain of industry, he indulged in the pardonable foible of seeming to own everything, from the grass to the giant skyscrapers towering above to the very gravity underfoot.

  In a cab they spun through dizzy traffic of the sort that had always fascinated Joe in the movies. As they rode along, he tried to look in all directions as fast as the sights were pointed out. He was ashamed of the sickening feeling of confusion that filled him, and resolved not to reveal that he was veritably reeling. Tightening his nerves, he took in the mad jumble of impressions as fast as they came.