American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Read online

  “Sand and smoke,” he said promptly. “Didn’t you read my report?”

  “Certainly. I want to know more.”

  “Everything’s in the report. Good Lord, they kept me in the interrogation room for three solid days when I got back. If I left anything out, it’s gone permanently.”

  I said: “That’s not what I mean, Jack. Who wants to spend his life reading reports? I have fifteen men in Research doing nothing but digesting reports for me so I don’t have to read them. I want to know something more. I want to get the feel of the planet. There’s only one place I can get it because only one man’s been there.”

  “And sometimes I wish I hadn’t,” O’Shea said wearily. “Well, where do I start? You know how they picked me—the only midget in the world with a pilot’s license. And you know all about the ship. And you saw the assay reports on the samples I brought back. Not that they mean much. I only touched down once, and five miles away the geology might be entirely different.”

  “I know all that. Look, Jack, put it this way. Suppose you wanted a lot of people to go to Venus. What would you tell them about it?”

  He laughed. “I’d tell them a lot of damn big lies. Start from scratch, won’t you? What’s the deal?”

  I gave him a fill-in on what Schocken Associates was up to, while his round little eyes stared at me from his round little face. There is an opaque quality, like porcelain, to the features of midgets: as though the destiny that had made them small at the same time made them more perfect and polished than ordinary men, to show that their lack of size did not mean lack of completion. He sipped his drink and I gulped mine between paragraphs.

  When my pitch was finished I still didn’t know whether he was on my side or not, and with him it mattered. He was no civil service puppet dancing to the strings that Fowler Schocken knew ways of pulling. Neither was he a civilian who could be bought with a tiny decimal of our appropriation. Fowler had helped him a little to capitalize on his fame via testimonials, books, and lectures, so he owed us a little gratitude, and no more.

  He said: “I wish I could help,” and that made things easier.

  “You can,” I told him. “That’s what I’m here for. Tell me what Venus has to offer.”

  “Damn little,” he said, with a small frown chiseling across his lacquered forehead. “Where shall I start? Do I have to tell you about the atmosphere? There’s free formaldehyde, you know —embalming fluid. Or the heat? It averages above the boiling point of water—if there were any water on Venus, which there isn’t. Not accessible, anyhow. Or the winds? I clocked five hundred miles an hour.”

  “No, not exactly that,” I said. “I know about that. And honestly, Jack, there are answers for all those things. I want to get the feel of the place, what you thought when you were there, how you reacted. Just start talking. I’ll tell you when I’ve had what I wanted.”

  He dented his rose-marble lip with his lower teeth. “Well,” he said, “let’s start at the beginning. Get us another drink, won’t you?”

  The waiter came, took our order, and came back with the liquor. Jack drummed on the table, sipped his rhine-wine and seltzer, and began to talk.

  He started way back, which was good. I wanted to know the soul of the fact, the elusive, subjective mood that underlay his technical reports on the planet Venus, the basic feeling that would put compulsion and conviction into the project.

  He told me about his father, the six-foot chemical engineer, and his mother, the plump, billowy housewife. He made me feel their dismay and their ungrudging love for their thirtyfive-inch son. He had been eleven years old when the subject of his adult life and work first came up. He remembered the unhappiness on their faces at his first, inevitable, offhand suggestion about the circus. It was no minor tribute to them that the subject never came up again. It was a major tribute that Jack’s settled desire to learn enough engineering and rocketry to be a test pilot had been granted, paid for, and carried out in the face of every obstacle of ridicule and refusal from the schools.

  Of course Venus had made it all pay off.

  The Venus rocket designers had run into one major complication. It had been easy enough to get a rocket to the moon a quarter-million miles away; theoretically it was not much harder to blast one across space to the nearest other world, Venus. The question was one of orbits and time, of controlling the ship and bringing it back again. A dilemma. They could blast the ship to Venus in a few days—at so squandersome a fuel expenditure that ten ships couldn’t carry it. Or they could ease it to Venus along its natural orbits as you might float a barge down a gentle river—which saved the fuel but lengthened the trip to months. A man in eighty days eats twice his own weight in food, breathes nine times his weight of air, and drinks water enough to float a yawl. Did somebody say: distill water from the waste products and recirculate it; do the same with food; do the same with air? Sorry. The necessary equipment for such cycling weighs more than the food, air, and water. So the human pilot was out, obviously.

  A team of designers went to work on an automatic pilot. When it was done it worked pretty well. And weighed four and one half tons in spite of printed circuits and relays constructed under a microscope.

  The project stopped right there until somebody thought of that most perfect servo-mechanism: a sixty-pound midget. A third of a man in weight, Jack O’Shea ate a third of the food, breathed a third of the oxygen. With minimum-weight, lowefficiency water- and air-purifiers, Jack came in just under the limit and thereby won himself undying fame.

  He said broodingly, a little drunk from the impact of two weak drinks on his small frame: “They put me into the rocket like a finger into a glove. I guess you know what the ship looked like. But did you know they zipped me into the pilot’s seat? It wasn’t a chair, you know. It was more like a diver’s suit; the only air on the ship was in that suit; the only water came in through a tube to my lips. Saved weight . . .”

  And the next eighty days were in that suit. It fed him, gave him water, sopped his perspiration out of its air, removed his body wastes. If necessary it would have shot novocaine into a broken arm, tourniqueted a cut femoral artery, or pumped air for a torn lung. It was a placenta, and a hideously uncomfortable one.

  In the suit thirty-three days going, forty-one coming back. The six days in between were the justification for the trip.

  Jack had fought his ship down through absolute blindness: clouds of gas that closed his own eyes and confused the radar, down to the skin of an unknown world. He had been within a thousand feet of the ground before he could see anything but swirling yellow. And then he landed and cut the rockets.

  “Well, I couldn’t get out, of course,” he said. “For forty or fifty reasons, somebody else will have to be the first man to set foot on Venus. Somebody who doesn’t care much about breathing, I guess. Anyway, there I was, looking at it.” He shrugged his shoulders, looked baffled, and said a dirty word softly. “I’ve told it a dozen times at lectures, but I’ve never got it over. I tell ’em the closest thing to it on Earth is the Painted Desert. Maybe it is; I haven’t been there.

  “The wind blows hard on Venus and it tears up the rocks. Soft rocks blow away and make the dust storms. The hard parts—well, they stick out in funny shapes and colors. Great big monument things, some of them. And the most jagged hills and crevasses you can imagine. It’s something like the inside of a cave, sort of—only not dark. But the light is—funny. Nobody ever saw light like that on Earth. Orangy-brownish light, brilliant, very brilliant, but sort of threatening. Like the way the sky is threatening in the summer around sunset just before a smasher of a thunderstorm. Only there never is any thunderstorm because there isn’t a drop of water around.” He hesitated. “There is lightning. Plenty of it, but never any rain . . . I don’t know, Mitch,” he said abruptly. “Am I being any help to you at all?”

  I took my time answering. I looked at my watch and saw that the return jet was about to leave, so I bent down and turned off the recorder in my br
iefcase. “You’re being lots of help, Jack,” I said. “But I’ll need more. And I have to go now. Look, can you come up to New York and work with me for a while? I’ve got everything you said on tape, but I want visual stuff too. Our artists can work from the pix you brought back, but there must be more. And you’re a lot more use than the photographs for what we need.” I didn’t mention that the artists would be drawing impressions of what Venus would look like if it were different from what it was. “How about it?”

  Jack leaned back and looked cherubic but, though he made me sweat through a brief recap of the extensive plans his lecture agent had made for his next few weeks, he finally agreed. The Shriners’ talk could be canceled, he decided, and the appointments with his ghost writers could be kept as well in New York as in Washington. We made a date for the following day just as the PA system announced that my flight was ready.

  “I’ll walk you to the plane,” Jack offered. He slipped down from the chair and threw a bill on the table for the waiter. We walked together through the narrow aisles of the bar out into the field. Jack grinned and strutted a little at some ohs and ahs that went up as he was recognized. The field was almost dark, and the glow of Washington backlighted the silhouettes of hovering aircraft. Drifting toward us from the freight terminal was a huge cargo ’copter, a fifty-tonner, its cargo nacelle gleaming in colors as it reflected the lights below. It was no more than fifty feet in the air, and I had to clutch my hat against the downdraft from its whirling vanes.

  “Damn-fool bus drivers,” Jack grunted, staring up at the ’copter. “They ought to put those things on G.C.A. Just because they’re maneuverable those fan-jockeys think they can take them anywhere. If I handled a jet the way they—Run! Run!” Suddenly he was yelling at me and pushing at my middle with both his small hands. I goggled at him; it was too sudden and disconnected to make any kind of sense. He lurched at me in a miniature body block and sent me staggering a few steps.

  “What the hell—?” I started to complain, but I didn’t hear my own words. They were drowned out by a mechanical snapping sound and a flutter in the beat of the rotors and then the loudest crash I had ever heard as the cargo pod of the ’copter hit the concrete a yard from where we stood. It ruptured and spilled cartons of Starrzelius Verily rolled oats. One of the crimson cylinders rolled to my toes and I stupidly picked it up and looked at it.

  Overhead the lightened ’copter fluttered up and away, but I didn’t see it go.

  “For God’s sake, get it off them!” Jack was yelling, tugging at me. We had not been alone on the field. From under the buckled aluminum reached an arm holding a briefcase, and through the compound noises in my ears I could hear a bubbling sound of human pain. That was what he meant. Get it off them. I let him pull me to the tangled metal, and we tried to heave it. I got a scratched hand and tore my jacket, and then the airport people got there and brusquely ordered us away.

  I don’t remember walking there, but by and by I found that I was sitting on someone’s suitcase, back against the wall of the terminal, with Jack O’Shea talking excitedly to me. He was cursing the class of cargo ’copter pilots and blackguarding me for standing there like a fool when he’d seen the nacelle clamps opening, and a great deal more that I didn’t get. I remember his knocking the red box of breakfast food from my hand impatiently. The psychologists say I am not unusually sensitive or timorous, but I was in a state of shock that lasted until Jack was loading me into my plane.

  Later on the hostess told me five people had been caught under the nacelle, and the whole affair seemed to come into focus. But not until we were halfway back to New York. At the time all I remembered, all that seemed important, was Jack’s saying over and over, bitterness and anger written on his porcelain face: “Too damn many people, Mitch. Too damn much crowding. I’m with you every inch of the way. We need Venus, Mitch, we need the space . . .”

  3

  Kathy’s apartment, way downtown in Bensonhurst, was not large but it was comfortable. In a homey, sensible way it was beautifully furnished. As who should know better than I? I pressed the button over the label “Dr. Nevin,” and smiled at her as she opened the door.

  She did not smile back. She said two things: “You’re late, Mitch,” and, “I thought you were going to call first.”

  I walked in and sat down. “I was late because I almost got killed and I didn’t call because I was late. Does that square us?” She asked the question I wanted her to ask, and I told her how close I had come to death that evening.

  Kathy is a beautiful woman with a warm, friendly face, her hair always immaculately done in two tones of blond, her eyes usually smiling. I have spent a great deal of time looking at her, but I never watched more attentively than when I told her about the cargo nacelle near-miss. It was, on the whole, disappointing. She was really concerned for me, beyond doubt. But Kathy’s heart opens to a hundred people and I saw nothing in her face to make me feel that she cared more for me than anyone else she had known for years.

  So I told her my other big news, the Venus account and my stewardship of it. It was more successful; she was startled and excited and happy, and kissed me in a flurry of good feeling. But when I kissed her, as I’d been wanting to do for months, she drew away and went to sit on the other side of the room, ostensibly to dial a drink.

  “You rate a toast, Mitch,” she smiled. “Champagne at the least. Dear Mitch, it’s wonderful news!”

  I seized the chance. “Will you help me celebrate? Really celebrate?”

  Her brown eyes were wary. “Um,” she said. Then: “Sure I will, Mitch. We’ll do the town together—my treat and no arguments about it. The only thing is, I’ll have to leave you punctually at 2400. I’m spending the night in the hospital. I’ve a hysterectomy to do in the morning and I mustn’t get to sleep too late. Or too drunk, either.”

  But she smiled.

  Once again I decided not to push my luck too far. “Great,” I said, and I wasn’t faking. Kathy is a wonderful girl to do the town with. “Let me use your phone?”

  By the time we had our drinks I had arranged for tickets to a show, a dinner table, and a reservation for a nightcap afterwards. Kathy looked a little dubious. “It’s a pretty crowded program for five hours, Mitch,” she said. “My hysterectomy isn’t going to like it if my hand shakes.” But I talked her out of it. Kathy is more resilient than that. Once she did a complete trepan the morning after we’d spent the entire night screaming out our tempers at each other, and it had gone perfectly.

  The dinner, for me, was a failure. I don’t pretend to be an epicure who can’t stand anything but new protein. I definitely am, however, a guy who gets sore when he pays new-protein prices and gets regenerated-protein merchandise. The texture of the shashlik we both ordered was all right, but you can’t hide the taste. I scratched the restaurant off my list then and there, and apologized to Kathy for it. But she laughed it off, and the show afterwards was fine. Hypnotics often give me a headache, but I slipped right into the trance state this time as soon as the film began and was none the worse for it afterwards.

  The night club was packed, and the headwaiter had made a mistake in the time for our reservations. We had to wait five minutes in the anteroom, and Kathy shook her head very decisively when I pleaded for an extension on the curfew. But when the headwaiter showed us with the fanciest apologies and bows to our places at the bar and our drinks came, she leaned over and kissed me again. I felt just fine.

  “Thanks,” she said. “That was a wonderful evening, Mitch. Get promoted often, please. I like it.”

  I lit a cigarette for her and one for myself, and opened my mouth to say something. I stopped.

  Kathy said, “Go ahead, say it.”

  “Well, I was going to say that we always have fun together.”

  “I know you were. And I was going to say that I knew what you were leading up to and that the answer still was no.”

  “I know you were,” I said glumly. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”r />
  She paid the tab and we left, inserting our antisoot plugs as we hit the street. “Cab, sir?” asked the doorman.

  “Yes, please,” Kathy answered. “A tandem.”

  He whistled up a two-man pedicab, and Kathy gave the lead boy the hospital’s address. “You can come if you like, Mitch,” she said, and I climbed in beside her. The doorman gave us a starting push and the cabbies grunted getting up momentum.

  Unasked, I put down the top. For a moment it was like our courtship again: the friendly dark, the slight, musty smell of the canvas top, the squeak of the springs. But for a moment only. “Watch that, Mitch,” she said warningly.

  “Please, Kathy,” I said carefully. “Let me say it anyhow. It won’t take long.” She didn’t say no. “We were married eight months ago—all right,” I said quickly as she started to speak, “it wasn’t an absolute marriage. But we took the interlocutory vows. Do you remember why we did that?”

  She said patiently after a moment: “We were in love.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I loved you and you loved me. And we both had our work to think about, and we knew that sometimes it made us a little hard to get along with. So we made it interim. It had a year to run before we had to decide whether to make it permanent.” I touched her hand and she didn’t move it away. “Kathy dear, don’t you think we knew what we were doing then? Can’t we—at least—give it the year’s trial? There are still four months to go. Let’s try it. If the year ends and you don’t want to file your certificate—well, at least I won’t be able to say you didn’t give me a chance. As for me, I don’t have to wait. My certificate’s on file now and I won’t change.”

  We passed a street light and I saw her lips twisted into an expression I couldn’t quite read. “Oh, damn it all, Mitch,” she said unhappily, “I know you won’t change. That’s what makes it all so terrible. Must I sit here and call you names to convince you that it’s hopeless? Do I have to tell you that you’re an illtempered, contriving, Machiavellian, selfish pig of a man to live with? I used to think you were a sweet guy, Mitch. An idealist who cared for principles and ethics instead of money. I had every reason to think so. You told me so yourself, very convincingly. You were very plausible about my work too. You boned up on medicine, you came to watch me operate three times a week, you told all our friends while I was sitting right in the room listening to you how proud you were to be married to a surgeon. It took me three months to find out what you meant by that. Anybody could marry a girl who’d be a housewife. But it took a Mitchell Courtenay to marry a firstclass rated surgeon and make her a housewife.” Her voice was tremulous. “I couldn’t take it, Mitch. I never will be able to. Not the arguments, the sulkiness, and the ever-and-ever fighting. I’m a doctor. Sometimes a life depends on me. If I’m all torn up inside from battling with my husband, that life isn’t safe, Mitch. Can’t you see that?”