Ballroom of the Skies (23 page)

They rode in silence for a time, nearing the apartment. The driver said, “When we used to have all them saucers around, my old man used to say it was time the Martians landed and took over. The old man had something, you know. Know what I think?”

“What?” said Dake.

“I figure those Martians took a good long look around and said to each other, boys, we better go away and come back in ten thousand years and see if these folks have grown up any. Man, it’s dangerous down there. Is this place you want in the middle of the block?”

“Right over there on the right, driver,” Mary said.

“Class, eh? Isn’t that where that racketeer used to live? Larner? Mig Larner?”

“That’s the place, driver.”

They got out. The driver took the fare, grinned. “I didn’t figure you to deadhead me. I can almost always tell. Be good now. Watch out for them Martians.”

They walked into the coolness of the air-conditioned lobby. Johnny came around from behind the desk, hand outstretched. “Here for good this time, Dake?”

“I think so.”

“Little stubborn, was he, Mary?”

“Did I take long?”

“Last ones in, dear. Martin Merman suddenly became interested in your space requirements the other day.”

Mary smiled. “He’s a hideous person. What he doesn’t know, he can guess.”

Johnny went back around to his side of the desk. “Both of you in suite 8C then?”

Stop blushing furiously, darling.

“Yes, Johnny,” she said.

“And so he’ll twin you on assignments. You’ll make an ominous pair, kids. Shard will have a happy time assigning the equivalent. Now Martin is expecting you for a couple of brief impressive ceremonies.”

They went down to the dioramic garden where Dake had first met Miguel Larner. Merman got up, his young-old face smiling, his handshake warm and firm.

He said, “It isn’t something we can give you, Dake. It’s something you have to find for yourself. You found it with Mary’s help. Are you ready to accept?”

“Completely.”

“That’s the only way we can … accept your acceptance. Without reservation. Raise your right hand, please. It isn’t necessary to repeat the phrases after me. Just say ‘I
do’ when I have finished. Do you, Dake Lorin, agree in heart, mind, and spirit with the eternal obligation of Earth, the planet of your origin, to provide leadership for Empire? Do you agree to accept dutifully all agent assignments given you with the full knowledge of the end purpose of those assignments, to provide leadership through keeping Earth, the planet of your origin, in a savage and backward state, where neither progress nor regression is possible? Do you promise to bring to this duty every resource of your mind and spirit, not only those resources recently acquired, but those developed in you by your environment prior to your association with us?”

Martin Merman’s eyes were level, sober, serious.

“I do,” Dake said.

“For the sake of all mankind,” Martin Merman said.

“For the sake of all mankind,” Mary repeated softly.

“Now you are one of us, Dake. I’ll break your heart a hundred times a year, from now on. At times you’ll be sickened, angry, resentful. You will be called on to do things which, in your previous existence, you would have considered loathsome. But you’ll do them. Because the purpose is clear. Cold. Inevitable.” He grinned suddenly. It was an astonishingly boyish grin. “Anything else, Mary?” he asked.

“Another … little ceremony, Martin.”

Now who looks like a beet?

“This is a tribal ceremony, Dake,” Martin said. “A uniting. It has no legal status among us. Only a moral and emotional status. Either of you can dissolve it at any time by merely stating the desire that it be dissolved. However, in our history, no such a uniting has ever been dissolved. It is, to pun badly, a mating of the minds. And in that field there can be no deceit, no unfortunate misunderstandings, no secrets, each from the other. You will live and work together as the closest possible team. You will complement each other’s efficiencies, and heal each other’s distress. Any children you may have will be taken from you and raised on one of the heart worlds, and you will renew your relationship with them once your duties here are over. They will still be children, still need you. And your eventual
Empire assignment will be as close as your assignment here. Do you accept that?”

“If Mary does.”

Mary nodded. Martin said, “Then we must have witnesses.” He smiled.

There was the faintest shimmer and Karen suddenly appeared near them. And then Johnny. And Watkins. And one by one, others from his training class. And the persons he had seen in the lobby that night long ago. And strangers. Many of them. All appearing, grouping themselves in the bright garden, their faces reflected in the garden pool.

Dake had always been a lonely man. He had never been a part of a group, never relished it, except during the months on Training T. There, for the first time, he had experienced the vague beginnings of group warmth and group unity.

And the warmth of all these people suddenly surrounded him, enfolded him. They had proud faces, and level eyes, and something unmistakably godlike about them. Super-beings who walked among men with sadness, with pride, with humility.

That group identity caught him up. He was a part of it. He knew that never again would he have the feeling of walking alone.

He stood for long moments, tasting this final acceptance, sensing the challenge of the years ahead, knowing that at this moment he began his apprenticeship.

He reached and took Mary’s firm brown hand, and turned just enough so that the two of them stood, side by side, facing Martin Merman. Her fingers tightened on his.

Dake Lorin squared his shoulders and stood quietly, awaiting Martin Merman’s words.

I wrote
Wine of the Dreamers
in 1950 and
Ballroom of the Skies
the following year.

When Knox Burger, who edits my work at Fawcett Publications, suggested we resurrect these two books, the only science fiction novels I have ever published, I read them for the first time since the obligatory reading in galley proofs nearly twenty years ago.

It would be a meretricious idiocy for any writer with any respect and consideration for his following to foist upon them the creative mistakes of the early years. I have closets full of previously published stories which will never see print again, regardless of whether I am on the scene or off in that limbo which I suspect is reserved for all novelists—where we are condemned to live for half of eternity in tiny rooms with the creatures of our own devising.

Though it may be merely one more symptom of the writer’s flawed objectivity, I found both these novels to be more cohesive and provocative than I had expected.

I have not revised them. I ached to doctor much stilted conversation, but to do so would have been to cheat, as somehow the pretentious and overly grammatic speeches made by the actors are touchingly typical of the genre.

They are both more accurately categorized as science fantasy than as science fiction, in that they
are neither space-adventure, nor mad-scientist, nor doom-machine epics.

The two novels are companion pieces in that they provide two congruent methods of accounting for all the random madness and unmotivated violence in our known world, and two quite different answers as to why, with all our technology, we seem unable to move a fraction of an inch toward bettering the human condition and making of life a universally more rewarding experience.

This, for the writer, is the charm of such novels, as they enable him to step up onto a small shaky soapbox and say something, without ever lecturing the reader, about the moral and emotional furniture of our lives. Books of this sort have a functional relationship to the world’s religions, in that they also make a sober attempt to explain the inexplicable, account for the unaccountable.

I confess to being particularly jolted by finding in
Wine of the Dreamers
that the Paris Peace Talks were still going on in 1975, that the Asians were quarreling with Russia about the orbits for snooper satellites, and that a substance was being advertised and sold to millions of Americans as a non-alcoholic, non-habit-forming beverage which would heighten the sensory response to such stimuli as a kiss or a sunset. I wish I could have equivalent prescience in personal matters.

To those of my reader-friends who are turned off completely by these organized speculations and term them “silly,” I extend apologies. I am glad to have these back in print. I suspect, however, that those who cruise vicariously aboard
The Busted Flush
with one T. McGee—as do I—will find things in these books which will reward and amuse.

Herein there are no bug-eyed monsters, except the ones forever resident in the human heart. There are
no lovelies being rescued by space explorers from giant insects who talk in clicks and carry disintegrators. No methane atmospheres. Nothing emerging from the evil swamps. Not even a single dutiful robot, harboring either electronic love or the cross-wired circuitry of rebellion. Because of these omissions I may well be responsible, also, for turning off the hard-core aficionado of science fiction who, because these are more about people than things, might also term them “silly.”

My most signal satisfaction in rereading these two novels and in authorizing their reappearance was to discover that I had not, as I had suspected, sacrificed story to message. They move right along. It had been so long since I had written them that my recall was fogged by fifty intervening novels. And so I had much ironic amusement in finding myself, for the first time, reading my own work with considerable curiosity as to what would happen next.

J
OHN
D. M
AC
D
ONALD

Sarasota, Florida

September 1968

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.