“No,” he said, but from the tone of his voice it might as well have been Yes.
“You worry too much, you know? I’ve only known you for an evening, and I can see you’re a worrier. You and that man you came in with—that Abel. Both of you stiff and tense, and snapping at each other about nothing at all. Imagine, quarrelling over whether next year is the Twentieth or the Twenty-first Century!”
“Which reminds me—” Carhew glanced at his watch. “It’s 11:40. Twenty minutes to midnight.”
“You’re changing the subject. Why don’t you come down to Dr. Bellison’s when the holiday is over.”
Carhew stiffened suddenly. “Bellison! That quack? That mystic—!”
“You don’t understand,” she said softly. “You’re like all the rest. But you haven’t experienced Relativistic Release, that’s all. You ought to come down sometime. It’ll do you a world of good.”
Feeling chilled, Carhew stared at the girl in his arms. Heldwig Bellison’s Relativistic Release philosophy was something new, something that had come spiraling out of Central Europe via jetcopter in 1998 and was busily infecting all of America now.
He didn’t know too much about it. It was, he knew, a hedonistic cult, devoted sheerly to pleasure—to drug-taking and strange sexual orgies and things like that. It seemed to Carhew, in the room’s half-light, that the girl’s eyes were dilated from drugs, and that her face bore the signs of dissipation. He shuddered.
No wonder she was so gay, so buoyant! Suddenly he no longer felt like dancing with her. He moved mechanically until the dance was over, then left the floor and headed for his seat.
“You still haven’t answered me, George. Will you come down to the clinic when the holiday’s over?”
He sipped at his drink. “Don’t ask me now, Maritta. Wait till later—till I’m really drunk. Then ask me. After midnight. Maybe by then I’ll be anxious to see Dr. Bellison. Who knows?”
She giggled. “You’re funny, George. And Abel, too. What do you two do for a living?”
Carhew exchanged a glance with dour Abel Marsh. Marsh shook his head imperceptibly.
“We’re…designers,” he said. “Draftsmen. Sort of engineers.”
“Sounds frightfully dull.”
Carhew was glad she didn’t intend to pursue the line of questioning too much further. “It is,” he said.
He raised the Four Planets to his lips and drained it.
“Be a good girl, will you, and get me another drink?”
“Sure. One Four Planets, coming up.”
“No,” he said. “This time I’ll have a screwdriver—with lots of vodka.”
“Switching drinks in midstream, eh? Okay, if you want to live dangerously!”
Carhew studied the girl’s trim form as she crossed the room to the bar. She was a lovely, languorous creature; it was a pity she belonged to that horrid cult. Carhew wondered how many men she had had already. He and Marsh had had time for very few dates in the past three years; he knew little about women. Tonight was their first really free night since 1998.
And even tonight, tension hung over them. An unanswered question remained to be answered.
Carhew glanced at his watch. “Eleven forty-nine,” he said. “Eleven more minutes.”
“Eleven minutes to A.D. 2000,” Marsh said.
“Eleven minutes to the Twenty-First Century.”
“Twentieth.”
“Twenty-first!”
“Twentieth!”
Maritta reappeared with the drinks.
“Are you two still bickering over that silly business?” she asked. “You’re like a couple of babies. Here’s your drink, George.”
Carhew took the drink from her and gulped at it, almost greedily. The vodka affected him rapidly; he felt his head starting to spin.
“Well,” he said “Twentieth or Twenty-first…doesn’t matter much…anyone got the time?”
“Eleven fifty-one,” Marsh said.
“That means—nine more minutes.” Carhew finished his drink. “I think I’ll have another one,” he said.
This time he weaved his way across the room to the bar and dialed his own—a martini, this time.
He sensed warmth behind him, and turned to see Maritta pressing gently against him. “You’ll get sick if you keep switching drinks,” she said.
“Maybe I want to get sick,” he said. “Maybe I see this whole sick crazy drug-ridden world and I want to get just as sick as it is.” I’m getting sober, he thought. Don’t want to do that.
He made out the time dimly. Eleven fifty-five. Five more minutes. Five minutes to the Year 2000. Dull tension started to mount inside him.
“You look awfully worried,” Maritta said. “I really think you should see Doctor—”
“Told you not to ask me that until after midnight. Wait till I’m good’n drunk. Maybe I’ll say yes then.”
He finished his cocktail, laughed crazily, and let the glass fall to the floor. It crashed against the leg of an iron table, and shattered, tinkling. “Too bad,” he said. “Guess I broke the glass. Guess so.”
“You’re drunk,” she said.
“Good. But not drunk enough.”
The room was starting to blur around him now; couples whirled by in a wild dance, and he could hardly see. From somewhere, the music began again.
“Let’s dance,” he suggested, and staggered forward into the girl’s arms.
They danced. While they spun around the room, someone turned on a radio. The announcer’s voice said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the time is now Eleven Fifty-Nine. In just one minute, the world will welcome a new year—and a new century, some claim, though purists insist that—”
Yeah, he thought. Purists like Marsh.
Somewhere inside his mind he was conscious that he ought to be at the window, looking out, when midnight came. He had one minute. Less than that, now. Fifty seconds. Forty-five. Forty.
Maritta’s lips touched his in a lingering kiss. He felt her body straining against his, while somewhere within him his mind went on counting. Thirty-five. Thirty. Twenty-five.
Twenty.
“Excuse me,” he said thickly. “Gotta go look out the window.”
Fifteen.
He sensed Abel Marsh standing next to him, pressing the button that would clear the opaqued window and make it possible for them to look out.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
The window cleared. Outside the night was black except for a few billion city lights and the round silver dollar up above that was the moon.
Seven. Six.
A current of excitement started to build up in Carhew. He saw the girl clinging to his arm. The three of them stared outward at the silent skies.
Five. Four. Three. Two.
ONE!
“It’s twelve midnight,” the announcer said. “We enter the Year 2000!”
Suddenly a bolt of light split the sky—a shaft of white flame that leaped up from the Earth and sprang through the heavens, lighting up the entire city and probably half the continent. A burning, searing bolt of light.
Carhew felt suddenly sober. He looked at Marsh.
Behind them, the radio blared: “We bring you now a special announcement relayed from White Sands Rocket Base. One minute ago, at the stroke of midnight, the Rocket Ship Moonflight made a successful blastoff. It was the first time in the history of humanity that man has broken forth from the bonds of Earth in a manned spaceship. We expect to bring you further bulletins throughout the night. Landing on the moon itself is scheduled for eight A.M. on New Year’s Day.”
Carhew was smiling. He looked at Abel Marsh, his fellow engineer on the project. “Well, we made it,” he said hoarsely. “The ship took off.”
“Happy New Year!” someone yelled. “Happy New Century!”
It didn’t matter much now, Carhew thought, which century this was. Not now. Twentieth or twenty-first, it made no difference.
All that counted was that this was the Age of Space.
T
HE ANDROID KILL
(1957)
Here, from the November, 1957 Imaginative Tales, is one of the stories from the batch that Garrett and I sent to Bill Hamling in October, 1956. This is another one that I’m pretty sure I wrote entirely on my own.
It’s an okay little chase story, but its big significance for me is that Hamling published it under the byline of “Alexander Blade,” the first time one of my stories had appeared that way. As I mentioned in the introduction to “Guardian of the Crystal Gate,” such powerful Alexander Blade stories as “The Brain” (Amazing, October 1948) and “Dynasty of the Devil” (Amazing, June 1949) had wowed me back when I was still too young to shave. Now, a mere nine years later, right around the time I was contemplating growing the beard that has been my trademark for the past forty-some years, I had become Alexander Blade myself!
——————
I was crazy to leave Laura here alone for a minute, I was thinking, as the space-liner roared through the atmosphere toward the spaceport at Rigel City. Even though the mighty ship was traveling at a thousand miles an hour, I kept urging it onward, down toward the port. I had to get there on time. Had to.
I kept picturing the way the riot-torn city must look, now that the long-festering hatred for synthetic android men had burst loose into a full-scale android kill. Clay Armistead had finally stirred up the riot his sick mind craved. And I had picked this week to make a business trip and leave my wife alone—alone, in the heart of the riot.
I counted the seconds until the spaceship would land. I had cut short my business trip the second I had heard of the riots, had caught the first liner back to Rigel City to find Laura and get her out of danger’s path.
The ship landed. “Unfasten deceleration cradles,” came the impersonal order from the loudspeakers, but I had already done that. I raced down the companionway, past a startled stewardess, shoved my way through a little knot of uniformed baggage-androids and grabbed my suitcase. There wasn’t any time to waste.
Quickly, the moment the catwalk for passengers was open, I dashed through the hatch and out into the bright, warm air of Rigel City. The giant sun was high above; it was a pleasant spring day.
And then all the pleasantness vanished. I saw the mob, pushing and shouting and shoving, at the far end of the landing field. It was an ugly sight. They looked like so many buzzing bees, each of them inflamed with killing-lust and brutality.
I passed through the checkout-desk in record time and on through the Administration Building, listening to the sounds of the mob. Somehow, they had smelled out the fact that there were androids aboard the starship that had just arrived, and they were determined to get them.
Well, that wasn’t my worry. I was concerned only with Laura.
A sleek taxi pulled up in front of me and waited, its turboelectric engine throbbing quietly. The driver was a human; I was startled not to see the familiar red star on his forehead. He looked at me coldly, without the politeness of the android cabby.
“Where to, fellow?”
“Twenty-fourth and Coolidge,” I said, and started to get in. “On the double.”
“Sorry, Mac. Coolidge is out of bounds. I’d be crazy to take my hack through there. I’ll drop you at Winchester. Okay?”
I frowned, then nodded. It meant a ten-minute walk, but it was better than nothing. “Good enough,” I said, and started for a second time to enter.
I got one leg inside the cab. Then a hand grabbed me from behind, pulled me out, and I was swung around.
“Where the hell you think you’re going—you damned android?”
For a second, I was too startled even to get angry. There were three men facing me—cold-eyed, hard-faced men with hatred naked in their features. I recognized them, contorted though their faces were.
Clay Armistead—the chief rabble-rouser, a burly, squat, ugly man who had been spreading lies about the synthetic men for years.
Roger Dubrow, tall, athletic, Armistead’s partner in their food-store business and his partner in villainy as well, it seemed.
Dave Hawks, a local tough just riding along for the fun.
“Android?” I said. “Is this a game, Armistead? You’ve known me for ten years. I’m no more of an android than you are. Let go of me!”
I wrenched my arm free and turned to my taxi—but the driver shook his head nervously and stepped on the accelerator. He wasn’t looking for trouble.
“Come here, android,” Hawks said. “C’mere and lemme rough you up.” He snatched at my suitcase, grabbed it away, tossed it to one side.
“Hold it, Hawks.” I looked from one face to the next. They looked alike—cold, menacing, ugly: “You know as well as I do that androids have red stars on their foreheads. Stop this nonsense, and go play your games elsewhere.”
I still couldn’t take them seriously. It was impossible for an android to masquerade as a human, and they knew it. Why were they accusing me, then? It was fantastic.
“Those red stars can be obliterated, Preston,” Armistead said, in a cold, tight voice. “It’s a secret the androids have kept for years. But now we know. We know you’re synthetic, Preston. And we’re going to get you!”
It was incredible. It was unbelievable. But it was happening, here in my own city, on the world where I’d lived all my thirty years. And suddenly, I was fighting for my life against three of my neighbors who were positive I was a synthetic man!
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dave Hawks moving on me. The sounds of the mob were chillingly close, and I knew I’d be in for trouble for sure if the entire swarm got here while the three ringleaders were working someone over. I’d be ripped to pieces before I knew what was happening.
Hawks closed and swung. His punch landed above my eye. I blinked away the pain and crashed a fist into his midsection. At the same time, Dubrow joined in. Armistead held back and watched.
An open-handed blow from Dubrow knocked me sprawling.
“Look at the android,” Dubrow gloated. “Look at him flat on his back!”
I kicked upward viciously and sent Dubrow over backward screaming in pain. Hawks dove savagely, and we went rolling over and over. I was getting numb from the fighting; all I wanted to do was find Laura and get out of this madhouse, and instead—
“Finish him off!” Armistead hissed. “The cops are coming!”
Sirens wailed. The Rigel City police—badly outnumbered, unable to handle the rioting in its full intensity—had heard of the outbreak at the spaceport and were on their way. Dubrow and Hawks clung to me, their fists pounding into me. I struck back, blindly, clawing, scratching, kicking. Blood trickled down my face—real blood. Human blood. But they didn’t care.
“Come on, android! Fight!” A palm crashed into my cheek; another into my throat. Choking, gasping, I rose to my feet with desperate determination. My clothes were in tatters, my suitcase gone.
I grabbed Hawks, swung the burly man around, sent him crashing into Dubrow and Armistead. Without waiting to see what would happen, I began to run. Just run, blindly, without direction. Running away. I was running for my life, and I still didn’t quite believe it was all happening.
I ran. I ran through the tangled mob of people, through the screaming, yelling, hysterical android-hating people of Rigel City. Bullets whined overhead, and here and there I could see the bright flash of a disruptor-pistol warning the outraged crowd back. There was no stopping them.
I kept running. I reached the fence that bordered the spaceport, ran until I found an exit gate. There was a guard patrolling it, but I went by so fast he didn’t know what had happened.
My heart was pounding and my lungs seemed to be quivering under the strain. And right down in my stomach was a cold hard knot of fear. Not so much for myself directly—I was too numb for that. But I was afraid for Laura.
“Do you have to go to Trantor, darling?” she had asked. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too, darling,” and it had been the truth. “But we can’t afford both to
go—and I can’t afford not to go. You know that.”
“I know, all right. But still—”
I had left her behind, and had been gone eight days. Only eight days—but in that time, Clay Armistead had fanned the smoldering human-android antagonism into a full-scale android kill.
The streets were nearly deserted as I raced into the heart of Rigel City. Up ahead, I could see fires burning—fires, no doubt, coming from shops of android shopkeepers. We had tried to live side by side, androids and men, identical in everything except birth, but it seemed doomed to failure.
I kept running, my legs moving almost mechanically. I passed one of the burning stores. It was John Nealy’s beauty parlor, and in the smoke and fiery shadows I could see figures moving about.
Someone emerged, face covered with soot. It was Lloyd Garber, a sedate, wealthy accountant—now wild-eyed with fury. He saw me.
“Hey, Preston! Come give us a hand!”
I stopped. “Are you mixed up in this too, Garber?”
“We’ve got Nealy in here,” Garber said, ignoring my question. “We’re making him watch while we burn his store. We need some help.”
As Garber spoke, an expensive hairdrying machine came hurtling through the open door. There was a scream of anguish from within, and I thought I recognized the voice of android John Nealy, ladies’ hairdresser extraordinary. Androids tended to go into unmasculine businesses like that, I thought. Maybe that was why people like Clay Armistead hated them so.
I paused, wondering if I should take time out to help Nealy, when another soot-smeared figure emerged from the store. He was so blackened I couldn’t recognize him, but he waved his arm as soon as he saw me.
“Hey, Garber—there’s Cleve Preston!”
“Yeah, I know,” Garber replied. “I was just—”
“Didn’t you hear what Armistead said? Preston’s an android! He’s been hiding the red star all his life!”
“What? But I—”
I didn’t stick around to see what would happen. Nealy would have to fend for himself. I dodged around the corner and ran as fast as I could. Footsteps pursued me for a while, and then I was alone. I kept on running.
In the Beginning: Tales From the Pulp Era Page 19
