The Metallic Muse

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  “Welcome home,” he said.

  Other cars left the terminal and started toward them. “Why did you land here?” the stranger said. “Most of us are putting down in out-of-the way places. Doesn’t do to have this oaf of an administrator know too much. I suppose it doesn’t matter now, though.”

  “Then there are—others?” Sandler asked.

  “Enough to scare this administrator if he learned the truth. More than a hundred thousand, and they’re still coming. Do you two remember anything? Family names? Places?”

  Sandler shook his head, but Miriam said quickly, “My mother’s name was Ligla.”

  “A common name, but we’ll do some checking.”

  The other cars drew up and stopped, and their occupants sat waiting. He chuckled softly. “I have a kind of semi-official position of which the administrator does not approve. I’m head of a settlers’ committee, which gives me the right to an exclusive interview before they have you off for the formalities. Krig is the name, incidentally. We’re all adopting our original names if we can find what they were. And you’ll have to learn to speak Analonian, though the old language is already pepped up to the point where you wouldn’t recognize it even if you remembered it.”

  He took their names, descriptions, educational training, and occupations. He inquired about identification marks that might have survived from childhood. He carefully spoke the names of prominent places on Analon to see if they recognized any.

  “We’ll go into this more thoroughly later on,” he said. “We’ll do our best to locate your parents if they’re still alive, and to help you get together with any brothers or sisters who’ve returned. The Federation—” He spat the word angrily. “The Federation took all the children in a certain age range. All of them. We estimate that a minimum quarter of a million children were stolen from Analon. Then the Federation pulled out abruptly. Didn’t even bother to leave medical or observation teams, but it did leave a lot of alien bacteria, and the population was nearly wiped out. We have a few scores to settle with the Federation. Any day, now, we’re going to throw out the administrator and run this planet ourselves.”

  Krig stepped back and nodded at the waiting officials. “These two have the committee’s approval,” he called.

  A young officer walked toward them waving a folder. “These people aren’t settlers,” he said.

  Krig looked at him coldly. “Of course they’re settlers.”

  “No. They’re going back to Earth and settle down to a nice multiple prison sentence. Or worse. Glad you dropped in here, Thomas Jefferson Sandler. This means a promotion for me. Consider yourself under arrest. I’ve already notified Sector Headquarters to send a ship for you.”

  “What’d he do?” Krig asked.

  “Both of them. The girl is an accomplice, at least. Here—read it yourself. There’s six pages.”

  Krig leafed through the folder, and then he stepped close to Sandler. “Did you really do all this?”

  “I wanted to come home,” Sandler said bitterly. “They tried to stop me.”

  Sympathy touched Krig’s face. “We need people like you,” he said softly. “It’s time we started running this planet our own way. We’ll have you out by midnight.”

  The officer tucked the file under his arm and jerked a thumb toward the ground car. Soldiers closed in on them. Sandler fumbled in his pocket and brought out a small plastic container. He broke the seal and tossed the contents to the searching wind.

  “Welcome home, Marty,” he whispered.

  On a distant planet, the commissioner of Sector 138 was jerked from a pleasantly sound slumber by the urgently clanging gong of his visiphone. Sleepily he stumbled toward it, listened for a few seconds to the incoherent babbling of a subclerk, and screamed, “Idiot!”

  He cut the connection and returned to his bed muttering angrily to himself. “Revolution, indeed!”

  The fool should have known that the native population on Analon was practically extinct!

  page 141

  Well of the Deep Wish

  (Introduction)

  Back in 1939, literary critic Bernard De Voto delivered himself of a memorable blast at Science Fiction. “This besotted nonsense,” he wrote, “is from the group of magazines known as the science pulps, which deal with both the World and the Universe of Tomorrow and, as our items show, take no great pleasure in either____The science discussed is idiotic beyond any possibility of exaggeration, but the point is that in this kind of fiction the bending of light or Heisenberg’s formula is equivalent to the sheriff of the horse opera fanning his gun, the heroine of the sex pulp taking off her dress.”*

  De Voto’s remarks concerning these “paranoid phantasies” may prove to be one of his more lasting observations upon the literary scene, for Science Fiction critics and commentators delight in quoting and requoting the besotted nonsense that is written, from time to time, about Science Fiction. Especially intriguing is the fact that outsiders such as De Voto invariably overlook one of Science Fiction’s most striking features as compared with the contemporary so-called Main Stream: the thread of optimism that runs through it even when it depicts man at his worst. As Kingsley Amis remarks in his book New Maps of Hell “… if we can imagine Brave New World rewritten by Anthony Boucher or Frederik Pohl, we could expect (as well as a little more narrative from time to time) an early scene showing a group of technicians working out a scheme for secretly subjecting all the Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon embryos to Alpha conditioning, just for a start. And the Savage might die at the hands of Mustapha Mond’s police force, but he would never commit suicide.” #

  * Bernard De Voto, “Doom Beyond Jupiter,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1939.

  # Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell. Copyright © 1960 by Kingsley Amis (Ballantine Books).

  Given a group of people in a hole in the ground, the Main Stream apostle of non-heroism describes, with inordinate delight and nauseous detail, those of them who are content to wallow in their filth. The Science Fiction writer is interested in those who are trying get out.

  page 143

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Well of the Deep Wish

  In the center of the table stood a miniature sun. In other places, on the other tables, it might have been taken for an ineffectual table lamp, since its battered plastic surface diffused the yellow light feebly. In the board room of Solar Productions, it was a sun.

  Bruce Kalder relaxed dreamily and watched the “sun” flicker on and off when the Chairman of the Board thumped on the table. Old Holbertson was powerfully worked up about something, but he talked in such long-winded circles that each subject he touched upon was abandoned before Kalder could properly get a grip on it.

  Kalder suppressed a yawn and looked across the table at June Holbertson. “She shouldn’t wear low-cut dresses to Board meetings,” he thought. He’d intentionally avoided looking at her because he didn’t want the other members to think his appointment was due to her influence—which was foolish. They already knew that, and everyone else in the room was watching her. Everyone except old Holbertson.

  She smiled faintly and winked at him.

  Old Holbertson thumped the table again, paused for a sip of water, and shouted, “Kalder, this is damned serious, and it’s your problem. What are you going to do about it?”

  Kalder turned slowly and faced the Chairman of the Board. From a condition of easy relaxation he had been slammed into one of stomach-twisting panic. His hands lay paralyzed on the arms of his chair. His dry tongue touched his dry lips and recoiled.

  Old Holbertson had talked for perhaps twenty minutes, and Kalder had listened attentively most of that time, and

  he hadn’t any idea as to what problem had the old man upset. Worse, he’d only started work that morning, and no one had yet explained to him what his job was.

  June came to his rescue. “Uncle Emmanuel, this is Bruce’s first meeting. Don’t you think he should know more about the problem before we ask him to solve it?”r />
  “He’s been on the job since this morning, hasn’t he? old Holbertson sputtered. “What’s he been doing?”

  From the other end of the table Paul Holbertson spoke. “Takes more than three hours for a man to learn his way around this place.”

  “Bah!” old Holbertson said. “If he doesn’t know where the men’s room is by this time—”

  “I move,” Paul Holbertson said, “that we ask Mr. Kalder to have a full report ready for the next meeting.”

  Seconded and passed. Kalder breathed easily once more, but he did not relax again.

  When the meeting broke up, Paul Holbertson crooked a finger at Kalder and June. He said, “My office, I think,” he escorted them in, and found chairs for them.

  “I thought I was going to be fired before I’d learned what all the buttons on my desk mean,” Kalder said. “Look—I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I listened as attentively as I could, and I still don’t know the problem.”

  “Emmanuel rambles,” Paul said. “Getting old, I’m afraid. He’ll retire one of these years, and we’ll miss him. Given some alternatives, he’s almost infallible in making the right decision. Trouble is, in this case we have no alternatives. We have nothing. The problem is that we’re having trouble with our writers. Hence your title—Director of Writer Personnel.”

  “What sort of trouble are we having?”

  Paul Holbertson took a long time getting a cigar lit. He leaned back, stared at the ceiling, and puffed deeply. “They don’t write.”

  He continued slowly, “We have competent men. We know that because of their past performances. We pay the highest rates paid anywhere. We have the best Tank in the industry, and we operate it at peak efficiency. And they don’t write. We’ve always maintained a big inventory and kept more writers than we needed, so we’ve had a big backlog to draw upon, but the situation has been gradually getting worse for years and now it’s approaching the critical point. Our inventory has sagged. We’re actually dipping into the rejection files, and even that won’t keep us going much longer. To quote Emmanuel, this is damned serious.”

  “Solar Productions leases four wires, and our contract stipulates that we must run twenty-four one-hour films per day on each wire. That adds up to ninety-six films. We don’t have any trouble shooting it. Our organization is absolutely the best. So are our facilities. We could shoot two hundred a day if we had the scripts, but we can’t get the scripts.”

  “There hasn’t been any reduction in writing personnel?” Kalder asked.

  “Certainly not. We have more writers than we’ve ever had, and we keep hiring them. We hire some that are hopelessly unqualified just in the hope that they’ll produce something for us. The quality keeps going down, and the number of scripts turned in drops daily.”

  “We need an incentive system,” Kalder said, speaking with a heroically affected nonchalance. “Let’s scrap the writers’ contracts, cut their guaranteed wage to the legal minimum, and pay a bonus for each completed script. We can work out a system of extra bonuses for quality.”

  Paul Holbertson shrugged indifferently and gestured with his cigar. “Everything that obvious was tried long ago. It didn’t help. I’ll tell you one more thing that won’t work. I got the foggy notion that the Tank was involved in some way, so I closed it down for a month. It damned near ruined us. Production dropped almost to zero. Things spurted a little when I opened it up again, but not for long, and production has been dropping ever since. Well—get to work on it, and remember this: No tampering with the Tank, and don’t expect the solution to be childishly simple. We have some highly capable people on our staff, and none of them have to been able to cope with this. The trouble is that we’re dealing with writers. I haven’t decided whether they’re superhuman or subhuman, but I know they aren’t functioning normally even when they act normally. The only thing I can do to help you is wish you luck.”

  “Thank you,” Kalder said.

  It was an opportunity, but it was also a test. The Holbertsons were a hard-boiled family, and none of its members would experience a twitch of conscience over handing him a problem that had stumped Solar Productions for years. He suspected a conspiracy. Either he would show the family that he was worthy of June, or the family would show June how incompetent he was. It would applaud his success, but no tears would be shed over his failure, and few fingers would be raised to help him. He perhaps should have been grateful that June’s father was willing to wish him luck.

  “I’d like to talk with some writers,” Kalder said.

  “So would I,” Paul Holbertson said grimly. “If you find out where they’re hiding, let me know.”

  In three days Kalder learned his way about the executive and editorial offices and gained a passing familiarity with the files. On the fourth day he decided to visit the Tank. The company ran a swing train between its office and its production center, but gainful employment was depriving Kalder of his accustomed daily exercise in tennis and swimming, and he decided to walk.

  He ran into trouble immediately. Q tunnel, which was the direct route to the Main, was blocked off. A guard waved him away as he started to enter it. The last of the Q tunnel population was moving out, and Kalder stood aside to let it pass: men, women and children who slouched along absently, each man cradling a TV set preciously in his arms. The women and children carried small bundles of belongings. A few women also carried sets—lucky families, to have two!

  “What’s up?” Kalder asked the guard.

  “Radiation seepage,” the guard said shortly.

  A short distance further on Kalder turned off into a narrow passageway, thinking he might find his way through to the Main without going all the way to R tunnel. There were numbered doorways along the passage but few doors. In each room clusters of people sat around TV sets watching intently.

  The passage divided, divided again, and gradually became narrower. Whenever two people met they had to edge past each other sideways. Abruptly he left the area of living quarters behind him, and he paused in amazement to contemplate the unfinished walls. He vaguely recalled rumors of a critical housing shortage, and the number of TV sets he had seen in some of the rooms could only mean that several families were living there; and yet this unused space could accommodate dozens of apartments. It only wanted someone to do the digging.

  Eventually he found his way through to the Main. The huge, brightly lighted tunnel swarmed with humanity. Government swing trains passed at regular intervals, moving slowly as the tractor drivers shouted people out of the way. Many factory shifts were changing, the men of the new shift reporting with glum faces for their hour’s labor. Long, slow-moving lines of women marked the locations of supply depots.

  Kalder stepped into the doorway of a medical clinic and stood for a few minutes watching housewives jostle for position in a fresh meat queue. He had passed this way many times, but always blindly and in a swing train or private car. Now it occurred to him that those lower classes politely referred to as the people were customers of Solar Productions—his customers—and as such they were important to him.

  As he continued to watch he discovered that they were human beings like himself; and in some way that he did not precisely understand, that made them much more important.

  At the production center he went to the executives dining room for an early lunch before he rode the elevator down to the Tank. Barney Fulton, the Tank’s manager, was a kindly old man who’d been with Solar in one capacity or another all of his working life. “The boss said you’d be around,” he told Kalder. “I’ll give you any help I can, but hell, I haven’t got any answers.”

  “I’ll have to ask some foolish questions, because all of this is new to me. Now—just what is the Tank?”

  “It used to belong to Production,” Barney said. “They still use it when they need it, but that’s only for the big scenes. Even then the writers kick up a fuss about it. Most of the time the writers have the Tank to themselves, and they’re supposed to use it to
give them ideas and for research on problems they’ve encountered in the scripts they’re working on. What they actually use it for no one knows, maybe because no one knows how a writer thinks. Jeff Powell, he writes nothing but romances, but when he comes in here he goes on an adventure jag. Maybe that gives him ideas for love stories. Who knows?”

  “Maybe you’d better let me look at it,” Kalder said doubtfully.

  “Sure.” Barney strode to the door of his office. “Pete this is Mr. Kalder, the new vice-president. Take him through the Tank and don’t get him killed.”

  Pete gave Kalder a broad grin and led him away.

  They signed in at one of the Tank’s entrances and stepped through a doorway into a scene of overwhelming grandeur. One glance at the spaciousness, at the vast, limited vistas, took Kalder’s breath away. Accustomed all his life to rooms and passageways, he could only stare disbelievingly.

  Ahead of them was a tangled jungle. Beyond it a hill rose steeply, and beyond that, other hills. There were glimpses of forests, of distant mountains. Overhead the ceiling arched upward and upward and away to a far distant, brightly lit dome.

  “Pretty big, eh?” Pete said proudly.

  “It’s tremendous,” Kalder said.

  “We have it on a twenty-four-hour day, meaning we got both day and night. At night we turn off the lights and turn on the stars. We got a moon, too. Come on. We’ll have to stay clear of that jungle. They’re shooting a jungle scene this afternoon.”

  They skirted the jungle, climbed a tall hill, and stood looking down on the lovely, still blueness of a lake.

  “Where to?” Pete asked.

  Kalder consulted his notebook. “I’d like to look around and see what the place is like. And then—do you know a writer named Walter Donald?”

  “Sure. Big fellow, with blond hair. I know all the older ones. Not many of the new ones have been using the Tank.”