Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J F Bone

  To throw a concept of paradise in the face of the galaxy would do precisely that which he wished to prevent. It would create tensions, wars, and anarchy until someone recognised the only way to cut the Gordian knot. And then Aurum would vanish forever in the flare of a phoenix explosion. Common sense told him that this was the only solution if the word got around. So the word couldn’t get around—at least not promiscuously—and Laura couldn’t go back to Civilization—at least not as Laura Latham.

  She looked at him expectantly. Obviously he was supposed to say something, and when he did not, she finally spoke. “There’s a solution to this, you know.”

  “There is?”

  “Certainly. It’s obvious that we’ll have to select the people who will come here. And it’s equally obvious that we’ll have to use Spaceways’ personnel department to do that—at least in the early stages. I don’t remember anything about Spaceways, hut if that company is like any other they are bound to have a very efficient personnel procurement and allocation section.”

  “They have.”

  “Well, then as I see it the problem all revolves around me. I own Spaceways, but I can’t take control because I’ve regressed some forty years. But you’ve only gone back ten. I’ll bet you hardly look any different than you did, and the little changes could be handled with a bit of makeup. Since I was in Video, I know enough about that to make you look enough older to avoid suspicion. Besides, who’d remember a pilot?”

  “Lots of people.”

  “Nobody who’s important.”

  Bennett nodded. “But then you want me to do the work?”

  “Better than that. I want you to take over Spaceways!”

  “You can’t mean that!”

  “But I do! Since Laura Latham is dead, she’ll have to remain that way. I don’t think it’d be improper if she left a will leaving everything to you for the tender care you gave her during her last weeks of life. A holographic will stands up in any court, and I don’t think my handwriting has changed too much over the years. If it has my fingerprints, it should be a satisfactory signature. I’ll bet with Oscar’s help we can make it legal enough.”

  “That brings up another problem,” Bennett muttered. “What are we going to do with Oscar?”

  “Erase him, of course.”

  “But you can’t erase a ship’s computer.”

  “I’ll be willing to bet,” Laura said, “that if I was as awful as you’ve made me believe, I’d have some way to bollix Oscar. If I owned that ship, I owned a key to that robot. It would be out of character if I didn’t. If I was a stinker, I’m sure I was a good one—and a possibility of a record is something I wouldn’t care to have out of my hands.”

  “All right, granting that—and I’ll admit it’s a good possibility—what about me doublecrossing you and going off with all that money of yours.”

  She smiled. “I know you better than that, but if you tried, I could always come to life.”

  “I could kill you.”

  “No, you couldn’t. You’re not a criminal type. If you were, I wouldn’t be here after I tried to shoot you.” He grinned. “Whatever may have happened to your outlook you still haven’t lost your brain. Well, then, now that we’ve decided to kill Laura Latham off, let’s polish the details. I’ll take the plan to Collie and have her go over it and iron out the flaws.”

  “That seems sensible enough.”

  “Now about the ship. I’ll get the meks on it and have her patched up as good as new.”

  “Not that good. It’d be suspicious. No more than could be done by one man working without help for four years.”

  “I know. I didn’t mean quite what I said. I’ll repair the tanks, patch the holes, and restore the steering jets, but I won’t have the meks do a finished job. I’ll leave it crude—but workable.”

  She shrugged. “That’s your problem. As far as mechanics are concerned I’ll sit it out. But I’m coming with you, of course. We’ll have to figure out some way to get me to Earth without rousing too much suspicion, but you’re going to need me on the sidelines if things get tough. But I’m sure you’ll pull through all right. I have confidence in you.”

  “That’s not confidence, that’s plain foolishness. But if it works, we have it made.”

  “It’ll work all right. No one will possibly question us after Collie works the plan over. It’ll be airtight. And once we get settled you can start organizing Altruism Incorporated.”

  “Huh?” Bennett looked blank.

  “Your noble plans for the betterment of humanity. If you’re smart, you’ll incorporate.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s obvious,” Laura replied. “A corporation is the only thing in our civilization that has a personality and lives forever. If we worked in person, a few decades would give away our secret, but under the cover of a corporate body we could move freely. Since you’re so eager to give everything we have away, let’s go about it sensibly. A corporation is expected to be ageless. Look at General Electronics. It can trace its life clear back to the General Electric Corporation of the Dark Ages. And we’ll need something with a life span at least that long to accomplish our purposes.”

  “That’s taking a long view of it.”

  “That’s the only view we can take. Actually, that’ll be our only advantage, and we must have it to control the one thing that’s important. With the power of granting eternal youth we can do anything. Ultimately we’ll have every outstanding scientist and philosopher in the galaxy in our organization, and with them on our team, we’ll never be touched. In the end we’ll control the Confederation.”

  “But I don’t want that.”

  “You can’t avoid it. It’s inevitable. It’s the only way we can keep what we have unless we stay here forever and say nothing. If we’re going to be altruistic, we’ll have to do it on a sound business basis, within the laws of Civilization.”

  Bennett chuckled. “I see how you become a power. You had the ability all along.”

  “I don’t want this—not really,” she said. “And I think we should make Collie chairman of the board. Her brain is better than either of ours, and her attitude is much better. I’m selfish, and you’re foolish. But she’s been conditioned to service, and she won’t let us down.”

  “Collie’s going to like it,” he said. “It’ll give her something to do that’ll make her use her powers. And in the meantime,” he ruffled her hair with one big hand, “I think we’d better keep our feet on the ground and let her work out the details. There’s no sense in having a superior mind available and not use it.”

  Laura sighed and settled herself in his lap. “That’s the first thing you’ve said that has the elements of real sense.”

  “I’ve been saving Civilization,” he grinned. “There hasn’t been time to be sensible.”

  “There’s all the time in the world. There’s years ahead of us, and I’m going to have my share of them.”

  Bennett smiled at her. “You’re a very demanding woman,” he said.

  “I know it,” she replied complacently, “but I never demand what I can’t get.” She twisted in his arms and kissed him full on the mouth.

  “You’re incorrigible!” Bennett chuckled.

  “It’s just animal spirits,” she said demurely. “Let Collie run the altruism. It’s a proper job for her. And in the meantime I’ll run you. At least, part of the time.”

  1960

  CULTURAL EXCHANGE

  How could any race look so ferocious and yet be peaceful—and devise so nasty a weapon?

  I

  I COULDN’T help listening to the big spaceman sitting alone at the corner table. He wasn’t speaking to me—that was certain—nor was his flat, curiously uninflected voice directed at anyone else. With some surprise I realized that he was talking to himself. People don’t do that nowadays. They’re adjusted.

  He noted my raised eyebrows and grinned, his square teeth white against the dark planes of his face. “I’m not psycho,�
� he said. “It’s just a bad habit I picked up on Lyrane.”

  “Lyrane?” I asked.

  “It hasn’t been entered on the charts yet. Just discovered.” His voice was inflected now. And then it changed abruptly. “If you must know, this is ethanol—C2H5OH—and I drink it.” He looked at me with an embarrassed expression in his blue eyes. “It’s just that I’m not used to it yet,” he explained without explaining. “It’s easier when I vocalize.”

  “You sure you’re all right?” I asked. “Want me to call a psychologician?”

  “No. I’ve just been certified by Decontamination. I have a paper to prove it.”

  “But—”

  “Draw up a chair,” he invited. “I hate to drink alone. And I’d like to talk to somebody.”

  I smiled. My talent was working as usual. I can’t walk into a bar without someone telling me his life history. Nice old ladies buttonhole me at parties and tell me all about their childhoods. Boys tell me about girls. Girls tell me about boys. Politicians spill party secrets and pass me tips.

  Something about me makes folks want to talk. It’s a talent and in my business it’s an asset. You see, I’m a freelance writer. Nothing fancy or significant, just news, popular stuff, adventure stories, problem yarns, romances, and mysteries. I’ll never go down in history as a literary great, but it’s a living—and besides I meet the damnedest characters.

  So I sat down.

  “I guess you’re not contagious if you’ve been through Decontamination,” I said.

  HE LOOKED at me across the rim of an oversized brandy sniffer—a Napoleon, I think it’s called—and waggled a long forefinger at my nose. “The trouble with you groundhogs is that you’re always thinking we spacers are walking hotbeds of contagion all primed to wreck Earth. You should know better. Anything dangerous has about as much chance of getting through Decontamination as an ice cube has of getting through a nuclear furnace.”

  “There was Martian Fever,” I reminded him.

  “Three centuries ago and you still remember it,” he said. “But has there been anything else since Decontamination was set up?”

  “No,” I admitted, “but that was enough, wasn’t it? We still haven’t reached the preMars population level.”

  “Who wants to?” He sipped at the brownish fluid in the glass and a shudder rippled the heavy muscles of his chest and shoulders. He grinned nastily and took a bigger drink. “There, that ought to hold you,” he muttered. He looked at me, that odd embarrassed look glinting in his eyes. “I think that did it. No tolerance for alcohol.”

  I gave him my puzzled and expectant look.

  He countered with a gesture at the nearly empty brandy glass. I got the idea. I signaled autoservice—a conditioned reflex developed over years of pumping material out of spacemen—and slipped my ID into the check slot of the robot as it rolled up beside us and waited, humming expectantly.

  “Rum,” the spaceman said. “Demerara, four ounces.”

  “You are cautioned, sir,” the autoservice said in a flat mechanical voice. “Demerara rum is one hundred fifty proof and is not meant to be ingested by terrestrial life-forms without prior dilution.”

  “Shut up and serve,” I said. The robot clicked disapprovingly, gurgled briefly inside its cubical interior and extruded a pony glass of brownish liquid. “Sir, you will undoubtedly end up in a drunkard’s grave, dead of hepatic cirrhosis,” it informed me virtuously as it returned my ID card. I glared as I pushed the glass across the table.

  “Robots,” I said contemptuously. It was lost on that metallic monstrosity. It was already rolling away toward another table.

  The spaceman poured the pony glass into his Napoleon, sniffed appreciatively, sipped delicately and extended a meaty hand. “My name’s Halsey,” he said. “Captain Roger Halsey. I skipper the Two Two Four.”

  “The Bureau ship that landed this morning?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I’m one of the Bureau’s brave boys.” There was a faint sneer in his voice. “The good old Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration. The busy BEE.” He failed to pronounce the individual letters. “You’re a reporter, aren’t you?” he asked suddenly.

  “How’d you guess?”

  “That little trick of not answering an introduction. Most of you sludge pumpers do it, but I never knew why.”

  “Libel and personal privacy laws,” I said. “If you don’t know who we are, you can’t sue.”

  He grinned. “Okay. I don’t care. Keep your privacy. All I want is someone to talk to.” I smiled inwardly.

  “Think my job’s exciting?” he asked. “Skipper of an exploration ship. Poking my nose into odd corners of the Galaxy. Seeing what’s over the hill.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Well, you’d be wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred. It’s just a job. Most of it is checking—or did you know that only one sun in ten has planets, and only one in ten thousand has a spectrum that will support human life, and that only one in ten thousand planets has Earthlike qualities? So you can imagine how we felt when we ran across Lyrane.” He grimaced wryly. “I had it on the log as Halsey’s Planet for nearly two weeks before we discovered it was inhabited.” He shrugged. “So the name was changed. Too bad. Always did want to have a planet named after me. But I’ll make it yet.”

  I clucked sympathetically. Capt. Halsey sighed, and this is what he told me.

  II

  IT’S a beautiful world, Lyrane is. Like Earth must have been before it got cluttered up with people. No cities, no smoke, no industrial complexes—just green plains, snowy mountains, dark forests, blue seas, and white polar caps all wrapped in cotton clouds swimming in the clearest atmosphere you ever saw. It made my eyes ache to look at it. And it affected the crew the same way.

  We were wild to land. We came straight in along the equatorial plane until we hit the Van Allen Belt and the automatics took over. We stopped dead, matched intrinsics and skirted the outer band, checking the radiation quality and the shape of the Belt. It was a pure band that dipped down at the poles to form entry zones. There was not a sign of bulges or industrial contaminants.

  Naturally we had everything trained on the planet while we made our sweeps—organic detectors, radar, spectroanalytic probes—all the gadgets the BEE equips us with to make analysis easy and complete. The readings were so homelike that every man was landsick. I wasn’t any different from the rest of them, but I was in command and I had to be cautious about setting the Two Two Four down until we’d really wrung the analytic data dry.

  So, while the crew grumbled about hanging outside on a skyhook, we kept swinging around in a polar orbit until we knew that world below us like a baby knows its mother. It checked clean to five decimal places, which is the limit of our gadgetry. Paradise, that’s what it was—a paradise untrod by human foot. And every foot on the ship was itching.

  “When we gonna land, Skipper?” Alex Baranov asked me. It was a gross breach of discipline, but I forgave him. Alex was the second engineer, an eager kid on his first flight out from Earth. Like most youngsters, he thought there was romance in space, but right now he was landsick. Even worse than most of us. And, like most kids, he’d leap where angels’d dread to walk on tiptoe.

  “We’ll land,” I assured him. “You’ll be down there pretty soon.”

  He hurried off to tell the others.

  We set the ship down in the middle of one of the continental land masses in an open plain surrounded by forest and ran a few more tests before we stepped out, planted the flag, and claimed the place for the Confederation. After that we had an impromptu celebration to thoroughly enjoy the solid feel of ground under our feet and open sky overhead. It lasted all of five minutes before we came to our senses and posted a guard.

  It was five minutes too long. Alex Baranov had a chance to get out of sight and go exploring, and, like a kid, he took it. We didn’t miss him for nearly ten minutes more, and in fifteen minutes a man can cover quite a bit of territory.

  �
��Anyone see where he went?” I asked.

  “He was wearing a menticom,” one of the crew offered. “Said he wanted to look around.”

  “The idiot!” I snapped. “He had no business going off like that.”

  “Nobody told him not to,” Dan Warren said. Dan was my executive officer, and a good hand in case of trouble, but he left the command decisions to me, and of course I figured that everybody knew the cardinal rule of first landings. The net result was that Alex had disappeared.

  I went back into the ship and broke out another menticom.

  “Alex!” I broadcasted. “Return to ship at once!”

  “I can’t, Skipper,” Alex’s projection came back to me. “I’m surrounded.”

  “By what? Where?”

  “They look sorta human—bigger than us. I’m near the edge of the forest nearest the ship. I can’t do anything. I didn’t bring a blaster.” There was panic in his thoughts. And then suddenly I saw two hairy bipeds flash across Alex’s vision. Both of them were carrying spears. The nearest one jumped and lunged. The scene dissolved in a blaze of red panic and the projection cut off as though someone had turned a switch.

  I had a fix now and turned to face a knob of forest jutting out into the plain. Near the forest’s edge I saw a flurry of movement that vanished as I watched.

  “Break out a ‘copter,” I ordered.

  “Why?” Warren asked, and then I realized that I alone of all the crew had seen what had happened to Alex.

  I told them.

  THE search, of course, was unproductive. I didn’t expect that it would be anything else. I was pretty certain that Alex was a casualty. I’d felt people die while wearing menticoms, and the same blank sense of emptiness had blotted out Alex. It was a bad deal all around. I liked that kid.