(1/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

"And no one had seen Richardson there. There was nothing but McIlvaine's word that he had heard what he said he heard. He needn't have volunteered that, but he did. After the police had finished with him, they wrote him off as a harmless nut. But the question of what happened to Richardson wasn't solved from that day to this."

  "People have been known to walk out of their lives," I said. "And never come back."

  "Oh, sometimes they do. Richardson didn't. Besides, if he walked out of his life here, he did so without more than the clothing he had on. So much was missing from his effects, nothing more."

  "And McIlvaine?"

  Harrigan smiled thinly. "He carried on. You couldn't expect him to do anything less. After all, he had worked most of his life trying to communicate with the worlds outside, and he had no intention of resigning his contact, no matter how much Richardson's disappearance upset him. For a while he believed that Guru had actually disintegrated Richardson; he offered that explanation, but by that time the dust had vanished, and he was laughed out of face. So he went back to the machine and Guru and the little excursions to Bixby's...."

  * * * * *

  "What's the latest word from that star of yours?" asked Leopold, when McIlvaine came in.

  "They want to rejuvenate me," said McIlvaine, with a certain shy pleasure.

  "What's that?" asked Alexander sourly.

  "They say they can make me young again. Like them up there. They never die. They just live so long, and then they rejuvenate, they begin all over. It's some kind of a process they have."

  "And I suppose they're planning to come down and fetch you up there and give you the works, is that it?" asked Alexander.

  "Well, no," answered McIlvaine. "Guru says there's no need for that--it can be done through the machine; they can work it like the disintegrators; it puts you back to thirty or twenty or wherever you like."

  "Well, I'd like to be twenty-five myself again," admitted Leopold.

  "I'll tell you what, Mac," said Alexander. "You go ahead and try it; then come back and let us know how it works. If it does, we'll all sit in."

  "Better make your will first, though, just in case."

  "Oh, I did. This afternoon."

  Leopold choked back a snicker. "Don't take this thing too seriously, Mac. After all, we're short one of us now. We'd hate to lose you, too."

  McIlvaine was touched. "Oh, I wouldn't change," he hastened to assure his friends. "I'd just be younger, that's all. They'll just work on me through the machine, and over-night I'll be rejuvenated."

  "That's certainly a little trick that's got it all over monkey glands," conceded Alexander, grinning.

  "Those little bugs on that star of yours have made scientific progress, I'd say," said Leopold.

  "They're not bugs," said McIlvaine with faint indignation. "They're people, maybe not just like you and me, but they're people just the same."

  He went home that night filled with anticipation. He had done just what he had promised himself he would do, arranging everything for his rejuvenation. Guru had been astonished to learn that people on Earth simply died when there was no necessity of doing so; he had made the offer to rejuvenate McIlvaine himself.

  McIlvaine sat down to his machine and turned the complex knobs until he was en rapport with his dark star. He waited for a long time, it seemed, before he knew his contact had been closed. Guru came through.

  "Are you ready, McIlvaine?" he asked soundlessly.

  "Yes. All ready," said McIlvaine, trembling with eagerness.

  "Don't be alarmed now. It will take several hours," said Guru.

  "I'm not alarmed," answered McIlvaine.

  And indeed he was not; he was filled with an exhilaration akin to mysticism, and he sat waiting for what he was certain must be the experience above all others in his prosaic existence.

  * * * * *

  "McIlvaine's disappearance coming so close on Richardson's gave us a beautiful story," said Harrigan. "The only trouble was, it wasn't new when the Globe got around to it. We had lost our informant in Richardson; it never occurred to Alexander or Leopold to telephone us or anyone about McIlvaine's unaccountable absence from Bixby's. Finally, Leopold went over to McIlvaine's house to find out whether the old fellow was sick.

  "A young fellow opened up.

  "'Where's McIlvaine?' Leopold asked.

  "'I'm McIlvaine,' the young fellow answered.

  "'Thaddeus McIlvaine,' Leopold explained.

  "'That's my name,' was the only answer he got.

  "'I mean the Thaddeus McIlvaine who used to play cards with us over at Bixby's,' said Leopold.

  "He shook his head. 'Sorry, you must be looking for someone else.'

  "'What're you doing here?' Leopold asked then.

  "'Why, I inherited what my uncle left,' said the young fellow.

  "And, sure enough, when Leopold talked to me and persuaded me to go around with him to McIlvaine's lawyer, we found that the old fellow had made a will and left everything to his nephew, a namesake. The stipulations were clear enough; among them was the express wish that if anything happened to him, the elder Thaddeus McIlvaine, of no matter what nature, but particularly something allowing a reasonable doubt of his death, the nephew was still to be permitted to take immediate possession of the property and effects."

  "Of course, you called on the nephew," I said.

  Harrigan nodded. "Sure. That was the indicated course, in any event. It was routine for both the press and the police. There was nothing suspicious about his story; it was straightforward enough, except for one or two little details. He never did give us any precise address; he just mentioned Detroit once. I called up a friend on one of the papers there and put him up to looking up Thaddeus McIlvaine; the only young man of that name he could find appeared to be the same man as the present inhabitant's uncle, though the description fit pretty well."

  "There was a resemblance, then?"

  "Oh, sure. One could have imagined that old Thaddeus McIlvaine had looked somewhat like his nephew when he himself was a young man. But don't let the old man's rigmarole about rejuvenation make too deep an impression on you. The first thing the young fellow did was to get rid of that machine of his uncle's. Can you imagine his uncle having done something like that?"

  * * * * *

  I shook my head, but I could not help thinking what an ironic thing it would have been if there had been something to McIlvaine's story, and in the process to which he had been subjected from out of space he had not been rejuvenated so much as just sent back in time, in which case he would have no memory of the machine nor of the use to which it had been put. It would have been as ironic for the inhabitants of McIlvaine's star, too; they would doubtless have looked forward to keeping this contact with Earth open and failed to realize that McIlvaine's construction differed appreciably from theirs.

  "He virtually junked it. Said he had no idea what it could be used for, and didn't know how to operate it."

  "And the telescope?"

  "Oh, he kept that. He said he had some interest in astronomy and meant to develop that if time permitted."

  "So much ran in the family, then."

  "Yes. More than that. Old McIlvaine had a trick of seeming shy and self-conscious. So did this nephew of his. Wherever he came from, his origins must have been backward. I suspect that he was ashamed of them, and if I had to guess, I'd put him in the Kentucky hill-country or the Ozarks. Modern concepts seemed to be pretty well too much for him, and his thinking would have been considerably more natural at the turn of the century.

  "I had to see him several times. The police chivvied him a little, but not much; he was so obviously innocent of everything that there was nothing for them in him. And the search for the old man didn't last long; no one had seen him after that last night at Bixby's, and, since everyone had already long since concluded that he was mentally a little off center, it was easy to conclude that he had wandered away somewhere, probably an amnesiac. That he might have anticipated that is indicated
in the hasty preparation of his will, which came out of the blue, said Barnevall, who drew it up for him.

  "I felt sorry for him."

  "For whom?"

  "The nephew. He seemed so lost, you know--like a man who wanted to remember something, but couldn't. I noticed that several times when I tried to talk to him; I had the feeling each time that there was something he wanted desperately to say, it hovered always on the rim of his awareness, but somehow there was no bridge to it, no clue to put it into words. He tried so hard for something he couldn't put his finger on."

  "What became of him?"

  "Oh, he's still around. I think he found a job somewhere. As a matter of fact, I saw him just the other evening. He had apparently just come from work and he was standing in front of Bixby's with his face pressed to the window looking in. I came up nearby and watched him. Leopold and Alexander were sitting inside--a couple of lonely old men looking out. And a lonely young man looking in. There was something in McIlvaine's face--that same thing I had noticed so often before, a kind of expression that seemed to say there was something he ought to know, something he ought to remember, to do, to say, but there was no way in which he could reach back to it."

  "Or forward," I said with a wry smile.

  "As you like," said Harrigan. "Pour me another, will you?"

  I did and he took it.

  "That poor devil!" he muttered. "He'd be happier if he could only go back where he came from."

  "Wouldn't we all?" I asked. "But nobody ever goes home again. Perhaps McIlvaine never had a home like that."

  "You'd have thought so if you could have seen his face looking in at Leopold and Alexander. Oh, it may have been a trick of the streetlight there, it may have been my imagination. But it sticks to my memory, and I keep thinking how alike the two were--old McIlvaine trying so desperately to find someone who could believe him, and his nephew now trying just as hard to find someone to accept him or a place he could accept on the only terms he knows."

  THE END

  * * *

  Contents

  MISSING LINK

  by Frank Herbert

  The Romantics used to say that the eyes were the windows of the Soul. A good Alien Xenologist might not put it quite so poetically ... but he can, if he's sharp, read a lot in the look of an eye!

  "We ought to scrape this planet clean of every living thing on it," muttered Umbo Stetson, section chief of Investigation & Adjustment.

  Stetson paced the landing control bridge of his scout cruiser. His footsteps grated on a floor that was the rear wall of the bridge during flight. But now the ship rested on its tail fins--all four hundred glistening red and black meters of it. The open ports of the bridge looked out on the jungle roof of Gienah III some one hundred fifty meters below. A butter yellow sun hung above the horizon, perhaps an hour from setting.

  "Clean as an egg!" he barked. He paused in his round of the bridge, glared out the starboard port, spat into the fire-blackened circle that the cruiser's jets had burned from the jungle.

  The I-A section chief was dark-haired, gangling, with large head and big features. He stood in his customary slouch, a stance not improved by sacklike patched blue fatigues. Although on this present operation he rated the flag of a division admiral, his fatigues carried no insignia. There was a general unkempt, straggling look about him.

  Lewis Orne, junior I-A field man with a maiden diploma, stood at the opposite port, studying the jungle horizon. Now and then he glanced at the bridge control console, the chronometer above it, the big translite map of their position tilted from the opposite bulkhead. A heavy planet native, he felt vaguely uneasy on this Gienah III with its gravity of only seven-eighths Terran Standard. The surgical scars on his neck where the micro-communications equipment had been inserted itched maddeningly. He scratched.

  "Hah!" said Stetson. "Politicians!"

  A thin black insect with shell-like wings flew in Orne's port, settled in his close-cropped red hair. Orne pulled the insect gently from his hair, released it. Again it tried to land in his hair. He ducked. It flew across the bridge, out the port beside Stetson.

  There was a thick-muscled, no-fat look to Orne, but something about his blocky, off-center features suggested a clown.

  "I'm getting tired of waiting," he said.

  "You're tired! Hah!"

  A breeze rippled the tops of the green ocean below them. Here and there, red and purple flowers jutted from the verdure, bending and nodding like an attentive audience.

  "Just look at that blasted jungle!" barked Stetson. "Them and their stupid orders!"

  A call bell tinkled on the bridge control console. The red light above the speaker grid began blinking. Stetson shot an angry glance at it. "Yeah, Hal?"

  "O.K., Stet. Orders just came through. We use Plan C. ComGO says to brief the field man, and jet out of here."

  "Did you ask them about using another field man?"

  Orne looked up attentively.

  The speaker said: "Yes. They said we have to use Orne because of the records on the Delphinus."

  "Well then, will they give us more time to brief him?"

  "Negative. It's crash priority. ComGO expects to blast the planet anyway."

  Stetson glared at the grid. "Those fat-headed, lard-bottomed, pig-brained ... POLITICIANS!" He took two deep breaths, subsided. "O.K. Tell them we'll comply."

  "One more thing, Stet."

  "What now?"

  "I've got a confirmed contact."

  Instantly, Stetson was poised on the balls of his feet, alert. "Where?"

  "About ten kilometers out. Section AAB-6."

  "How many?"

  "A mob. You want I should count them?"

  "No. What're they doing?"

  "Making a beeline for us. You better get a move on."

  "O.K. Keep us posted."

  "Right."

  * * * * *

  Stetson looked across at his junior field man. "Orne, if you decide you want out of this assignment, you just say the word. I'll back you to the hilt."

  "Why should I want out of my first field assignment?"

  "Listen, and find out." Stetson crossed to a tilt-locker behind the big translite map, hauled out a white coverall uniform with gold insignia, tossed it to Orne. "Get into these while I brief you on the map."

  "But this is an R&R uni--" began Orne.

  "Get that uniform on your ugly frame!"

  "Yes, sir, Admiral Stetson, sir. Right away, sir. But I thought I was through with old Rediscovery & Reeducation when you drafted me off of Hamal into the I-A ... sir." He began changing from the I-A blue to the R&R white. Almost as an afterthought, he said: "... Sir."

  A wolfish grin cracked Stetson's big features. "I'm soooooo happy you have the proper attitude of subservience toward authority."

  Orne zipped up the coverall uniform. "Oh, yes, sir ... sir."

  "O.K., Orne, pay attention." Stetson gestured at the map with its green superimposed grid squares. "Here we are. Here's that city we flew over on our way down. You'll head for it as soon as we drop you. The place is big enough that if you hold a course roughly northeast you can't miss it. We're--"

  Again the call bell rang.

  "What is it this time, Hal?" barked Stetson.

  "They've changed to Plan H, Stet. New orders cut."

  "Five days?"

  "That's all they can give us. ComGO says he can't keep the information out of High Commissioner Bullone's hands any longer than that."

  "It's five days for sure then."

  "Is this the usual R&R foul-up?" asked Orne.

  Stetson nodded. "Thanks to Bullone and company! We're just one jump ahead of catastrophe, but they still pump the bushwah into the Rah & Rah boys back at dear old Uni-Galacta!"

  "You're making light of my revered alma mater," said Orne. He struck a pose. "We must reunite the lost planets with our centers of culture and industry, and take up the glor-ious onward march of mankind that was so bru-tally--"

  "Can it!"
snapped Stetson. "We both know we're going to rediscover one planet too many some day. Rim War all over again. But this is a different breed of fish. It's not, repeat, not a re-discovery."

  Orne sobered. "Alien?"

  "Yes. A-L-I-E-N! A never-before-contacted culture. That language you were force fed on the way over, that's an alien language. It's not complete ... all we have off the minis. And we excluded data on the natives because we've been hoping to dump this project and nobody the wiser."

  "Holy mazoo!"

  "Twenty-six days ago an I-A search ship came through here, had a routine mini-sneaker look at the place. When he combed in his net of sneakers to check the tapes and films, lo and behold, he had a little stranger."

  "One of theirs?"

  "No. It was a mini off the Delphinus Rediscovery. The Delphinus has been unreported for eighteen standard months!"

  "Did it crack up here?"

  "We don't know. If it did, we haven't been able to spot it. She was supposed to be way off in the Balandine System by now. But we've something else on our minds. It's the one item that makes me want to blot out this place, and run home with my tail between my legs. We've a--"

  Again the call bell chimed.

  "NOW WHAT?" roared Stetson into the speaker.

  "I've got a mini over that mob, Stet. They're talking about us. It's a definite raiding party."

  "What armament?"

  "Too gloomy in that jungle to be sure. The infra beam's out on this mini. Looks like hard pellet rifles of some kind. Might even be off the Delphinus."

  "Can't you get closer?"

  "Wouldn't do any good. No light down there, and they're moving up fast."

  "Keep an eye on them, but don't ignore the other sectors," said Stetson.

  "You think I was born yesterday?" barked the voice from the grid. The contact broke off with an angry sound.

  * * * * *

  "One thing I like about the I-A," said Stetson. "It collects such even-tempered types." He looked at the white uniform on Orne, wiped a hand across his mouth as though he'd tasted something dirty.

  "Why am I wearing this thing?" asked Orne.

  "Disguise."