COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 360
The baiting note faded from their yells, but the volume of the noise did not slacken. They meant him to go. There was a dogged quality in their voices that would not cease while he stood here in their world. He would not again hear any sound in Malesco except the roaring of the people urging him toward Paradise.
There was nothing left for him to do but accept the honor and the glory that was being thrust upon him. He turned with a regal sweep of his robes and with sudden firmness strode unhesitatingly toward the Earth-Gates. He knew what he was doing. He knew better than any of us just then. But he never faltered.
He moved like a juggernaut to the last. He'd always crushed opposition. Now, when it was his own life that stood in the way of the prestige he'd built up and lived by for so long, his hubris sustained him and he crushed that, too. He rolled forward with grim pride, refusing to depart from Malesco in anything less than the full dignity of his office. In his own way he was magnificent.
With majestic stride he stepped up on the brink of the Earth-Gates. The blurred sounds of New York traffic and the blurred motions of the lights flickered in his very face as he stood there. He did not hesitate or look back. He raised one arm in a gesture of farewell to the watchers and stepped forward over the threshold.
The last sound he heard must have been the roar of his people driving him out of Malesco and into Paradise.
The people couldn't see what we saw, on the dais. He'd planned it that way naturally. He hadn't wanted anybody but the priests to see the trap he'd set for Lorna and me.
He'd had no intention of letting living people return to New York and open the way for more angels from Paradise. He'd had trouble enough as it was. So the Earth-Gates were set to insure that no living person could pass between the worlds.
There was a flare of bright gold when he touched the surface of the screen. The flare was blinding. From below, in the hall, all anybody could see was the upper area of the flash. But from where I stood I saw the figure in the gleaming robes pause for an instant between two worlds, in that singing void I remembered so well myself. He was balanced on the crossbar of the Alchemic A, in effect, the bridge narrow under his feet.
Then fire sprang out all around him.
I saw the golden robes catch and go up in colored flames. I saw his hair catch and burn like a crown. But when the fire took hold on the man himself its brilliance increased suddenly a hundredfold, and the Hierarch vanished in a furnace glare which no one who watched could endure to gaze at.
I shut my eyes. Inside the lids for a moment or two the outlines of the burning man were etched clearly, an after-image incised by the brilliance of the flame that destroyed him. He stood in full outline upon my inner lids for longer than the man himself stood in his own body. I think he was consumed and destroyed before his image faded against my closed eyes.
And that's how it happened that Lorna Maxwell and I stepped through onto the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street at three in the morning, dressed in fantastic garments. The lumbering buses and the stone lions were a lot less real to us than the world we'd just left.
When you think about it you have to realize that a lot of clichés are self-fulfilling by definition. Given a particular setup plus a particular stimulus, the chances are strong that a particular result will follow, trite because it's more or less inevitable. It wasn't yet dawn in Malesco when we fulfilled our own cliché and rounded out the ceremony by departing with full grandeur through the Earth-Gates, back to Paradise.
Of course I could have made a speech before I left. I could have said, "There's no point in making a ceremony of this because your whole religion is based on a fraud. New York's no more a Paradise than Malesco. The theory of reincarnation is stultifying and alchemy as a religion isn't going to get you anywhere no matter how hard you try."
They would probably have mobbed me if I'd said it. You can't change the thinking patterns of a world overnight by administering a few home truths. It will be a long slow subtle process if it takes place at all. That's Coriole's problem, to be tackled sometime in the future. His immediate problem that night was to get rid of Lorna and me quickly.
I had played Prometheus and my part was over. Lorna had been too much the tool of the Hierarch to be welcome in Malesco. The sooner we were shunted back to Paradise and the Earth-Gates firmly closed behind us, the better.
So we left Malesco. And the gates were closed. I doubt if they will open again in our lifetime. The things that are going on behind it now are probably very interesting and exciting—for Malescans—but they're no business of ours. Coriole knows what he wants and traffic with Earth isn't on the list.
We left the rose-red city in the throes of its own revolution and came home to Paradise.
-
Epilogue
She calls herself Malesca now. You can see why.
And she's beautiful, all right. Probably her press agent's telling the truth when he says she's the most beautiful girl in the world—if you like that kind of beauty. It's saccharine. I know I couldn't live with it myself.
Still, the Malescan priesthood knew what it was doing. They were clever psychologists. They worked out all the features that would appeal most strongly to Malescans—who are extremely human.
Pygmalion fell in love with Galatea, didn't he? Even though he knew she was nothing but a chunk of stone. But the beauty that shaped the stone was irresistible.
Lorna says she loves me. That began a long time ago, before the episode in Malesco. She says she hadn't changed. But she has, of course. Malesco changed her quite a lot.
She had nothing I wanted before the change and the essential Lorna, the woman behind all that beauty, is exactly the same. I know it. I wish I could forget it. The forces that drive a man or a nation or a world are inarguable. I can't fight them, myself. I wish I could.
Because blast all clichés—I love her. In my own way. After a fashion. I couldn't live with her. You know what she's like. And that's why I'd never have gone to the place that night if I'd known she was singing there.
But I sat clinking ice in my glass, listening to Malesca sing. They gave her a beautiful voice. I kept repeating axioms to myself to drown out the sweetness of the song that was hypnotizing everyone else in the room. "Beauty is only skin deep," I thought. "Handsome is as handsome does. A bird in the hand—"
Applause in a sudden storm interrupted me. I looked up to see Malesca bowing, making every motion a symphony of grace. Her luminous blue eyes were searching the dimness for me, bewildered and determined as they always were whenever she looked at me.
She wasn't going to accept refusal. She was going to come to me again as soon as the applause stopped. She was going to sit down beside me and plead again in that lovely throaty voice, soft as velvet and sweet as honey.
I finished my drink in one quick gulp, jumped up and started toward the exit. Behind me the applause died and I heard Malesca's voice calling, "Eddie, Eddie!"
When I reached the door I was almost running.
The End
THE SKY IS FALLING
Planet Stories - Fall 1950
with Henry Kurrner
(as by C. H. Liddell)
The Blow-Up was coming. It was near ... Johnny Dyson knew he would see it soon. One minute, Earth. The next ... little Nova, weeping radioactive dust into the void. Then Johnny and the Robot would build an Eden on Mars ...
-
JOHNNY WONDERED WHEN the spaceship would get there. He didn't know where "there" was—nobody knew. But he was anxious for landing-day to come. It would give day a real meaning, after the endless artificial days and nights of the ship.
Not that the ship wasn't comfortable, and not that there wasn't purpose in that comfort. Johnny would have to be in perfect shape when the hour of landing finally came and his job would begin. Because he wanted to be in condition to do the job, he had trained his mind to complete relaxation.
So he lay back in his deep chair and watched the viziports with their troubling tri-dimensional visions of what no longer existed. Blue sky, white clouds, birds, the tops of buildings—he closed his eyes. Perhaps it had been a mistake, after all, this hiding the blackness of space by camouflage. He didn't want to remember Earth. There was no Earth. There was a shaking white blaze among the stars, somewhere a long way back now, and that was all. No Earth.
All that remained of it was himself, this ship, the robot that took care of them both, and the images that filled the viziports with nostalgic pictures.
The rest was over, finished. He didn't often let himself think about the unpleasant past, or how, for himself, the beginning of the end had happened ...
-
LEANING BACK against the bulkhead, Johnny Dyson smiled.
"Go on," he said to the hooked fish named Benjy White.
White tipped his head back cautiously because of the cumbersome helmet he wore, sprouting wires like Medusa-hair. He looked at his own foreshortened image reflected dimly in the steel ceiling and nodded sagely at himself.
"Yeah," he said, "I learned about women from her. I sure did. Toughest tomato I ever met, then or since. Only one thing ever scared Poochie—I called her Poochie—"
Beyond the steel walls lay the endless red hills of Mars. Beyond the steel ceiling hung Orion in a blue-black sky lighted by tumbling moons. Somewhere between here and Orion rolled a time-bomb called Earth with its fuse set and lighted and the hours ticking along toward Blow-Up.
"I called her Poochie," White said. "If I told you her real name you'd be surprised. After she swiped my dough and divorced me she went right on to the top. What a woman. Now she owns half of—"
Johnny Dyson thought of the take-off, scheduled for noon tomorrow. Back to Earth. Back to the eve of Armageddon. "Back to the world I never made," he thought fiercely. "—'I, a stranger and afraid—' "
Well, he had a right to be afraid. He knew what was coming. He thought:
Problem: To keep the ship on Mars.
Method: To steal the atomic fuel.
It was perfectly simple. All good plans were simple. Unfortunately it depended on the simple mind of White whether or not the plan worked out. And White was a well-hooked fish, all right, but he wasn't landed yet. He wore the transmitter that controlled the ship's robot. And the robot was the key to the fuel supply which could bridge the long jump between Mars, where life could be an Eden, and Earth, where life was doomed. Sooner or later, sooner or later ...
"Oh, well," White was saying, "Funny thing is, there's a warrant out for my arrest back on Earth, and the company that issued it belongs to Poochie lock, stock and barrel. She don't know about it, of course." He chuckled sardonically.
"Think I could get her to quash that warrant? No, sir. Only one thing ever scared that woman. Thunder. If I went to Poochie right now—only it'd be a long walk—if I went to her and said, 'Poochie, remember how you used to try to crawl in my pocket whenever it thundered? Well, now, for old time's sake—' "
He grinned, shaking his head until the Medusa-wires whined against each other.
"That woman," he said admiringly. "That woman. She'd put the cuffs on me herself. Tough as pig-iron. Never was very pretty, but "she looks like a hippo these days. My opinion, if she ever got the idea of conquering the world, she'd do it. Oh, well. She went up. I didn't."
"What's the warrant for?" Dyson asked, not caring.
"Larceny. I guess I sort of miscalculated there." White grinned again. "Not so good, is it? I look older than I am, the life I led, but I'm under fifty. And I always felt I had my best years ahead. Still feel that way. I'd hate to waste 'em in jail. I'll tell you, Johnny, I kind of like your idea of staying on here. Not going back. Nobody to say, 'Move along, bud.' And then there's lots of things I always wanted to do, never been let. Lots of things. On Earth, I'd never get a chance."
Now they were getting to it. Dyson kept the eagerness out of his voice with rigid control. All he said was, "We're in Eden, Benjy. We've got all the power we need in the batteries—safe power. Safe atomic power. We've got the robot. People were right when they said heaven was in the sky, Benjy. Mars is heaven."
"Mm-m. Sometimes Mars is underneath, too. Still, the closer I get to that larceny rap, the more I like your idea. Just like Paradise. Milk and honey for free. All we'd need is some houris," White said, mispronouncing it.
"You can't have everything."
"Guess not. Still, it almost seems like in this set-up you got planned, I could wish for anything and just get it. If I wished for a woman—" He snorted. "I might get Poochie, come to think of it. Oh, Lord. Maybe later we could put the robot to work on quasi-biology. I recollect something about surrogate plasms. If I could rig the genes in advance I could maybe work out a nice, comfortable little lady and speed up her growing time. Wonder how long it'd take her to hit biological twenty? It's an idea, Johnny, it's an idea."
"Sure, why not? Wish on a star. All you need's to be on the right star. This is it. We can do anything we want, and there's nobody to stop us."
"Martine," White said.
"Two against one. Benjy?"
"Yeah?"
"We can do it. Right now."
White's brows lifted.
"What's happened? Not—" His face changed. He tilted his head to stare at the dull reflection in the ceiling. Beyond it he was seeing the night sky and the blue-green star of Earth.
"Oh no, no," Dyson said quickly. "Not the Blow-Up. Not yet, anyhow."
White shrugged. "May never come," he said, and stretched his arm out for a cigarette on the table beside him. "May never come at all."
"It'll come," Dyson said quietly. "It doesn't matter a hoot whether or not our cargo gets back to Earth. Ever since the Forties physicists have been looking for an atomic safety, and if they couldn't even find it through artificial radio-elements, what good can Martian ores do? We've wasted six months mining junk."
"Can't tell that," White said, blowing smoke. "We got no equipment for refining and testing. All we do is hunt, dig and load. The rest is up to the physics boys."
Dyson shook his head.
"It'll come," he insisted. "Ever since Alamogordo it's been coming. So I say, what's the use of going back? All you'll get out of it's jail. All I'll get is—oh, I don't know. More hard work, more worries, the same old routine. And for what? The Blow-Up. That's all. Why work?"
-
WHITE, sitting on the edge of'the bunk, humped himself forward, elbows on knees, cigarette dangling from his lips. The wires of the helmet cast complex shadows over his face. He didn't answer.
Dyson said eagerly, "We can pull our plan right now, Benjy. Martine's micro-photographing the log. He'll be busy for a couple of hours more anyway. We'll have all the time we need to hide the fuel."
White tried absently to scratch his head and tangled his fingers in a maze of insulated wiring.
"Not so fast," he said. "What's the big rush? We got to think this over. I'm not going to haul that fuel around. Even if I had lead skin, I'd still say no thanks."
"Who's asking you to haul fuel? All you've got to do is hand over that transmitter."
White looked at him sidewise. His eyes grew slightly glassy. "Hold on there. The robot's got to stay energized. It takes somebody's mind to do that. If I took it off—"
"I'd put it on."
"Yes, but—look here, there might be trouble if I—"
"Martine's busy, I tell you."
"I mean robot trouble. Suppose we need the critter in an emergency? After all, the robot's the lad who's got to pilot us home."
"Not if we don't go. Look, Benjy. We won't be leaving Mars. Got that?"
White screwed up his face dubiously. "Yeah," he said.
"Okay. That means the ship will be immobilized. Got that too?"
White blew smoke and studied it, squinting.
"Sure."
"So we don't have to worry about the robot. All it's going to do is take the fuel out and hide it where Martine can't find it. Got that?"
White snorted and inhaled smoke.
"Sure I got it. I ain't dumb. Even if they did pick three beat-up techs like us for this crazy trip, that don't mean my head's soft yet. I get it, all right. Only, I got my orders about this robot. Martine would blow his top if he caught you with the helmet on."
"I know how to handle the thing. I've done it before."
"Not since the Chief caught you passing the buck to the robot," White said with the air of one capturing a minor pawn.
That had happened a month before when Dyson, wearing the transmitter, had sent the robot down a deep crevasse to test rock strata. Martine had objected violently. While the robot was far stronger and more agile than a man, it was also much heavier and more fragile, even in the decreased gravity of Mars. Obviously too, Martine considered the robot much less expendable than Johnny Dyson. Insofar as this argument applied to the social unit it was true, since the piloting of the ship depended on the precision, memory and integration of the robot. Dyson, however, remained unconvinced.
