The 19th Golden Age of Science Fiction

by Charles V. De Vet

  This was more than burglary; the net was already tight around him. He needed help. Another minute, and he had the obvious answer. Effress.

  Effress answered Albrecht’s first call. Evidently the man was a light sleeper. Albrecht explained the situation quickly.

  “I’ll be over immediately. Do you have any plan in mind?”

  “My first problem is to get out of here. Do you have an automobile?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. How long will it take you to get here?”

  “I can make it in fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll allow twenty minutes. I’ll come out of my room then. You wait for me at the front door. If you’re able, cover anyone waiting in the lobby. You’ll also have to keep in mind the man out in the street. You have that clear?”

  “Right. I’ll look for you in twenty minutes—exactly.” Albrecht hung up and dressed quietly. He found the padded chair against a farther wall and let himself ease into it. After a minute he noted the rigidity of his stomach muscles, and forced himself to relax. He realized that he was afraid, but was glad to note that it was not the fear of panic. He took the safety catch off his pistol and laid it on his lap, and waited. Patiently.

  * * * *

  Twice during the next twenty minutes Albrecht heard movement in the hall outside his door, and once someone tried the doorknob again. But they made no attempt to force their way in.

  When his time was up, Albrecht rose and unlocked the door. He put his pistol in his pocket, but kept his hand around it. As he stepped out into the hall a man slid around a corner at the far end. So far so good.

  Albrecht reached the head of the stair without being stopped; however, two men stood close together at the foot. He glanced across the lobby and breathed a sigh of relief as he saw Effress leaning negligently against a doorframe. Both his hands were in his pockets.

  Deliberately Albrecht paused and raised his free hand in greeting to Effress. The heads of both men at the foot of the stairs swiveled around—in time to see Effress nod casually back.

  Albrecht started down the steps. When he reached a point one step from the waiting men he stopped. “Get the hell out of my way,” he said very gently.

  Involuntarily the two men moved apart. Albrecht strode between them. As he walked toward the door he glanced at Effress and saw that he was facing them now. He walked past Effress and they went out through the door back to back.

  * * * *

  Albrecht allowed himself to breathe freely again when they were in Effress’ car. “Thanks. I saw the way those men looked at you. Apparently you have some reputation in affairs of this kind.”

  Effress shrugged the compliment aside. “They were merely hirelings, they will have to get further instructions before they know how to cope with the change in affairs. We should have you well hidden by then.”

  “Im very grateful to you. Where do we go now?”

  “I have a place where you’ll be safe for a few days at least.”

  After a half-hour’s drive, Effress parked his car in a public lot and they went ahead on foot. Albrecht noted that they were in the waterfront section of the city. Soon they reached a small wharf and walked across a plank to the roof of a rundown houseboat.

  Effress led the way down a dark stairway and into a room without lights that smelled faintly of oil. He led Albrecht to a bunk. “Try to get some sleep. We’ll talk again in the morning.”

  * * * *

  Ken Albrecht must have been more tired than he had known, for he was awakened by the noise of someone walking in the room, and saw by the watch on his wrist that it was after nine o’clock. He had to presume that it was morning, for no light came in from outside.

  Concealed fluorescent tubes in the walls revealed that he was in the former engine room of the old houseboat. The engine had been removed from the center of the floor and the hole covered with a large patch of composition board. Plastic cloth was pasted over the portholes in the sides of the vessel. Two double-bunk cots were attached to each wall.

  Effress had just let himself sprawl back in a cot directly opposite Albrecht. In a makeshift chair that was actually a fishbox a third man sat regarding Albrecht from beneath bushy eyebrows that met above a red, thick, nose. The man had the face and figure of a bull, with large ears and great bony cheeks.

  “Mr. Albrecht. Mr. Vingers.” Effress nodded negligently at each man as he gave his name.

  “How do you do?” This was the man Albrecht remembered, who had gotten into trouble with the Earth authorities by his opposition to their bloodletting practices. Apparently Effress was combining two jobs.

  Vingers made a reluctant rumble in his throat but gave no other reply.

  “Mr. Vingers will be with us until the day after tomorrow,” Effress explained. “He has a rendezvous with a plane that will fly him to our southern continent.”

  “That’s a coincidence,” Albrecht said. “I’ll be leaving the same day, if I’m able to get my passport back.” The third man did not seem to be in the mood to talk. “Are you still going to try to find that girl for me?” he asked Effress.

  Effress nodded. “I intend to visit information central today. If I can give an accurate enough description of the girl I should be able to find out just who she is, and where she lives. Tell me every detail about her that might help.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if I went with you? You wouldn’t recognize her even if you saw her.”

  “Later of course, I’ll have to have you along,” Effress answered. “But I’d better do the preliminary work alone. Also I thought I’d try to find the person or persons who threaten you. If I find them, we can decide what is best to do next: whether we should attempt negotiations, or move against them.”

  “The man who is trying to kill me is the same one who engineered the stealing of my passport. He probably learned that you were investigating for me, and decided that he would be safer if he removed me.”

  “Very probably. But we have to find him first.” Effress rolled up his sleeves, splashed water on his face from a sink set in the end wall and went out.

  * * * *

  For several hours after Effress had gone, Vingers did not speak, and Albrecht felt no inclination to begin a conversation. He tried to nap but Vingers’ heavy-footed pacing of the room kept him from ever actually sleeping.

  Finally Vingers stopped at his side and stood over him. “How can you lie there when we have to skulk down here like rats in a filthy hole?”

  “What do you suggest we do?” Without defining the reason, Albrecht found himself disliking the man quite intensely.

  Vingers lifted his shoulders irritably and continued his pacing. After another ten minutes passed he said, “Did it ever occur to you that we’re both due to leave the same day; that I’ve got to get away from here or lose my life; that I could be a very logical suspect—the person who has your passport?”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.” Albrecht had given the possibility some thought when he’d first found out who Vingers was. Only the fact that he’d trusted Effress had made him decide against the possibility.

  “Perhaps Effress actually works only for me.” Vingers seemed to anticipate the trend of Albrecht’s reasoning.

  “That could be, but I’ll have to take my chances that it isn’t.” Albrecht turned on his side, with his back to Vingers. He felt his temper rising, and knew that a few more words with Vingers would lead to a fight that would be foolhardy.

  Vingers laughed.

  * * * *

  Effress returned during the early evening. “I couldn’t find anyone fitting the description, exactly,” he said. “See if you can remember more details tonight, and I’ll try again tomorrow.”

  His total lack of success made Ken Albrecht suspect that perhaps Vingers had spoken the truth. But why should Vingers have mentioned it at all? Unless it was because of the very cantankerousness of his nature.

  Yet it was evident by the surreptitious way Effress goaded the other man that he
liked Vingers no more than did Albrecht.

  Vingers became talkative as the night hours dragged on with their galling inactivity. “This is a sick world,” he said, to neither of them in particular. “Suffering from a neurosis that compels it to draw the blood of innocent victims. Men and women are killed while barely past their prime of life; husbands murder their wives, on the slightest pretext, or no pretext at all.”

  He turned his attention to Albrecht. “Did you know that every third child is automatically put to death at birth? That every child born on Wednesday suffers the same fate? Could anything be more absurd—more brutally, savagely, absurd?” He raised his hand in a clenched fist. “Those acts are violations of basic mortality. If there is a God, I say he must hate us for what we do.”

  He was about to go on when Effress spoke. “We can barely feed the nearly thirty-five billion people we have on Earth now. If these were not killed, at least an equal number would starve. Do you have a better solution?”

  “We could limit the population.”

  “That was tried, two hundred years ago.” Reading between the words, Albrecht recognized that Effress was doing more than baiting the contentious Vingers: He was apologizing to Albrecht for Earth’s savagery. “They were unable to control the growth of population. They squandered their natural resources to keep men fed and clothed, but nevertheless there was soon hunger, revolution, and war. For a time there was no government, and men died in a wholesale, self-inflicted, extermination. If you want the present blood-letting stopped, you must give us a better alternative.”

  “You missed my point,” Vingers continued his same argument, and Albrecht realized then that the man was not exceptionally intelligent. He was merely a fanatic who had learned to use the speech and ideas of a pedagogue. “I am not advocating that we go back to old methods. I said we must use intelligent control. Then we will succeed.”

  “There is a beautiful and enlightening world of talk,” Effress said, “in which everything makes sense. And there is another world—a more practical world—that is governed by the unintelligibility of necessity.” His eyes closed and, as Vingers reiterated and expounded his argument, Effress’ chest began a regular rise and fall. He had gone to sleep. Albrecht allowed himself to do the same.

  * * * *

  The next day he had a brief talk with Effress. Their time was short, and they decided to concentrate on finding the girl, Dolores. They took the chance of visiting information center together.

  They had no success. The description they gave was inadequate. Effress went on to the spaceport, and Albrecht returned to the houseboat.

  That night Effress was very discouraged. “I was still unable to get in to see Wrestler, and I turned up nothing new asking around.”

  Before he went to sleep, Albrecht momentarily had the feeling that he should know the answer to his problem. He felt that he had all the clues, but that he was not putting them together correctly.

  In the morning he had the solution.

  He arose quietly, before the others awoke, and let himself out of the houseboat. A few blocks away he hailed a cab and had himself driven out to the spaceport.

  He went on foot to the inter-world bank and withdrew all his money. Dividing it exactly in half he put one bundle into his pocket, and the other into an envelope he had gotten at the bank. He addressed the envelope to Effress and dropped it into a mail chute.

  At a newsstand, he bought a morning paper and a magazine and brought them into a lunchroom and found a table in one corner. For over an hour he ate slowly and read as he killed time. When he consulted his watch and saw that his flight would begin loading in a half-hour, he rose and walked without haste to the Personnel Bureau.

  “I have an urgent appointment with Mr. Wrestler,” he informed the girl in the outer office. “He’s expecting me.” As she opened her mouth to question him, Albrecht went on past her and into Wrestler’s office.

  Wrestler was standing at the front of his desk. A large handbag rested on the floor a few feet away.

  Ken Albrecht pulled his gun from his armpit and showed it to Wrestler. “Were you going somewhere?”

  Wrestler’s eyes opened in shocked surprise. “What do you want here?” he asked indignantly.

  “Put my passport on your desk, and step back.”

  “I don’t have your passport.” Wrestler’s voice was a whine.

  “It would almost give me pleasure to shoot you,” Albrecht said in a conversational tone of voice.

  Wrestler’s shoulders slumped. The starch seemed to go out of his body. He drew a wallet from his breast pocket and pulled out a card—which Albrecht recognized as his passport—and laid it on the desk. “What mistake did I make?” he asked listlessly.

  “None. But I nearly made the mistake of waiting too long to see the obvious.”

  “Tell me, how did you know? I thought I’d covered perfectly.”

  Albrecht picked up the passport and put it into his pocket. “It was very simple—after I’d figured it out. First, your age. You must be near to sixty. We both know what happens to you when you reach it. You would probably give your fortune to get away from here. Then your lack of cooperation in helping me find the girl—for no apparent reason. And who would be in the best position to put her on the job, and assign her to someone from whom she could steal a passport?

  “And finally, why wouldn’t you let Effress in to see you? When he came here investigating, you decided it would be best to put me out of the way. It all adds up.”

  Wrestler tried to smile. “Better luck next time.”

  “Perhaps.” Albrecht brought his pistol down hard against the side of Wrestler’s head. “Sorry to do that,” he apologized to the unconscious man at his feet. “But I’ve got to be certain that you don’t try any more tricks until I’m safely away from here.”

  He went out of the building and across a grassy court and into the waiting spaceship.

  Twenty minutes later he was on his way home.

  TRACK OF THE BEAST

  Originally appeared in Other Worlds, August 1952.

  In all the world about him there was not one thing he recognized—not one face that was familiar. He was not even certain that the organisms of the beings he saw were similar to those he should know about. In fact he was certain of—absolutely nothing!

  He stood with his eyes staring straight ahead, his features twisted with tortured interrogation, and his body rigid with frozen, abnormal tension. Each impact of the outside world would beat upon his consciousness with the stark fear of the unknown.

  A one-eyed beggar limped toward him, mumbling in a strange language.

  The sound of the beggar’s words was picked up by his auditory system and channeled into his brain. He felt a subtle, intangible meshing of thought processes, as though waiting cogs were slipping into place. And he understood what the beggar was saying.

  “Alms. Alms.”

  His hand responded to the words—with no directive from the brain. He reached into a side pocket and removed a round metallic disc. He placed the coin in the beggar’s outstretched hand.

  The beggar palmed the coin, touched his forehead and showed toothless gums.

  The words of the mendicant had fitted into prepared channels and he had reacted to them. A simple process of practiced response to stimulus. Vaguely he understood this, but beyond that his reasoning stopped. To reason he must have the tools of reason: Words. And he had only one—Alms. It was not enough.

  Desperately he sought for some small segment of facts from which to reconstruct his past. Who was he? What was he? What could he do to find out?

  A great nameless terror threatened to engulf him. He was impotent—terribly, starkly impotent! He could not even think.

  Now he fought the blackness of despair. Fought to bring the intricate excitations within himself under his control. He drew three deep breaths, concentrating on the respiratory function. He sensed that this would hold back the terror by diversion. He let his intuitions assu
me full sway.

  By the time he had expelled the third breath a plan of action had crystallized. He must manufacture his own tools of thought. And he understood what they must be: Word pictures.

  He looked about him and let the flood of impressions pour in upon him. He dissected the stream into its components and categorized each detail. He made no attempt to ascribe significances yet.

  Concrete objects first. A stream of opaque liquid flowed by a short distance away. He let its picture register. Though he had no way of conceiving the abstraction of distance. Next a tree. The solid matter he stood on was colored an off-shade of the liquid in the stream. Beside the stream stood a structure. There were several of them, but he did not know it. He had no comprehension of quantity.

  He saw another creature. It resembled the beggar. His reasoning took a tremendous bound with the conception of comparison. Also it brought his attention back to himself.

  Looking down he saw that he, too, was shaped in the same form as that of the beggar. Except that less of his flesh was exposed. He was clothed from the shoulders to his waist with a colored garment. Another garment covered the lower half of his body. And the flesh of his hands was lighter than that of the beggar.

  After a few moments of this study he had sufficient rudimentary tools to continue his first embryonic reasoning in abstraction. He desired to move. He watched the locomotion of the two visible creatures. His first attempt was successful. He walked readily and easily.

  He passed a street sign which read: CALCUTTA, INDIA, British Section. The words meant nothing to him.

  His system of numbers evolved simply. There was either one, or more than one. Thus he knew he was passing several buildings. He even realized that they were structures rather than natural objects.

  With this simple, but great, progress came confidence. He did not know who he was or even what he was, but certainly he was equipped with a great survival factor—reason. Given time to develop it, before he became overwhelmed by the complexities of this strange existence, there would be a possibility of his being able to cope with the unascertained forces of his-heterogeneous environment.