Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.

  At intermission I said, "How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?"

  He shook his head.

  "Then maybe a Venusian fizz?"

  His grunt was negative.

  "Then some old-fashioned beer?"

  He smiled. "Yes, I like beer."

  I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.

  "John," I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, "where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night."

  John yawned. "Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan."

  "Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot."

  He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration. "I don't know," he finally drawled.

  "It'd be a steady job, John." Inspiration struck me. "And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef, 'copter landing--if we ever get a 'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages."

  His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.

  He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:

  "No, I don't ... care much ... about playing."

  "What do you like to do, John?"

  His string-bean of a body stiffened. "I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan."

  Oh Lord, that plan again!

  I took a deep breath. "Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting."

  He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. "The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand."

  Oh, oh, I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.

  "Trouble is," he went on, "there are so many holes in this universe."

  "Holes?" I kept a straight face.

  "Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows--they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes--millions and millions of holes!"

  I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.

  His voice trembled with emotion. "Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is--"

  "But, John," I said as patiently as possible, "what have these holes got to do with you?"

  He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence. "What have they to do with me?" he shrilled. "I can't find the right one--that's what!"

  I closed my eyes. "Which particular hole are you looking for, John?"

  He was speaking rapidly again now.

  "I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark--and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole--I fell through."

  I closed my eyes. "Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole--is that why you have to find it?"

  "Oh I didn't lose anything important," he snapped, "just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited."

  His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. "But there's still time for my plan to work out--with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it."

  "Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one."

  He nodded. "But it can't be too far away."

  "I'd like to hear more about it," I said. "But if you're not going to play with us--"

  "Oh, I'll play with you," he beamed. "I can talk to you. You understand."

  Thank heaven!

  * * * * *

  Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.

  John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.

  Goon-Face was still cautious.

  "Contract?" he wheezed. "Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?"

  "Oh, sure," I said. "He'll stay--just as long as you want him."

  "Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract."

  "Sure. We'll get him to sign it." I laughed hollowly. "Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli."

  Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.

  A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.

  "This is the first time he's talked to anybody," Fat Boy breathed. "I--I'm scared.

  "Nothing can happen," I said, optimistically. "This'll be good publicity."

  We watched.

  John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.

  John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.

  John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.

  The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.

  John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.

  "He's doing it," Hammer-Head groaned. "He's telling him!"

  I rose swiftly. "We better get over there. We should have known better--"

  We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.

  "He wouldn't listen," he said, weakly. "I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole."

  I patted him on the back. "No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll--well, we'll help you."

  "We're working on a plan, too," said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration. "We're going to make a more scientific approach."

  "How?" John asked.

  Fat Boy gulped.

  "Just wait another day," I said. "We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work."

  "No, I guess not," he sighed. "I'll stay--until tomorrow."

  * * * * *

  All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?

  Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds
but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.

  It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.

  John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.

  "John!" I cried. "You're drunk!"

  His watery eyes squinted at me. "No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!"

  "But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory."

  His body trembled. "No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter."

  "Then what is it, John?"

  "It's my body. It's--"

  "Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?"

  His face was white with terror. "No, my--my body's full of holes. Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?"

  He rose and staggered to his Zloomph, clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.

  I patted him gingerly on the arm. "Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now."

  We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph, and I.

  I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph--steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.

  Then--he was gone.

  John just slipped out of my grasp--Zloomph and all--and was gone--completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing--nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.

  "--is it.--is it.--is it.--is it."

  John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....

  * * * * *

  Tonight is our last night at The Space Room. Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, "No beeg feedle, no contract."

  Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.

  We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.

  Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.

  And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.

  * * *

  Contents

  AND ALL THE EARTH A GRAVE

  BY C.C. MacApp

  There's nothing wrong with dying--it just hasn't ever had the proper sales pitch!

  It all began when the new bookkeeping machine of a large Midwestern coffin manufacturer slipped a cog, or blew a transistor, or something. It was fantastic that the error--one of two decimal places--should enjoy a straight run of okays, human and mechanical, clear down the line; but when the figures clacked out at the last clacking-out station, there it was. The figures were now sacred; immutable; and it is doubtful whether the President of the concern or the Chairman of the Board would have dared question them--even if either of those two gentlemen had been in town.

  As for the Advertising Manager, the last thing he wanted to do was question them. He carried them (they were the budget for the coming fiscal year) into his office, staggering a little on the way, and dropped dazedly into his chair. They showed the budget for his own department as exactly one hundred times what he'd been expecting. That is to say, fifty times what he'd put in for.

  When the initial shock began to wear off, his face assumed an expression of intense thought. In about five minutes he leaped from his chair, dashed out of the office with a shouted syllable or two for his secretary, and got his car out of the parking lot. At home, he tossed clothes into a travelling bag and barged toward the door, giving his wife a quick kiss and an equally quick explanation. He didn't bother to call the airport. He meant to be on the next plane east, and no nonsense about it....

  * * * * *

  With one thing and another, the economy hadn't been exactly in overdrive that year, and predictions for the Christmas season were gloomy. Early retail figures bore them out. Gift buying dribbled along feebly until Thanksgiving, despite brave speeches by the Administration. The holiday passed more in self-pity than in thankfulness among owners of gift-oriented businesses.

  Then, on Friday following Thanksgiving, the coffin ads struck.

  Struck may be too mild a word. People on the streets saw feverishly-working crews (at holiday rates!) slapping up posters on billboards. The first poster was a dilly. A toothy and toothsome young woman leaned over a coffin she'd been unwrapping. She smiled as if she'd just received overtures of matrimony from an eighty-year-old billionaire. There was a Christmas tree in the background, and the coffin was appropriately wrapped. So was she. She looked as if she had just gotten out of bed, or were ready to get into it. For amorous young men, and some not so young, the message was plain. The motto, "The Gift That Will Last More Than a Lifetime", seemed hardly to the point.

  Those at home were assailed on TV with a variety of bright and clever skits of the same import. Some of them hinted that, if the young lady's gratitude were really precipitous, and the bedroom too far away, the coffin might be comfy.

  Of course the more settled elements of the population were not neglected. For the older married man, there was a blow directly between the eyes: "Do You Want Your Widow to Be Half-Safe?" And, for the spinster without immediate hopes, "I Dreamt I Was Caught Dead Without My Virginform Casket!"

  Newspapers, magazines and every other medium added to the assault, never letting it cool. It was the most horrendous campaign, for sheer concentration, that had ever battered at the public mind. The public reeled, blinked, shook its head to clear it, gawked, and rushed out to buy.

  Christmas was not going to be a failure after all. Department store managers who had, grudgingly and under strong sales pressure, made space for a single coffin somewhere at the rear of the store, now rushed to the telephones like touts with a direct pronouncement from a horse. Everyone who possibly could got into the act. Grocery supermarkets put in casket departments. The Association of Pharmaceutical Retailers, who felt they had some claim to priority, tried to get court injunctions to keep caskets out of service stations, but were unsuccessful because the judges were all out buying caskets. Beauty parlors showed real ingenuity in merchandising. Roads and streets clogged with delivery trucks, rented trailers, and whatever else could haul a coffin. The Stock Market went completely mad. Strikes were declared and settled within hours. Congress was called into session early. The President got authority to ration lumber and other materials suddenly in starvation-short supply. State laws were passed against cremation, under heavy lobby pressure. A new racket, called boxjacking, blossomed overnight.

  The Advertising Manager who had put the thing over had been fighting with all the formidable weapons of his breed to make his plant managers build up a stockpile. They had, but it went like a toupee in a wind tunnel. Competitive coffin manufacturers were caught napping, but by Wednesday after Thanksgiving they, along with the original one, were on a twenty-four hour, seven-day basis. Still only a fraction of the demand could be met. Jet passenger planes were stripped of their seats, supplied with Yankee gold, and sent to plunder the world of its coffins.

  It might be supposed that Christmas goods other than caskets would take a bad dumping. That was not so. Suc
h was the upsurge of prosperity, and such was the shortage of coffins, that nearly everything--with a few exceptions--enjoyed the biggest season on record.

  On Christmas Eve the frenzy slumped to a crawl, though on Christmas morning there were still optimists out prowling the empty stores. The nation sat down to breathe. Mostly it sat on coffins, because there wasn't space in the living rooms for any other furniture.

  There was hardly an individual in the United States who didn't have, in case of sudden sharp pains in the chest, several boxes to choose from. As for the rest of the world, it had better not die just now or it would be literally a case of dust to dust.

  * * * * *

  Of course everyone expected a doozy of a slump after Christmas. But our Advertising Manager, who by now was of course Sales Manager and First Vice President also, wasn't settling for any boom-and-bust. He'd been a frustrated victim of his choice of industries for so many years that now, with his teeth in something, he was going to give it the old bite. He gave people a short breathing spell to arrange their coffin payments and move the presents out of the front rooms. Then, late in January, his new campaign came down like a hundred-megatonner.

  Within a week, everyone saw quite clearly that his Christmas models were now obsolete. The coffin became the new status symbol.

  The auto industry was of course demolished. Even people who had enough money to buy a new car weren't going to trade in the old one and let the new one stand out in the rain. The garages were full of coffins. Petroleum went along with Autos. (Though there were those who whispered knowingly that the same people merely moved over into the new industry. It was noticeable that the center of it became Detroit.) A few trucks and buses were still being built, but that was all.

  Some of the new caskets were true works of art. Others--well, there was variety. Compact models appeared, in which the occupant's feet were to be doubled up alongside his ears. One manufacturer pushed a circular model, claiming that by all the laws of nature the foetal position was the only right one. At the other extreme were virtual houses, ornate and lavishly equipped. Possibly the largest of all was the "Togetherness" model, triangular, with graduated recesses for Father, Mother, eight children (plus two playmates), and, in the far corner beyond the baby, the cat.