PRODUCING THE DRUG IS GEORGE PARSONS, RESPECTED
PUBLISHER OF FROSTBITE'S ONLY NEWSPAPER.
INTERSTELLAR FLASH
FIRST UNITED PLANETS PATROL SHIP LANDS IN
FROSTBITE CAPITAL CITY OF PLANET.
INTERSTELLAR FLASH
PATROL COMMANDER PHONES EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW TO
INTERSTELLAR NEWS SERVICE FROSTBITE BUREAU REPORTING
ROUND-UP OF PLANETARY GOVERNMENT LEADERS AT
TESTIMONIAL DINNER
(WITH FROSTBITE)
FROSTBITE—ISN—ONE INTERSTELLAR NEWS REPORTER HAS
ALREADY GIVEN HIS LIFE IN THE CAMPAIGN TO EXPOSE THE MAKER
OF J-K-B. ED KENNEDY, ISN BUREAU CHIEF, WAS ASSASSINATED BY
AGENTS OF DRUGMAKER GEORGE PARSONS THREE MONTHS AGO.
AGENTS OF PARSONS STRIPPED KENNEDY AND EXPOSED HIM
OVERSIGHT TO THE BITTER COLD OF THIS PLANET, CAUSING HIS
DEATH BY PNEUMONIA. A SECOND INTERSTELLAR NEWS SERVICE
REPORTER, JOE STCNCER, NARROWLY ESCAPED DEATH AT THE
HANDS OF A DRUG-RING MEMBER WHO SOUGHT TO PREVENT HIM
FROM SENDING NEWS OVER THE CIRCUITS OF THE INTERSTELLAR
NEWS SERVICE.
INTERSTELLAR FLASH PATROL SEIZES PARSONS
INTERSTELLAR BULLETIN
FROSTBITE— IN A TELEPHONE MESSAGE TO INTERSTELLAR NEWS
SERVICE A PATROL SPOKESMAN $AJD GEORGE PARSONS HAD BEEN
TAKEN INTO CtSTODY AND UNMISTAKABLY IDENTIFIED. PARSONS HAD BEEN LIVING A LIE ON FROSTBITE, USING THE NAME
CHENERY AND THE GUISE OF A COLUMNIST FOR PARSONS'
NEWSPAPER. SAID THE PATROL SPOKESMAN;—"IT IS A TYPICAL
MANEUVER. WE NEVER GOT SO FAR ALONG THE CHAIN OF J-K-B
PEDDLERS THAT WE NEVER FOUND ONE MORE. APPARENTLY THE
SOURCE OF THE DRUG HIMSELF THOUGHT HE COULD PUT HIMSELF
OUT OF THE REACH OF INTERPLANETARY JUSTICE BY ASSUMING A FICTITIOUS PERSONALITY. HOWEVER, WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY
IDENTIFIED HIM AND EXPECT A CONFESSION WITHIN THE HOUR.
PARSONS APPEARS TO BE A J-K-B ADDICT HIMSELF.
INTERSTELLAR FLASH PARSONS CONFESSES
(FIRST LEAD FROSTBITE)
FROSTBITE—ISN—THE UNITED PLANETS PATROL AND THE
INTERSTELLAR NEWS SERVICE JOINED HANDS TODAY IN TRIUMPH
AFTER WIPING OUT THE MOST VICIOUS NEST OF DRUGMAKERS IN
THE GALAXY. J-K-B, THE INFAMOUS NARCOTIC WHICH HAS
MENACED—
I ground out nearly thirty thousand words of copy that night Bleary-eyed at the end of the run, I could barely read a note that came across: NOTE FRBBUO: WELL DONE. RETURN MARS JMMY: SNDNG
REPLCEMNT. MARSBUO MCG.
The Patrol flagship took me back in a quick, smooth trip with lots of service and no yaks.
After a smooth landing I took an eastbound chair from the field and whistled as the floater lifted me to the ISN floor. The newsroom was quiet for a change and the boys and girls stood up for me.
McGillicuddy stepped out from the copy table slot to say: "Welcome back. Frankly, I didn't think you had it hi you, but you proved me wrong. You're a credit to the profession and the ISN." Portwanger was there, too. "A pragmatist, your McGillicuddy," he muttered. "But you did a good job."
I didn't pay very much attention; my eyes were roving over no man's land. Finally I asked McGillicuddy: "Where's Miss Masters? Day off?"
"How do you like that?" laughed McGillicuddy. "I forgot to tell you.
She's your replacement on Frostbite. Fired her off yesterday. I thought the woman's angle—where do you think you're going?"
"Honest Blogri's Olde Earthe Saloon," I told him with dignity. "If you want me, I'll be under the third table from the left as you come in. With sawdust in my hair."
Everybody Knows Joe
[Fantastic Universe, Oct/Nov 1953]
Job had quite a day for himself Thursday, and as usual I had to tag along. If I had a right arm to give, I'd give it for a day off now and then.
Like on Thursday. On Thursday he really outdid himself.
He woke up in the hotel room and had a shower. He wasnt going to shave until I told him be looked like a bum. So he shaved and then he stood for a whole minute admiring his beauty in the mirror, forgetting whose idea it was in the first place.
So down to the coffee shop for breakfast A hard-working man needs a good breakfast So getting ready for a backbreak-ing day of copying references at the library, he had tomato juice, two fried eggs, three sausages, a sugared doughnut, and coffee—with cream and sugar.
He couldn't work that off his pot in a week of ditch-digging under a July sun, but a hard-working man needs a good breakfast. I was too disgusted to argue with him. He's hopeless when he smells that short-order smell of smoking grease, frying bacon and coffee.
He wanted to take a taxi to the library—eight blocks!
"Walk, you jerk!" I told him. He started to mumble about pulling down six hundred bucks for this week's work and then he must have thought I was going to mention the high-calory breakfast. To him that's hitting below the belt. He thinks he's an unfortunate man with an affliction—
about twenty pounds of it. He walked and arrived at the library glowing with virtue.
Making out his slip at the newspaper room he blandly put down next to firm—The Griffin Press, Inc.—when he knew as well as I did that he was a free lance and hadn't even got a definite assignment from Griffin.
There's a line on the slip where you put down reason for consulting files (please be specific). It's a shame to cramp Joe's style to just one line after you pitch him an essay-type question like that. He squeezed in, Preparation of article on year in biochemistry for Griffin Pr. Encyc. 1952
Yrbk., and handed it with a flourish to the librarian.
The librarian, a nice old man, was polite to him, which is usually a mistake with Joe. After he finished telling the librarian how his microfilm files ought to be organized and how they ought to switch from microfilm to microcard and how in spite of everything the New York Public Library wasn't such a bad place to research, he got down to work.
He's pretty harmless when he's working—it's one of the things that keeps me from cutting his throat. With a noon break for apple pie and coffee he transcribed about a hundred entries onto his cards, mopping up the year in biochemistry nicely. He swaggered down the library steps, feeling like Herman Melville after finishing Moby Dick.
"Don't be so smug," I told him. "You still have to write the piece. And they still have to buy it"
"A detail," he said grandly. "Just journalism. I can do it with my eyes shut."
Just journalism. Somehow his three months of running copy for the A.P.
before the war has made him an Ed Leahy.
"When are you going to do it with your eyes …?" I began but it wasn't any use. He began telling me about how Gautama Buddha didn't break with the world until he was 29 and Mohammed didn't announce that he was a prophet until he was 30, so why couldn't he one of these days suddenly bust loose with a new revelation or something and set the world on its ear? What it boiled down to was he didn't think he'd write the article tonight.
He postponed bis break with the world long enough to have a ham and cheese on rye and more coffee at an automat and then phoned Maggie.
She was available as usual. She said as usual, "Well then, why don't you just drop by and we'll spend a quiet evening with some records?"
As usual he thought that would be fine since he was so beat after a hard day. As usual I told him, "You're a louse, Joe. You know all she wants is a husband and you know it isn't going to be you, so why don't you let go of the girl so she can find somebody who means business?"
The usual answers rolled out automatically and we got that out of the way.
Maybe Maggie isn't very bright but she seemed glad to see him. She's shooting for her Doctorate in sociology at N.Y.U., she does part-time case work for the city, she has one of those three-room Greenwich Village a
partments with dyed burlap drapes and studio couches and home-made mobiles. She thinks writing is something holy and Joe's careful not to tell her different.
They drank some rhine wine and seltzer while Joe talked about the day's work as though he'd won the Nobel prize for biochemistry. He got downright brutal about Maggie being mixed up in such an approximate unquantitative excuse for a science as sociology and she apologized humbly and eventually he forgave her. Big-hearted Joe.
But he wasn't so fried that he had to start talking about a man wanting to settle down—"not this year but maybe next Thirty's a dividing point that makes you stop and wonder what you really want and what youVe really got out of life, Maggie darlin'." It was as good as telling her that she should be a good girl and continue to keep open house for him and maybe some day…maybe.
As I said, maybe Maggie isn't very bright But as I also said, Thursday was the day Joe picked to outdo himself.
"Joe," she said with this look on her face, "I got a new LP of the Brahms Serenade Number One. It's on top of the stack. Would you tell me what you think of it?"
So he put it on and they sat sipping rhine wine and seltzer and he turned it over and they sat sipping rhine wine and seltzer until both sides were played. And she kept watching him. Not adoringly.
"Well," she asked with this new look, "what did you think of it?”
He told her, of course. There was some comment on Brahms'
architectonics and his resurrection of the contrapuntal style. Because he'd sneaked a look at the record's envelope he was able to spend a couple of minutes on Brahms' debt to Haydn and the young Beethoven in the fifth movement (allegro, D Major) and the gay rondo of the—
"Joe," she said, not looking at him. "Joe," she said, "I got that record at one hell of a discount down the street. It's a wrong pressing. Somehow the first side is the first half of the Serenade but the second half is Schumann's Symphonic Studies Opus Thirteen. Somebody noticed it when they played it in a booth. But I guess you didn't notice it."
"Get out of this one, braino," I told him.
He got up and said in a strangled voice, "And I thought you were my friend. I suppose I’ll never learn." He walked out I suppose he never will.
God help me, I ought to know.
The Remorseful
[Star Science Fiction Stories #2, Ballantine, 1953]
It does not matter when it happened. This is because he was alone and time had ceased to have any meaning for him. At first he had searched the rubble for other survivors, which kept him busy for a couple of years. Then he wandered across the continent in great, vague quarterings, but the plane one day would not take off and he knew he would never find anybody anyway. He was by then in his forties, and a kind of sexual delirium overcame him. He searched out and pored over pictures of women, preferring leggy, high-breasted types. They haunted his dreams; he masturbated incessantly with closed eyes, tears leaking from them and running down his filthy bearded face. One day that phase ended for no reason and he took up his wanderings again, on foot. North in the summer, south in the winter on weed-grown U.S. 1, with the haversack of pork and beans on his shoulders, usually talking as he trudged, sometimes singing.
It does not matter when it happened. This is because the Visitors were eternal; endless time stretched before them and behind, which mentions only two of the infinities of infinities that their "lives"
in-cluded. Precisely when they arrived at a particular planetary system was to them the most trivial of irrelevancies. Eternity was theirs; eventually they would have arrived at all of them.
They had won eternity in the only practical way: by outnumbering it.
Each of the Visitors was a billion lives as you are a billion lives— the billion lives, that is, of your cells. But your cells have made the mistake of specializing. Some of them can only contract and relax. Some can only strain urea from your blood. Some can only load, carry, and unload oxygen. Some can only transmit minute electrical pulses and others can only manufacture chemicals in a desperate at-tempt to keep the impossible Rube Goldberg mechanism that you are from breaking down. They never succeed and you always do. Per-haps before you break down some of your specialized cells unite with somebody else's specialized cells and grow into another impossible, doomed contraption.
The Visitors were more sensibly arranged. Their billion lives were not cells but small, unspecialized, insect-like creatures linked by an electromagnetic field subtler than the coarse grapplings that hold you together. Each of the billion creatures that made up a Visitor could live and carry tiny weights, could manipulate tiny power tools, could carry in its small round black head, enough brain cells to feed, mate, breed, and work—and a few million more brain cells that were pooled into the field which made up the Visitor's consciousness.
When one of the insects died there were no rites; it was matter-of-factly pulled to pieces and eaten by its neighboring insects while it was still fresh. It mattered no more to the Visitor than the growing of your hair does to you, and the growing of your hair is accomplished only by the deaths of countless cells.
"Maybe on Mars!" he shouted as he trudged. The haversack jolted a shoulder blade and he arranged a strap without breaking his stride.
Birds screamed and scattered in the dark pine forests as he roared at them: "Well, why not? There must of been ten thousand up there easy.
Progress, God damn it! That's progress, man! Never thought it'd come in my time. But you'd think they would of sent a ship back by now so a man wouldn't feel so all alone. You know better than that, man. You know God damned good and well it happened up there too. We had Northern Semisphere, they had Southern Semisphere, so you know God damned good and well what happened up there. Semisphere?
Hemisphere. Hemi-semi-demisphere."
That was a good one, the best one he'd come across in years. He roared it out as he went stumping along.
When he got tired of it he roared: "You should of been in the Old Old Army, man. We didn't go in for this Liberty Unlimited crock in the Old-Old Army. If you wanted to march in step with somebody else you marched in step with somebody else, man. None of this crock about you march out of step or twenty lashes from the sergeant for limiting your liberty."
That was a good one too, but it made him a little uneasy. He tried to remember whether he had been in the army or had just heard about it.
He realized in time that a storm was blowing up from his depths; unless he headed it off he would soon be sprawled on the bro-ken concrete of U.S. 1, sobbing and beating his head with his fists. He went back hastily to Sem-isphere, flem-isphere, Hem-i-sem-i-de/n-isphere, roaring it at the scared birds as he trudged.
There were four Visitors aboard the ship when it entered the plan-etary system. One of them was left on a cold outer planet rich in metal outcrops to establish itself in a billion tiny shelters, build a bil-lion tiny forges, and eventually—in a thousand years or a million; it made no difference—construct a space ship, fission into two or more Visitors for company, and go Visiting. The ship had been getting crowded; as more and more information was acquired in its voyaging it was necessary for the swarms to increase in size, breeding more insects to store the new facts.
The three remaining Visitors turned the prow of their ship toward an intermediate planet and made a brief, baffling stop there. It was uninhabited except for about ten thousand entities—far fewer than one would expect, and certainly not enough for an efficient first-con-tact study. The Visitors made for the next planet sunward after only the sketchiest observation. And yet that sketchy observation of the entities left them figuratively shaking their heads. Since the Visitors had no genitals they were in a sense without emotions—but you would have said a vague air of annoyance hung over the ship never-theless.
They ruminated the odd facts that the entities had levitated, ap-peared at the distance of observation to be insubstantial, appeared at the distance of observation to be unaware of the Visitors. When you are a hundred-yard rippling black carpet moving
across a strange land, when the dwellers in this land soar aimlessly about you and above you, you expect to surprise, perhaps to frighten at first, and at least to provoke curiosity. You do not expect to be ignored.
They reserved judgment pending analysis of the sunward planet's entities—possibly colonizing entities, which would explain the sparseness of the outer planet's population, though not its indifference.
They landed.
He woke and drank water from a roadside ditch. There had been a time when water was the problem. You put three drops of iodine in a canteen. Or you boiled it if you weren't too weak from dysentery. Or you scooped it from the tank of a flush toilet in the isolated farm-house with the farmer and his wife and their kids downstairs gro-tesquely staring with their empty eye sockets at the television screen for the long-ago-spoken latest word. Disease or dust or shattering supersonics broadcast from the bullhorn of a low-skimming drone— what did it matter? Safe water was what mattered.
"But hell," he roared, "it's all good now. Hear that? The rain in the ditches, the standing water in the pools, it's all good now. You should have been Lonely Man back when the going was bad, fella, when the bullhorns still came over and the stiffs shook when they did and Lonely Man didn't die but he wished he could …"
This time the storm took him unaware and was long in passing. His hands were ragged from flailing the-broken concrete and his eyes were so swollen with weeping that he could hardly see to shoulder his sack of cans. He stumbled often that morning. Once he fell and opened an old scar on his forehead, but not even that interrupted his steady, mumbling chant: "Tain't no boner, 'tain't no blooper; Corey's Gin brings super stupor. We shall conquer; we will win. Back our boys with Corey's Gin. Wasting time in war is sinful; black out fast with a Corey skinful."
They landed.
Five thousand insects of each "life" heaved on fifteen thousand wires to open the port and let down the landing ramp. While they heaved a few hundred felt the pangs of death on them. They com-municated the minute all-they-knew to blank-minded standby young-sters, died, and were eaten. Other hundreds stopped heaving briefly, gave birth, and resumed heaving.
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 83
