(2/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume II: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  "That's my good luck that I heard it. So there'll be no agreement, no guns, no fat job for Tammany Zorn, hey? Well, I can still play it the other way, What have I got to lose?"

  With a movement too quick to follow, Retief's hand chopped down across Zorn's wrist. The needler clattered as Zorn reeled, and then Retief's hand clamped Zorn's arm and whirled him around.

  "In answer to your last question," Retief said, "your neck."

  "You haven't got a chance, doublecrosser," Zorn gasped.

  "Shoke will be here in a minute," Retief said. "Tell him it's all off."

  "Twist harder, Mister," Zorn said. "Break it off at the shoulder. I'm telling him nothing!"

  "The kidding's over, Zorn," Retief said. "Call it off or I'll kill you."

  "I believe you," Zorn said. "But you won't have long to remember it."

  "All the killing will be for nothing," Retief said. "You'll be dead and the Rotunes will step into the power vacuum."

  "So what? When I die, the world ends."

  "Suppose I make you another offer, Zorn?"

  "Why would it be any better than the last one, chiseler?"

  Retief released Zorn's arm, pushed him away, stooped and picked up the needler.

  "I could kill you, Zorn. You know that."

  "Go ahead!"

  Retief reversed the needler, held it out.

  "I'm a gambler too, Zorn. I'm gambling you'll listen to what I have to say."

  Zorn snatched the gun, stepped back. He looked at Retief.

  "That wasn't the smartest bet you ever made, Mister; but go ahead. You've got maybe ten seconds."

  "Nobody doublecrossed you, Zorn. Magnan put his foot in it. Too bad. Is that a reason to kill yourself and a lot of other people who've bet their lives on you?"

  "They gambled and lost. Tough."

  "Maybe you haven't lost yet--if you don't quit."

  "Get to the point!"

  Retief spoke earnestly for a minute and a half. Zorn stood, gun aimed, listening. Then both men turned as footsteps approached along the terrace. A fat man in a yellow sarong padded up to Zorn.

  Zorn tucked the needler in his waistband.

  "Hold everything, Shoke," he said. "Tell the boys to put the knives away. Spread the word fast. It's all off."

  * * * * *

  "I want to commend you, Retief," Ambassador Crodfoller said expansively. "You mixed very well at last night's affair. Actually, I was hardly aware of your presence."

  "I've been studying Mr. Magnan's work," Retief said.

  "A good man, Magnan. In a crowd, he's virtually invisible."

  "He knows when to disappear all right."

  "This has been in many ways a model operation, Retief." The Ambassador patted his paunch contentedly. "By observing local social customs and blending harmoniously with the court, I've succeeded in establishing a fine, friendly, working relationship with the Potentate."

  "I understand the agreement has been postponed."

  The Ambassador chuckled. "The Potentate's a crafty one. Through ... ah ... a special study I have been conducting, I learned last night that he had hoped to, shall I say, 'put one over' on the Corps."

  "Great heavens," Retief said.

  "Naturally, this placed me in a difficult position. It was my task to quash this gambit, without giving any indication that I was aware of its existence."

  "A hairy position indeed," Retief said.

  "Quite casually, I informed the Potentate that certain items which had been included in the terms of the agreement had been deleted and others substituted. I admired him at that moment, Retief. He took it coolly--appearing completely indifferent--perfectly dissembling his very serious disappointment."

  "I noticed him dancing with three girls wearing a bunch of grapes apiece. He's very agile for a man of his bulk."

  "You mustn't discount the Potentate! Remember, beneath that mask of frivolity, he had absorbed a bitter blow."

  "He had me fooled," Retief said.

  "Don't feel badly; I confess at first I failed to sense his shrewdness." The Ambassador nodded and moved off along the corridor.

  Retief turned and went into an office. Magnan looked up from his desk.

  "Ah," he said. "Retief. I've been meaning to ask you. About the ... ah ... blasters. Are you--?"

  Retief leaned on Magnan's desk, looked at him.

  "I thought that was to be our little secret."

  "Well, naturally I--" Magnan closed his mouth, swallowed. "How is it, Retief," he said sharply, "that you were aware of this blaster business, when the Ambassador himself wasn't?"

  "Easy," Retief said. "I made it up."

  "You what!" Magnan looked wild. "But the agreement--it's been revised! Ambassador Crodfoller has gone on record...."

  "Too bad. Glad I didn't tell him about it."

  * * * * *

  Magnan leaned back and closed his eyes.

  "It was big of you to take all the ... blame," Retief said, "when the Ambassador was talking about knighting people."

  Magnan opened his eyes.

  "What about that gambler, Zorn? Won't he be upset?"

  "It's all right," Retief said, "I made another arrangement. The business about making blasters out of common components wasn't completely imaginary. You can actually do it, using parts from an old-fashioned disposal unit."

  "What good will that do him?" Magnan whispered, looking nervous. "We're not shipping in any old-fashioned disposal units."

  "We don't need to," Retief said. "They're already installed in the palace kitchen--and in a few thousand other places, Zorn tells me."

  "If this ever leaks...." Magnan put a hand to his forehead.

  "I have his word on it that the Nenni slaughter is out. This place is ripe for a change. Maybe Zorn is what it needs."

  "But how can we know?" Magnan yelped. "How can we be sure?"

  "We can't," Retief said. "But it's not up to the Corps to meddle in Petreacs' internal affairs." He leaned over, picked up Magnan's desk lighter and lit a cigar. He blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. "Right?"

  Magnan looked at him, nodded weakly. "Right."

  "I'd better be getting along to my desk," Retief said. "Now that the Ambassador feels that I'm settling down at last--"

  "Retief," Magnan said, "tonight, I implore you. Stay out of the kitchen--no matter what."

  Retief raised his eyebrows.

  "I know," Magnan said. "If you hadn't interfered, we'd all have had our throats cut. But at least," he added, "we'd have died in accordance with regulations!"

  END

  * * *

  Contents

  NO GREAT MAGIC

  by FRITZ LEIBER

  The troupers of the Big Time lack no art to sway a crowd-- or to change all history!

  I

  To bring the dead to life Is no great magic. Few are wholly dead: Blow on a dead man's embers And a live flame will start. --Graves

  I dipped through the filmy curtain into the boys' half of the dressing room and there was Sid sitting at the star's dressing table in his threadbare yellowed undershirt, the lucky one, not making up yet but staring sternly at himself in the bulb-framed mirror and experimentally working his features a little, as actors will, and kneading the stubble on his fat chin.

  I said to him quietly, "Siddy, what are we putting on tonight? Maxwell Anderson's Elizabeth the Queen or Shakespeare's Macbeth? It says Macbeth on the callboard, but Miss Nefer's getting ready for Elizabeth. She just had me go and fetch the red wig."

  He tried out a few eyebrow rears--right, left, both together--then turned to me, sucking in his big gut a little, as he always does when a gal heaves into hailing distance, and said, "Your pardon, sweetling, what sayest thou?"

  Sid always uses that kook antique patter backstage, until I sometimes wonder whether I'm in Central Park, New York City, nineteen hundred and three quarters, or somewhere in Southwark, Merry England, fifteen hundred and same. The truth is that although he loves every last fat part in Shakespe
are and will play the skinniest one with loyal and inspired affection, he thinks Willy S. penned Falstaff with nobody else in mind but Sidney J. Lessingham. (And no accent on the ham, please.)

  I closed my eyes and counted to eight, then repeated my question.

  He replied, "Why, the Bard's tragical history of the bloody Scot, certes." He waved his hand toward the portrait of Shakespeare that always sits beside his mirror on top of his reserve makeup box. At first that particular picture of the Bard looked too nancy to me--a sort of peeping-tom schoolteacher--but I've grown used to it over the months and even palsy-feeling.

  He didn't ask me why I hadn't asked Miss Nefer my question. Everybody in the company knows she spends the hour before curtain-time getting into character, never parting her lips except for that purpose--or to bite your head off if you try to make the most necessary conversation.

  "Aye, 'tiz Macbeth tonight," Sid confirmed, returning to his frowning-practice: left eyebrow up, right down, reverse, repeat, rest. "And I must play the ill-starred Thane of Glamis."

  I said, "That's fine, Siddy, but where does it leave us with Miss Nefer? She's already thinned her eyebrows and beaked out the top of her nose for Queen Liz, though that's as far as she's got. A beautiful job, the nose. Anybody else would think it was plastic surgery instead of putty. But it's going to look kind of funny on the Thaness of Glamis."

  * * * * *

  Sid hesitated a half second longer than he usually would--I thought, his timing's off tonight--and then he harrumphed and said, "Why, Iris Nefer, decked out as Good Queen Bess, will speak a prologue to the play--a prologue which I have myself but last week writ." He owled his eyes. "'Tis an experiment in the new theater."

  I said, "Siddy, prologues were nothing new to Shakespeare. He had them on half his other plays. Besides, it doesn't make sense to use Queen Elizabeth. She was dead by the time he whipped up Macbeth, which is all about witchcraft and directed at King James."

  He growled a little at me and demanded, "Prithee, how comes it your peewit-brain bears such a ballast of fusty book-knowledge, chit?"

  I said softly, "Siddy, you don't camp in a Shakespearean dressing room for a year, tete-a-teting with some of the wisest actors ever, without learning a little. Sure I'm a mental case, a poor little A & A existing on your sweet charity, and don't think I don't appreciate it, but--"

  "A-and-A, thou sayest?" he frowned. "Methinks the gladsome new forswearers of sack and ale call themselves AA."

  "Agoraphobe and Amnesiac," I told him. "But look, Siddy, I was going to sayest that I do know the plays. Having Queen Elizabeth speak a prologue to Macbeth is as much an anachronism as if you put her on the gantry of the British moonship, busting a bottle of champagne over its schnozzle."

  "Ha!" he cried as if he'd caught me out. "And saying there's a new Elizabeth, wouldn't that be the bravest advertisement ever for the Empire?--perchance rechristening the pilot, copilot and astrogator Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh? And the ship The Golden Hind? Tilly fally, lady!"

  He went on, "My prologue an anachronism, quotha! The groundlings will never mark it. Think'st thou wisdom came to mankind with the stenchful rocket and the sundered atomy? More, the Bard himself was topfull of anachronism. He put spectacles on King Lear, had clocks tolling the hour in Caesar's Rome, buried that Roman 'stead o' burning him and gave Czechoslovakia a seacoast. Go to, doll."

  "Czechoslovakia, Siddy?"

  "Bohemia, then, what skills it? Leave me now, sweet poppet. Go thy ways. I have matters of import to ponder. There's more to running a repertory company than reading the footnotes to Furness."

  * * * * *

  Martin had just slouched by calling the Half Hour and looking in his solemnity, sneakers, levis and dirty T-shirt more like an underage refugee from Skid Row than Sid's newest recruit, assistant stage manager and hardest-worked juvenile--though for once he'd remembered to shave. I was about to ask Sid who was going to play Lady Mack if Miss Nefer wasn't, or, if she were going to double the roles, shouldn't I help her with the change? She's a slow dresser and the Elizabeth costumes are pretty realistically stayed. And she would have trouble getting off that nose, I was sure. But then I saw that Siddy was already slapping on the alboline to keep the grease paint from getting into his pores.

  Greta, you ask too many questions, I told myself. You get everybody riled up and you rack your own poor ricketty little mind; and I hied myself off to the costumery to settle my nerves.

  The costumery, which occupies the back end of the dressing room, is exactly the right place to settle the nerves and warm the fancies of any child, including an unraveled adult who's saving what's left of her sanity by pretending to be one. To begin with there are the regular costumes for Shakespeare's plays, all jeweled and spangled and brocaded, stage armor, great Roman togas with weights in the borders to make them drape right, velvets of every color to rest your cheek against and dream, and the fantastic costumes for the other plays we favor; Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Shaw's Back to Methuselah and Hilliard's adaptation of Heinlein's Children of Methuselah, the Capek brothers' Insect People, O'Neill's The Fountain, Flecker's Hassan, Camino Real, Children of the Moon, The Beggar's Opera, Mary of Scotland, Berkeley Square, The Road to Rome.

  There are also the costumes for all the special and variety performances we give of the plays: Hamlet in modern dress, Julius Caesar set in a dictatorship of the 1920's, The Taming of the Shrew in caveman furs and leopard skins, where Petruchio comes in riding a dinosaur, The Tempest set on another planet with a spaceship wreck to start it off Karrumph!--which means a half dozen spacesuits, featherweight but looking ever so practical, and the weirdest sort of extraterrestrial-beast outfits for Ariel and Caliban and the other monsters.

  Oh, I tell you the stuff in the costumery ranges over such a sweep of space and time that you sometimes get frightened you'll be whirled up and spun off just anywhere, so that you have to clutch at something very real to you to keep it from happening and to remind you where you really are--as I did now at the subway token on the thin gold chain around my neck (Siddy's first gift to me that I can remember) and chanted very softly to myself, like a charm or a prayer, closing my eyes and squeezing the holes in the token: "Columbus Circle, Times Square, Penn Station, Christopher Street...."

  * * * * *

  But you don't ever get really frightened in the costumery. Not exactly, though your goosehairs get wonderfully realistically tingled and your tummy chilled from time to time--because you know it's all make-believe, a lifesize doll world, a children's dress-up world. It gets you thinking of far-off times and scenes as pleasant places and not as black hungry mouths that might gobble you up and keep you forever. It's always safe, always just in the theatre, just on the stage, no matter how far it seems to plunge and roam ... and the best sort of therapy for a pot-holed mind like mine, with as many gray ruts and curves and gaps as its cerebrum, that can't remember one single thing before this last year in the dressing room and that can't ever push its shaking body out of that same motherly fatherly room, except to stand in the wings for a scene or two and watch the play until the fear gets too great and the urge to take just one peek at the audience gets too strong ... and I remember what happened the two times I did peek, and I have to come scuttling back.

  The costumery's good occupational therapy for me, too, as my pricked and calloused fingertips testify. I think I must have stitched up or darned half the costumes in it this last twelvemonth, though there are so many of them that I swear the drawers have accordion pleats and the racks extend into the fourth dimension--not to mention the boxes of props and the shelves of scripts and prompt-copies and other books, including a couple of encyclopedias and the many thick volumes of Furness's Variorum Shakespeare, which as Sid had guessed I'd been boning up on. Oh, and I've sponged and pressed enough costumes, too, and even refitted them to newcomers like Martin, ripping up and resewing seams, which can be a punishing job with heavy materials.

  In a less sloppily organized company I'd be called wardrobe mi
stress, I guess. Except that to anyone in show business that suggests a crotchety old dame with lots of authority and scissors hanging around her neck on a string. Although I got my crochets, all right, I'm not that old. Kind of childish, in fact. As for authority, everybody outranks me, even Martin.

  Of course to somebody outside show business, wardrobe mistress might suggest a yummy gal who spends her time dressing up as Nell Gwyn or Anitra or Mrs. Pinchwife or Cleopatra or even Eve (we got a legal costume for it) and inspiring the boys. I've tried that once or twice. But Siddy frowns on it, and if Miss Nefer ever caught me at it I think she'd whang me.

  And in a normaller company it would be the wardrobe room, too, but costumery is my infantile name for it and the actors go along with my little whims.

  I don't mean to suggest our company is completely crackers. To get as close to Broadway even as Central Park you got to have something. But in spite of Sid's whip-cracking there is a comforting looseness about its efficiency--people trade around the parts they play without fuss, the bill may be changed a half hour before curtain without anybody getting hysterics, nobody gets fired for eating garlic and breathing it in the leading lady's face. In short, we're a team. Which is funny when you come to think of it, as Sid and Miss Nefer and Bruce and Maudie are British (Miss Nefer with a touch of Eurasian blood, I romance); Martin and Beau and me are American (at least I think I am) while the rest come from just everywhere.

  * * * * *

  Besides my costumery work, I fetch things and run inside errands and help the actresses dress and the actors too. The dressing room's very coeducational in a halfway respectable way. And every once in a while Martin and I police up the whole place, me skittering about with dustcloth and wastebasket, he wielding the scrub-brush and mop with such silent grim efficiency that it always makes me nervous to get through and duck back into the costumery to collect myself.

  Yes, the costumery's a great place to quiet your nerves or improve your mind or even dream your life away. But this time I couldn't have been there eight minutes when Miss Nefer's Elizabeth-angry voice came skirling, "Girl! Girl! Greta, where is my ruff with silver trim?" I laid my hands on it in a flash and loped it to her, because Old Queen Liz was known to slap even her Maids of Honor around a bit now and then and Miss Nefer is a bear on getting into character--a real Paul Muni.