Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One

by Jack Vance

  Murphy jerked his arm free. “Let go of me, damn it!” But they certainly couldn’t hear him through the vacuum.

  He glanced over his shoulder. The first man held his naked blade a foot or two behind Murphy’s bulging space-suit. Murphy made no further resistance. He punched the button on his camera to automatic. It would now run for several hours, recording one hundred pictures per second, a thousand to the inch .

  The sjambaks led Murphy two hundred yards to a metal door. They opened it, pushed Murphy inside, banged it shut. Murphy felt the vibration through his shoes, heard a gradually waxing hum. His gauge showed an outside pressure of 5, 10, 12, 14, 14.5. An inner door opened. Hands pulled Murphy in, unclamped his dome .

  “Just what’s going on here?” demanded Murphy angrily.

  Prince Ali-Tomás pointed to a table. Murphy saw a flashlight battery, aluminum foil, wire, a transistor kit, metal tubing, tools, a few other odds and ends.

  “There it is,” said Prince Ali-Tomás. “Get to work. Let’s see one of these paralysis weapons you boast of.”

  “Just like that, eh?”

  “Just like that.”

  “What do you want ’em for?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’d like to know.” Murphy was conscious of his camera, recording sight, sound, odor.

  “I lead an army,” said Ali-Tomás, “but they march without weapons. Give me weapons! I will carry the word to Hadra, to New Batavia, to Sundaman, to Boeng-Bohôt!”

  “How? Why?”

  “It is enough that I will it. Again, I beg of you…” He indicated the table.

  Murphy laughed. “I’ve got myself in a fine mess. Suppose I don’t make this weapon for you?”

  “You’ll remain until you do, under increasingly difficult conditions.”

  “I’ll be here a long time.”

  “If such is the case,” said Ali-Tomás, “we must make our arrangements for your care on a long-term basis.”

  Ali made a gesture. Hands seized Murphy’s shoulders. A respirator was held to his nostrils. He thought of his camera, and he could have laughed. Mystery! Excitement! Thrills! Dramatic sequence for Know Your Universe! Staff-man murdered by fanatics! The crime recorded on his own camera! See the blood, hear his death-rattle, smell the poison!

  The vapor choked him. What a break! What a sequence!

  “Sirgamesk,” said Howard Frayberg, “bigger and brighter every minute.”

  “It must’ve been just about in here,” said Catlin, “that Wilbur’s horseback rider appeared.”

  “That’s right! Steward!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “We’re about twenty thousand miles out, aren’t we?”

  “About fifteen thousand, sir.”

  “Sidereal Cavalry! What an idea! I wonder how Wilbur’s making out on his superstition angle?”

  Sam Catlin, watching out the window, said in a tight voice, “Why not ask him yourself?”

  “Eh?”

  “Ask him for yourself! There he is—outside, riding some kind of critter…”

  “It’s a ghost,” whispered Frayberg. “A man without a spacesuit…There’s no such thing!”

  “He sees us…Look…”

  Murphy was staring at them, and his surprise seemed equal to their own. He waved his hand. Catlin gingerly waved back.

  Said Frayberg, “That’s not a horse he’s riding. It’s a combination ram-jet and kiddie car with stirrups!”

  “He’s coming aboard the ship,” said Catlin. “That’s the entrance port down there…”

  Wilbur Murphy sat in the captain’s stateroom, taking careful breaths of air.

  “How are you now?” asked Frayberg.

  “Fine. A little sore in the lungs.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” the ship’s doctor growled. “I never saw anything like it.”

  “How does it feel out there, Wilbur?” Catlin asked.

  “It feels awful lonesome and empty. And the breath seeping up out of your lungs, never going in—that’s a funny feeling. And you miss the air blowing on your skin. I never realized it before. Air feels like—like silk, like whipped cream—it’s got texture…”

  “But aren’t you cold? Space is supposed to be absolute zero!”

  “Space is nothing. It’s not hot and it’s not cold. When you’re in the sunlight you get warm. It’s better in the shade. You don’t lose any heat by air convection, but radiation and sweat evaporation keep you comfortably cool.”

  “I still can’t understand it,” said Frayberg. “This Prince Ali, he’s a kind of a rebel, eh?”

  “I don’t blame him in a way. A normal man living under those domes has to let off steam somehow. Prince Ali decided to go out crusading. I think he would have made it too—at least on Cirgamesç.”

  “Certainly there are many more men inside the domes…”

  “When it comes to fighting,” said Murphy, “a sjambak can lick twenty men in spacesuits. A little nick doesn’t hurt him, but a little nick bursts open a spacesuit, and the man inside comes apart.”

  “Well,” said the Captain. “I imagine the Peace Office will send out a team to put things in order now.”

  Catlin asked, “What happened when you woke up from the chloroform?”

  “Well, nothing very much. I felt this attachment on my chest, but didn’t think much about it. Still kinda woozy. I was halfway through decompression. They keep a man there eight hours, drop pressure on him two pounds an hour, nice and slow so he don’t get the bends.”

  “Was this the same place they took you, when you met Ali?”

  “Yeah, that was their decompression chamber. They had to make a sjambak out of me; there wasn’t anywhere else they could keep me. Well, pretty soon my head cleared, and I saw this apparatus stuck to my chest.” He poked at the mechanism on the table. “I saw the oxygen tank, I saw the blood running through the plastic pipes—blue from me to that carburetor arrangement, red on the way back in—and I figured out the whole arrangement. Carbon dioxide still exhales up through your lungs, but the vein back to the left auricle is routed through the carburetor and supercharged with oxygen. A man doesn’t need to breathe. The carburetor flushes his blood with oxygen, the decompression tank adjusts him to the lack of air-pressure. There’s only one thing to look out for; that’s not to touch anything with your naked flesh. If it’s in the sunshine it’s blazing hot; if it’s in the shade it’s cold enough to cut. Otherwise you’re free as a bird.”

  “But—how did you get away?”

  “I saw those little rocket-bikes, and began figuring. I couldn’t go back to Singhalût; I’d be lynched on sight as a sjambak. I couldn’t fly to another planet—the bikes don’t carry enough fuel.

  “I knew when the ship would be coming in, so I figured I’d fly up to meet it. I told the guard I was going outside a minute, and I got on one of the rocket-bikes. There was nothing much to it.”

  “Well,” said Frayberg, “it’s a great feature, Wilbur—a great film! Maybe we can stretch it into two hours.”

  “There’s one thing bothering me,” said Catlin. “Who did the steward see up here the first time?”

  Murphy shrugged. “It might have been somebody up here skylarking . A little too much oxygen and you start cutting all kinds of capers. Or it might have been someone who decided he had enough crusading.

  “There’s a sjambak in a cage, right in the middle of Singhalût. Prince Ali walks past; they look at each other eye to eye. Ali smiles a little and walks on. Suppose this sjambak tried to escape to the ship. He’s taken aboard, turned over to the Sultan and the Sultan makes an example of him…”

  “What’ll the Sultan do to Ali?”

  Murphy shook his head. “If I were Ali I’d disappear.”

  A loudspeaker turned on. “Attention all passengers. We have just passed through quarantine. Passengers may now disembark. Important: no weapons or explosives allowed on Singhalût!”

  “This is where I came in,” said Murphy.
/>   Afterword to “Sjambak”

  My grandfather’s law office was situated on the ninth floor of the Balboa building on Market Street in San Francisco, and I visited him often. In the outer office was a typewriter, and when I was eight or nine years old I sat at this typewriter and set out to write cowboy stories. I made this attempt a few times but never got much farther than two or three pages. I don’t remember much about these stories, but I was here dipping my toe into what was to be my future career.

  When I was about sixteen or seventeen, I was impelled to write some very silly stories describing the adventures of a group of teenagers at a seaside resort. These also have been consigned to the farthest precincts of oblivion.

  I have already mentioned…that I wrote a science fiction story for my Creative English course at the university, and that the professor reviewed it in such sardonic terms that, had I been sensitive, my career would have gone glimmering. Fortunately I did not take his remarks to heart.

  A few years later, some friends of mine started a science fiction society in Berkeley, which they called The Chowder and Marching Science Fiction Society of Berkeley. I wrote them a little story called “Seven Exits from Bocz”, which they published in their magazine.

  Eventually I decided to become a professional writer: I started writing stories for sale. The first of these were gadget stories, dealing with some recondite aspect of science. I sold most of them, but I don’t look back on them with any pride. For a fact they were rather boring to write, and after the first few I abandoned this formula.

  I then decided that my métier was novels, which I began to produce. The first of these I called Clarges, though it was published as To Live Forever, a title I detest.

  The longer I wrote, the more I liked the results. I discovered that if I wrote to please and amuse myself, instead of editors and publishers, the books turned out better. Looking back, I am especially fond of my Cadwal sequence, and the latter two books of the Durdane set, Emphyrio, and more recently Night Lamp, Ports of Call and Lurulu. There are others I like as well: the so-called Demon Princes books, and of course the Cugel stories, Rhialto the Marvellous and the Lyonesse cycle.

  Among the characters I’ve conceived, I also have my favorites: Navarth, the Mad Poet (Demon Princes); Baron Bodissey (Demon Princes), who wrote the encyclopedic tautology Life; also Henry Belt from “Sail 25”. Among the ladies I like Wayness (Cadwal), and Madouc (Lyonesse).

  —Jack Vance

  The Absent-Minded Professor

  I stood in the dark in front of the observatory, watching the quick fiery meteor trails streaking down from Perseus. My plans were completed. I had been meticulous, systematic.

  The night was remarkable: clear and limpid…a perfect night for what we had arranged, the cosmos and I. And here came Dr. Patcher—old “Dog” Patcher, as the students called him—the lights of his staid sedan sniffing out the road up the hill. I looked at my watch: ten-fifteen. The old rascal was late, probably had spent an extra three minutes shining his high-top shoes, or punctiliously brushing the coarse white plume of his hair.

  The car nosed up over the hill, the head-lights sent scurrying yellow shapes and shadows past my feet. I heard the motor thankfully gasp and die, and, after a sedate moment, the slam of the door, then the crush-crush of Dr. Patcher’s feet across the gravel. He seemed surprised to see me standing in the doorway, and looked at me sharply as much as to say, “Nothing better to do, Sisley?”

  “Good evening, Dr. Patcher,” I said smoothly. “It’s a lovely night. The Perseids are showing very well…Ah! There’s one now.” I pointed at one of the instant white meteor streaks.

  Dr. Patcher shook his head with that mulish nicety which has infuriated me since I first laid eyes on him. “Sorry, Sisley, I can’t waste a moment of this wonderful seeing.” He pushed past me, remarking over his shoulder, “I hope that everything is in order.”

  I remained silent. I could hardly say “no”; if I said “yes”, he would pry and poke until he found something—anything—at which he could raise his eyebrows: a smudge of oil, the roof opening not precisely symmetrical to the telescope, a cigarette butt on the floor. Anything. Then I would hear a snort of disparagement; a quick gleam of a glance would flick in my direction; the deficiency would be ostentatiously remedied. And at last he would get busy with his work—if work it could be called. Myself, I considered it trivial, a piddling waste of time, a repetition of what better men at better instruments had already accomplished. Dr. Patcher was seeking novae. He would not be satisfied until a nova bore his name—“Patcher’s Nova”. And night after night, when the seeing was best, Dr. Patcher had crowded me away from the telescope, I who had research that was significant and important. Tonight I would show Dr. Patcher a nova indeed.

  He was inside now, rustling and probing; tonight he would find nothing a millimeter out of place. I was wrong. “Oh, Sisley,” came his voice, “are you busy?”

  I hurried inside. Patcher was standing by the senior faculty closet with his old tweed coat already carefully arranged on a hanger. Instantly I knew his complaint. Patcher affected a white laboratory coat, which he called his “duster”. About twice a month the janitor, in cleaning out the senior faculty closet, would remove the duster and replace it in the junior closet—whether as an act of crafty malice or sheer wool-gathering I had never made up my mind. In any event the ritual ran its course as usual. “Have you seen my duster, Sisley? It’s not in the clothes closet where it should be.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to retort, “Dr. Patcher, I am a professor of astronomy, not your valet.” To which he would make the carping correction: “Assistant professor, my dear Sisley,” thus enraging me. But tonight of all nights a state of normality must be assured, since what was to happen would be so curious and unique that only a framework of absolute humdrum routine would make the circumstances convincing.

  So I swallowed my temper and, opening the junior closet, handed Patcher his duster. “Well, well,” said Patcher as usual, “what on earth is it doing in there?”

  “I suppose the janitor has been careless.”

  “We’ll have to bring him up short,” said Patcher. “One place where carelessness can never be tolerated is an observatory.”

  “I agree whole-heartedly,” I said, as indeed I did. I am a systematic man, with every aspect of my life conducted along lines of the most rigorous efficiency.

  Buttoning his duster, Dr. Patcher looked me up and down. “You seem restless tonight, Sisley.”

  “I? Certainly not. Perhaps a little tired, a little fatigued. I was prospecting up Mount Tinsley today and found several excellent specimens of sphalerite.” Perhaps I should mention that my hobby is mineralogy, that I am an assiduous “rock-hound”, and devote a good deal of time to my collection of rocks, minerals and crystals.

  Dr. Patcher shook his head a little. “I personally could not afford to dilute my energy to such an extent. I feel that every ounce of attention belongs to my work.”

  This was a provocative misstatement. Dr. Patcher was an ardent horticulturalist and had gone so far as to plant a border of roses around the observatory.

  “Well, well,” I said, perhaps a trifle heavily, “I suppose each of us must go his own way.” I glanced at my watch. Twenty-five minutes. “I’ll leave the place in your hands, Doctor. If the visibility is good I’ll be here about three—”

  “I’m afraid I’ll be using the instrument,” said Patcher. “This is a perfect night in spite of the breeze—”

  I thought: it is a perfect night because of the breeze.

  “—I can’t afford to waste a minute.”

  I nodded. “Very well; you can telephone me if you change your mind.”

  He looked at me queerly; I seldom showed such good grace. “Good-night, Sisley.”

  “Good-night, Dr. Patcher. Perhaps I’ll watch the Perseids for a bit.”

  He made no reply. I went outside, strolled around the observatory, re-entered. I cried, “Dr. Patch
er, Dr. Patcher!”

  “Yes, yes, what is it?”

  “Most extraordinary! Of course I’m no gardener, but I’ve never seen anything like it before, a luminescent rose!”

  “What’s that?”

  “One of the rose bushes seems to be bearing luminescent blossoms.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” muttered Patcher. “It’s a trick of vision.”

  “A remarkable illusion, if so.”

  “Never heard of such a thing,” said Patcher. “I can’t see how it’s possible. Where is this ‘luminescent rose-bush’?”

  “It’s right around here,” I said. “I could hardly believe my eyes.” I led him a few feet around the observatory, to where the bed of roses rustled and swayed in the breeze. “Just in there.”

  Dr. Patcher spoke the last words of his existence on earth. “I don’t see any—”

  I hurried to my car, which I had parked headed down-slope. I started the motor, roared down the hill as fast as the road and my excellent reflexes allowed. Three days ago I had timed myself: six minutes from the observatory to the outskirts of town. Tonight I made it in five.

  Slowing to my usual pace, I rounded the last turn and pulled into Sam’s Service Station, stopping the car at a spot which I had calculated to a nicety several weeks earlier. And now I had a stroke of rather good luck. Pulled up in the inside lane was a white police car, with a trooper leaning against the fender.

  “Hello, Mr. Sisley,” said Sam. “How’s all the stars in their courses tonight?”

  At any other time I might have treated the pleasantry to the cool rejoinder it deserved. Sam, a burly young man with a perpetual smut on his nose, was a typical layman, in a total fog concerning the exacting and important work that we do at the observatory. Tonight, however, I welcomed his remark. “The stars are about as usual, Sam, but if you keep your eyes open, you’ll see any number of shooting stars tonight.”