The Space Opera Novella

by Frank Belknap Long

  Call it fate, if you will, or coincidence. Call it anything you wish to explain why I, of all persons, should have been the one who met the stranger. Whatever you call it, it was the first of a series of surprises too intimate, too disturbingly accurate, to be wholly fortuitous.

  For as we approached each other across the lawn, he smiled apologetically and—

  “Good afternoon,” he said. “Could you tell me which of these houses is the home of Nelson Bond?”

  “I’m Nelson Bond,” I said, and his eyes lighted.

  “You are? What luck! I wonder if we might—” He glanced meaningfully in the direction of my study. “There’s something I’d like to discuss with you. A matter of greatest importance.”

  To you, I thought derisively. An encyclopedia. Or life insurance. Or maybe an investment trust of some sort. Though why in the world anyone should suspect a writer of having any money to invest…

  But it was a dull day, and any excuse to escape the typewriter was a good one. I nodded and led the way indoors. As I cleared space for him on a lounge chair cluttered with a hodge-podge of reference books and old manuscript carbons, he watched me with bright, birdlike interest.

  “You’re a younger man than I thought,” he said.

  I kept a straight face, but chuckled inwardly. Then it is insurance, I thought; well, watch him take a powder when I toss my bombshell at him. In as casual a tone as I could manage I said, “Well, maybe I’d look even younger if I didn’t have this damned ulcer.”

  That’s the gambit which usually quick-freezes insurance men. One whisper of the magic word “ulcer” and they make for the nearest exit. But my visitor merely shook his head commiseratingly.

  “You have one, too? Does it annoy you all the time, or only periodically? Mine seems to act up worst in April and October. They tell me—”

  “Sit down,” I said, a bit disgruntled. “I’d rather not talk about it, if it’s all the same to you. Now—you had something to discuss with me?”

  He sat—perched, rather—on the edge of his chair and gazed intently into my eyes.

  “Yes, Mr. Bond, I have. But before I begin, let me introduce myself. My name is Westcott—Dr. Arthur Westcott. I am a medical doctor and a practicing psychiatrist connected with—”

  The institution he named is one of the South’s most famous clinics, specializing in mental ailments. I looked at him with some suspicion.

  “Delighted to meet you, Dr. Westcott. But if you’re here to make a case history of me simply because my stories run for the most part to fantasy—”

  He leaned forward earnestly.

  “I have no intention of making you a case history,” he said. “But I am here because you are known as a writer of fantasies. Fantasies and science fiction.” Perhaps I preened myself a trifle. His wasn’t much of a compliment, but any writer likes to hear he is “known”—if only for his Pro Bono Publico complaints in the Letters to the Editor section of his local newspaper.

  I corrected him gently. “Fantasies only, Dr. Westcott. I don’t write science fiction any more.”

  He stared at me in something remarkably like alarm. “You don’t write science fiction?”

  “Not for a number of years. Five or six, anyway.”

  “But,” he protested, “you must! It’s the only way! That’s why I’m here. You’ve got to do it—or Grayson is mad, and the whole thing is a maniac’s wild dreaming. I can’t believe that’s true.”

  It was my turn to stare at him in something considerably like alarm. I said carefully, “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Who is Grayson? And why on Earth should I write a story for a field of fiction I deserted years ago?”

  “On Earth!” laughed my guest—without mirth in his laughter. “On Earth, indeed. It is odd you should use those words.”

  Then his face was suddenly grave, and his eyes were bleak with a vision I could not share.

  “You must do one more tale,” he said, and his words were a grim command. “You must do one more story of the days that are yet to be. You dare not refuse. For on its telling may depend the fate of all mankind…

  * * * *

  It was a hot summer day. Everywhere the leaves stirred fretfully in the wake of a stifling breeze; in the skies above no wisp of cloud offered shield to the searing torrent of the sun. There was, then, no reason why it should seem to me that for an instant there touched my nape a breath of chilling wind, heavy and foreboding as the draft that precursors a squall.

  No reason, again, why my query that ended the brief silence should have been voiced in something barely more than a whisper. But there was something about Dr. Westcott—his preternatural gravity, the taut conviction of his plea that was more than a demand—which compelled a like intensity.

  “Tell me,” I suggested.

  He nodded and touched the briefcase beside him. “I will explain,” he said in that curiously stilted, definition-conscious style so frequently found in educators. “I will explain. Only this can tell you.”

  It was a manuscript he drew from the briefcase. In the true meaning of the word a manuscript—a thick bundle of pages written by hand, not type. Westcott did not give it to me. I had time to notice only that the writing was sprawling and ill-formed; then my visitor laid the sheets down again.

  “I have already told you who I am and what I do. I take it you are familiar with the nature of our clinic and my work?”

  I nodded. “Mental rehabilitation. Emphasis on war victims. Shellshock, battle fatigue—that sort of thing.”

  “Quite correct,” nodded Westcott. “And if I may say so, we have had an unusual degree of success in our treatment of those unfortunates through the use of new and experimental therapies.

  “Not the least of which,” he continued in his stiff, pedantic style, “is a treatment of the psychotic trauma by hypnosis. You have undoubtedly read or heard something about this technique. Our efforts include conversational hypnosis, post-hypnotic suggestion, and automatic writing.”

  “You make the patient remember what happened to him,” I said, “things so terrible that his psyche rejected them—and you effect a cure. That the principle?”

  “That,” nodded my visitor, “is the basic principle. But suppose—” Here he lifted to mine eyes that were frankly baffled—“Suppose a patient were to remember events which he could never possibly have witnessed? What then would your explanation be?”

  I frowned. “The question is a contradiction in terms. No one can remember things he hasn’t known.”

  “Grayson can,” said Dr. Westcott simply.

  “Grayson?”

  “One of my patients. An ex-pilot with the Army Air Corps. The man who wrote this.”

  He touched once more the manuscript lying face down between us. I stared at it, then at him, curiously.

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Doctor.” I essayed the light touch. “Which of us is the fantasist? You or me?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Westcott ruefully. “I honestly don’t know. I wish to God I did. For if Frank Grayson is sane, then all our scientific knowledge is as a sapling in the vast forest of truths yet to be learned, and man’s infant culture totters on the brink of a frightful catastrophe. And if Grayson is mad—then I, too, am mad. For, Lord help me—I believe him!

  “Please let me finish,” he went on hurriedly, “and listen with an open mind. I came two hundred miles to see you because, whether you will it or not, you are a part of this strange, tangled skein. It may be that you won’t believe what I have come to tell you. That doesn’t matter. Whether you believe or not, there is a story you must write.

  “Or, rather, there is a story you must publish. It is this story—” He touched the manuscript. “The tale written by Frank Grayson under automatic reflex, when he was hypnotized and had no knowledge of what his hand was doing.”

  “Just a minute!�
�� I interrupted a bit angrily. “You want me to publish under my own name these dreamworld ravings of a mental patient? What gives you the idea I’d do such—”

  “Isaiah,” said Westcott in strangely trancelike tones. “Isaiah, Samuel, and Jeremiah. The na-bi-u of Babylon, the oracles of Greece. Nostradamus, Joseph Smith—and Billy Mitchell. What is prophecy, and by what wild talent may some men glimpse a fragment of the future?

  “All those I have named, and countless others, were mocked by their fellow men for daring to foresay that which was to come. Yet in the ebbing of slow time their prescience was proven. And all too terribly may yet be proven true the prophecy of Frank Grayson.

  “This manuscript was written by the hand of Grayson. But it was not his brain that dictated its words. Grayson is my patient; I know the way he thinks, the way he talks. These words are no more his than the hand in which these sentences are written is his handwriting. See here—”

  He laid before me the final page of the manuscript. Beneath the concluding lines of that sprawling cacography was a final paragraph:

  Francis J. Grayson, hereby attest that the foregoing was written by me, under hypnosis, at the times hereafter noted—

  The statement gave dates and hours. Both statement and signature were penned in a neat, precise hand—the printed script favored by draftsmen and artists. The writing was in no respect like that of the preceding pages.

  “Whether this be prophecy or prescience,” continued Westcott, “I do not know. By whatever means Grayson happened forward up the stream of time, the fact remains that McLeod’s story is vivid, forceful, and potentially of the greatest importance—”

  “McLeod?” I interrupted. “Who is McLeod?”

  “The man who really lived this adventure,” answered Westcott. “Kerry McLeod—soldier, pioneer, and colonist of Earth’s outpost on the planet Venus in the year Nineteen Eighty-five A.D.”

  There are times when speech is impossible. This was such a time. I opened my mouth to say something, but no words came. I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know my own reaction to this fantastically incredible situation.

  If Westcott were a would-be writer trying to snare me into publishing under my name one of his fledgling tales, I had every justification for anger. Yet there was a disconcerting sincerity in the manner of my guest. His were not the eyes of a guileful man, nor was there any laughter in them.

  What finally I should have said, I do not know. It was spared me the necessity of saying anything, for Westcott rose, placing before me the manuscript.

  “I will go now,” he said, “and leave this with you. I ask only one thing: that even though you doubt, when you have finished reading it, you do that which the tale tells you you must do. No matter what you believe, dare not gamble on your judgment.

  “The tale, you will find, begins and ends abruptly, as began and ended Grayson’s curious rapport with Kerry McLeod. It has several gaps, coincident with Grayson’s intervals of non-hypnotic consciousness. The text has errors, both of grammar and fact. Some of these I have already corrected. Feel free to revise others as seems best to you. The degree of literary excellence is incidental. It is not important that Kerry McLeod lacks culture. It is of the utmost importance that he be given the message, the clue, he so direly needs.”

  He smiled briefly, tentatively.

  “I hope,” he said, “that when you have read, you will believe—as I do. And now, I wish you good day.”

  I watched him down the street and out of sight, the little stranger whose curious demand had roused in me emotions so troubled and confused. And then, of course, I read the manuscript.

  —Which now, as I was bade, I offer you. It comes to you under my name in a book of stories, the rest of which are frankly and admittedly fantasies.

  How, then, can I convince you that of the lot, this one alone is not wild imagining, but chill and sober truth? What protest will convince you that I am herein simply an instrument through which is brought to you the story of a man not yet born?

  Only the by-line is mine. The story is the story of Kerry McLeod, colonist of an outpost distant by many millions of miles and many decades of time…

  CHAPTER II

  …shoved me violently, and another snatched at my gun. I kicked at the one in front of me and he fell back, spitting curses and teeth. Then I whirled and grabbed the hand fumbling at my holster. It was a lean, strong, sinewy hand, but mine was toughened in the Bratislava campaign and on the steppes before Moscow. I twisted, and my attacker screamed as bones grated.

  Even so they would have got to me in a few minutes, for there must have been eight or ten of them surrounding me, held at bay only by the fear I might use my gun. The streets were deserted at this late hour, and lightless. There was no moon, and the fitful glare of that damned crimson ball crawling across the sky was worse than starlight or no light at all. It cast its red, unhealthy hue on all it touched, until even the shadows seemed dabbled with the color of blood, and they flickered and shifted like furtive, creeping things.

  Footsteps shuffled nearer, and a taut voice called, “Don’t be a fool, Corpsman! We don’t want to hurt you unless you make us. We are your friends and the friends of all mankind. Throw down your blaster and join with us.”

  “And if I don’t?” I asked.

  “Then we’ll take it anyway,” came the answer, “but you won’t live to join us.”

  “Your opinion,” I said. “I’ve got a full cartridge that says otherwise. Come and get it, Sackies!”

  I thought that would anger them, and it did. Other voices merged in a growl, and in the blood-tinted darkness you could feel them tensing for action. If there’s anything in the world they can’t stand, it’s to be called Sackies. I slipped my blaster from its holster and thumbed back the safety catch. I wasn’t as confident as I’d tried to sound, but of one thing I was certain: they would take from me no blast-gun to add to their steadily growing arsenal. My cartridge would go before I did.

  “As you wish,” snarled their spokeman. “They who refuse our friendship are our enemies. Brothers—by the Sign!”

  I set myself as they came at me in a flood of clawing, fanatic humanity. Not yet did I hit the stud. Too well had been drilled into me the law of the Corps. Fight solely to keep the peace, and then to disable, not kill. With clubbed barrel I struck at them, spinning, whirling, fending them off, fighting to break out of their tightening net. A cudgel glanced off my temple, raked my cheek and jaw, and suddenly I tasted the hot, salt flavor of blood. A weight hurled itself on my back, and the chill of an outlawed knife touched my arm as I stumbled to my knees.

  Then came relief, as welcome as it was unhoped for. Twin beams of light swirled around the corner, with whiteness sponging out the sallow shadows, with blinding clarity fixing my attackers in midstride. The distinctive whistle of a patrol siren shrilled, brakes squealed, and a voice cried, “Hey, what’s going on here? Break it up! Break it up!”

  The weight lifted suddenly from my back, encircling arms no longer bound my knees, as the Diarist gang took to its heels. Where they disappeared to, heaven only knows. Like the rats they were, they scuttled into doorways, alleys, entrances that mysteriously opened to receive them, then as mysteriously closed. In a matter of seconds I was alone in the street with the two Corpsmen who hurried to me from the car.

  I rose, dusting myself, and they gasped as they saw my uniform.

  “A Corpsman!” exclaimed the patrol sergeant. Then, suspiciously, “But what outfit? You’re not local.”

  “That’s right,” I nodded. “Lieutenant McLeod, Pan-American Sector.” I didn’t think it necessary to tell a pair of local watchdogs I was with Intelligence. “Thanks for the rescue job. Things looked bad.”

  “You look bad. That cut very deep?”

  I had felt the steel, but had not realized until he brought it to my attention that the Diarist’s bl
ade had gashed my arm from wrist to elbow. It was an ugly slash, but neither painful nor serious. I wrapped a handkerchief about it.

  “I don’t think so. It will hold till I get a medic to look at it.”

  “Get him to look at that bump on your noggin, too,” suggested the sergeant. “It looks like a second head.”

  “I could use another one—with more brains than the first. A midnight walk alone through this sector wasn’t such a bright idea. The Sackies are nasty here, eh?”

  “They’re nasty everywhere,” he grunted, “but Fedhed is infested with the meanest breed.” He eyed me thoughtfully. “I suppose you know we’ll have to take you to sector headquarters for a ref check, Lieutenant? You’ve got your creds?”

  I patted my pocket. “All in order, Sergeant.”

  “You look right,” he conceded, “but we can’t afford to take chances any more. They’ve been picking up Corpsmen’s uniforms lately, as well as arms and ammo. Last month a Fedhed guard turned out to be a Diarist in disguise. We have no idea what information he managed to smuggle out to his Sackcloth buddies before we nabbed him. We’ll learn that the hard way, I suppose, a few months from now.”

  “You’re right to play it safe,” I told him. “And I want to meet the local authorities, anyway. Let’s go.”

  We piled into the patrol car. The headlights bored a tunnel of safety before us as we sped across the avenues of once-populous New York to the massive buildings which are the World Federation Headquarters. Above us that damned, sanity-shaking demon watched our progress with a baleful, scarlet eye.

  * * * *

  General Harkrader, commander of Fedhed, motioned me to a chair across the wide mahogany desk from his own. There were cigarettes in a box at my elbow and a decanter of Scotch in a cellaret beside me.

  “Well, Lieutenant,” he said, “now that your credentials have been checked and you’re patched up, relax and take it easy for a few minutes.” He grinned. “We gave you a fine welcome to Fedhed, didn’t we?”

  “My own fault, sir,” I admitted. “I should have known better than to take a post-curfew stroll through Diarist districts. But where I come from, the Sackies are scattered and not at all dangerous.”