The Early Pohl (7 page)

In a moment the powerful suction of the mud was broken. Wing slammed down an entire row of keys; the ship creaked and groaned; the mighty rockets shoved them forward with immense acceleration, and in a moment they were roaring through the atmosphere, their ship ripping the air to shreds as they sped for the high vacuums where they could really make speed for the nearest Earth colony.

Wing cut half the rockets, and touched the lever that brought out the tiny, retractable stubby wings. Even in the stratosphere, where they were, their immense speed made wings useful. It saved fuel, for one thing, and, more important to Wing, it made conversation possible by cutting down the noise. Wing had been too anxious to get away from the Venusian town to bother with questions; now he succumbed to his curiosity, turned to Henderson, and said:

"Now spill it. How did you work that little trick?"

Henderson smiled weakly, but with triumph.

"Well, I knew that neither you nor I had killed Ch'mack. It had to be one of the Venusians. Which one? That I had to find out. . . .

"But there was a logical suspect, if you followed the detective-story pattern, and looked for the motive. Someone stood to become King after Ch'mack died. I thought that might be a powerful inducement to killing. . . .

"And while you were talking to them, I was trying to read their minds with my perceptor. I couldn't make a great deal of progress with any of them,—but one of them had me stopped cold. He was very intently
not
thinking about the murder. I figured that was sort of suspicious, and I saw that he was the guy who'd inherit the king-ship, so . . . I took a chance. It worked."

"Good for you," applauded Wing. "You got us out of a pretty damned tight mess." He sat complacently at the controls, smiling into the black sky ahead as the ship sped along. Suddenly his smile clouded. "If you couldn't read his mind, how did you know that he had the Eye?" he asked.

"Oh, that," said Henderson proudly. "I didn't. I mean, he didn't. I knew that he
didn't
have the Eye, because I did. I found it on Ch'mack's body, and planted it on the other guy for effect. I knew that it would take a real shock to make him think 'out loud' about the killing, so I provided one. And that," he said, hastily pursuing his advantage, "is all due to my 'sleight-of-hand' that you're so fond of criticizing. I hope you'll be a little more respectful about it in the future."

"I will," agreed Wing happily. "In fact, soon as we land I'll let you play cards with me again."

"For money?" particularized Henderson.

"Well—" Wing hesitated, then grimly agreed. "Yes, for money. I guess I owe you something." He resumed his sunny smile at the sky. "Well, it's too late to do anything about it now, but I wish I could have got a closer look at that Eye," he said a moment later. "Seemed to me that Ch'mack was a lot more worried about keeping it than even its value warranted. I wish I had it to find out why."

"Do you really wish you had it?" grinned Henderson.

"Uh-huh. It ought to be. . . . Say! Did you—?"

"You bet I did!" Henderson cried. He took the object in question from a pocket and tossed it at his colleague. "Here—catch!"

When that story appeared, around the end of 1940,1 had been an editor for a year and, among other things, I had gotten married.

The girl I married was a slim, pretty brunette named Leslie Perri. Well, she wasn't really named Leslie Perri. That was her writing name. The name she was born to was Doris Marie Claire Baumgardt. She wrote, she painted, she knew about music and, in the ego-busting environment of the Futurians, she held her own.

The way I met Doë was that an old school friend—a civilian, no connection with science fiction—was dating a girl he thought a lot of, and brought her around to show her off. That was a serious miscalculation on his part. He had not stopped to think that I had been living a pretty depressingly monastic life. Brooklyn Tech was an all-boy school and fandom, where I spent most of the rest of my tune, was wholly male, not out of choice but because no girls ever seemed to show up at our meetings. Doë was about the first girl I had ever met who wasn't either some sort of a relative or an old family friend, and I suddenly perceived what nice creatures girls were and how fine it would be to have one. So I moved in. Very hard, very fast. I was maybe seventeen when we met. We dated for three years and then got married as soon as I had a job that looked like lasting for more than a week.

This had immense implications for science fiction.

See, I had all these male friends, who had little contact with girls.

Doë, on the other hand, had vast resources of female friends, and apparently they hadn't had too much experience of men, either. We brought them together. Instant critical mass was attained. In the fallout my friend Dick Wilson married Doë's friend Jessica Gould; my friend Dirk Wylie married Doë's friend Rosalind Cohen; my friend Don Wollheim married Doë's friend Elsie Baiter,* and of second-order effects and liaisons that did not quite reach matrimony there was no end. Such a flowering of instant romances had not been seen since Jeanette MacDonald and the rest of the
paquet
girls reached New Orleans and the arms of Nelson Eddy.

Women had a civilizing influence on us. We began to think in terrms of lifetime careers and Making a Buck. We also began to think in terms of nest-building.

So a few of us decided to rent a house, to serve as a sort of primitive commune. Doë and I were slated to be house-parents. The occupants were to be Dick Wilson, Don Wollheim and Joseph Harold Dockweiler. In the event Doë and I didn't move in, but the other three went ahead and, with that innate sense of concinnity so characteristic of science-fiction writers, at once perceived a pattern emerging: DW, DW and—JHD? No, that would never do. So on the spot Joseph Harold Dockweiler rechristened himself Dirk Wylie.

The house episode lasted a couple of months, and the survivors fled to an apartment on Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, which they named the Ivory Tower. Cyril Kornbluth had turned up by that time, an evilly bland, precocious fifteen-year-old. So had Robert W. Lowndes, migrating to the big city from Connecticut. Some of us lived there, some only visited, but one way or another the Ivory Tower was our center of activities for a couple of years. It was where we talked and partied. It was where we put together fan mags and plotted strategies against other sf fan groups. It was where Dick Wilson and I kept our common car. (We used a common driver's license for a couple of years, too. His. We matched up almost exactly on height, color of eyes, weight and everything else on the license.) And it was where we kept our still.

That was Cyril's contribution. I did say he was precocious? He took up a collection, went off to a chemical supply store and returned with a glass water-jacketed distillation rig that turned cheap, bad red wine into cheap and even worse brandy at the rate of about ten drops a minute. With half a dozen Futurians waiting their turn at the business end of the still, it rationed our liquor consumption better than A.A.

* Donald and Elsie still are married, and jointly run the sf publishing firm of DAW Books.

The Ivory Tower is where we began to do our collaborative writing in earnest. I was a market for much of it. A little later, Wollheim and Lowndes got their own magazines, and then the typewriters were kept smoking. It wasn't all very good science fiction—some of it was pretty terrible—but it was better than we could buy on the open market at the rates we were paying.

It was not, however, the best we could possibly write. I think we all began to be aware of that at around the same time. In my case, when I began seeing the fan mail that came in to my magazines I perceived that Being a Writer was not enough. Even Being a Published Writer was something short of the ultimate. What I really wanted was to be a published writer of whom the audience wrote enthusiastic letters to the editor.

So I resolved to try to write better stories.

I didn't resolve to write masterpieces. Heaven knows, I was simply neither mature enough nor skillful enough as a writer to be Great. But I was capable of writing better than I had been doing. Capable of writing something that was uniquely my own, and not a piece of yard goods that any hack could rattle off as fast as he could type. And the story that came out of that resolve was
It's a Young World,
which appeared, under the James MacCreigh pen name, in the April 1941 issue of
Astonishing Stories
.

It's a Young World

JAMES MacCREIGH

1
In the Enemy's House

I don't think there was anyone in the universe that shot better than my Tribe, but I brought down the average a lot. Though I'd been a hunter all my life, I never became really proficient. Even the babies of the tribe were better than I when it came to shooting at a moving target with a light bow, and I was never allowed to participate in the raids on enemy camps for that reason.

Hunting was all right. There my natural gifts for being inconspicuous and very quiet helped me. I could be more motionless than even the rocks I sat upon. When the wood's life came close to me I didn't have to be a good shot to kill more than my share of marauding animals.

Not that most of the animals we ever saw were really dangerous: of course not. But there was a species of lizard we had come to fear. It was big and powerful, and it moved almost without sound, but those were not the worst things. Being a lizard, akin to the fish of the streams more than to us, it actually ate the flesh of the animals and men it killed. When it could get no living thing to eat, it chewed and swallowed leaves or grass, or the flowers and fruits of the trees. It had to. If it did not eat, it would die. It was too low in the evolutionary scale, it seems, to live as all warm-blooded creatures do, on the fresh water and fresh air that are free to all.

Because of this vile habit of eating, it always gave me a feeling of pleasure to kill these lizards whenever I could, almost like what the others boasted of when they came back from a raid and told of the fun of killing the members of the Enemy tribe.

Four times in every year I was sent out to kill a lizard—we called them Eaters—and each time I remained away until I caught one. Though it might take me days or weeks to track one down and slay it, I dared not come back without at least one skin on my shoulders. Though they became increasingly scarce, I always managed to trap one eventually—always, that is, but once.

For there finally came a day when, look where I would, use whatever arts of searching I knew, there was no Eater to be found. I ranged a hundred miles and more, over a period of nearly a month, utterly without success. In our own area of the planet, at least, the Eaters seemed completely extinct.

As I trudged into the village of my Tribe I saw that something was up. I had no wish to attract attention, since my quest had been fruitless, so I did not quite enter the village, but stood within the shelter of the trees and watched for a little while. The warriors were stalking around importantly in a bustle of scurrying women and hunters like myself, each warrior lugging a twelve-foot war bow.

A raid?

It had to be that. Little Clory, my favourite girl friend, spied me before anyone else and came running up to me with a finger on her lips. "Stay back, Keefe," she warned. "They're going out to lick the Red-and-Browns and you'd better not get in the way."

I picked her up and sat her on my shoulder. She was a little thing, even for her seven years of age, but her long yellow hair covered my face. I blew it aside, and said, "When will they have the Affair, Clory?"

"Oh, right away. Look—they're building the fires now."

They were. The warriors had gathered and were seated in the triple-tiered Balcony of Men, while the youths and women built a tottering little shack of firewood. I should have helped them, being a non-military, but I wasn't needed, and I preferred to keep as much as possible out of anything connected with raids.

The whole Tribe was in the little clearing on the outskirts of the village by now. The House of the Enemy—that was the little jerry-built shack that would be burned—was nearly completed. The four braided vine ropes that would serve as fuses were already laid out, and the musicians were tuning up with an ungodly din.

Corlos, Chief of the Warriors, and Lord of the Tribe of the Blues, strode into the centre of the cleared circle, and raised his bow. A ten-foot arrow, hollowed at the point, was in it; he drew it back in the string until I could almost hear the wood of the bow creaking, then released it, aiming at the tiny red disc of the sun, setting on the horizon. The arrow screamed up and out in a flat arc—literally screamed, because the pitted point caused it to whistle in flight.

That was the signal. The musicians, who had been silent for a few moments, waiting their cue, screamed into their instruments, slapped their drums, sawed their stringed gourds. The noise was frightful—but almost beautiful, I had to admit. Maybe the beauty lay in the unusualness, because we heard this ceremonial music only just before a raid, not more than once in a year.

To the tune of the tempestuous music, a group of the younger girls of the Tribe came pacing in to the centre of the ring, bearing a closed palanquin on their shoulders. In it, presumably, was the Enemy, the animal—sometimes, the person—which would be burned alive, representing the members of the Tribe against whom our warriors would soon be marching.

Corlos strode up to the car and halted, raising his arm peremptorily. The music stopped. In a savage, deep guttural he declaimed: "Who is our Enemy?"

The antiphony rose in unison from the benches of the warriors: "He who does not serve the Tribe—he is our Enemy: he must die! That which kills one of our Tribe—that is our Enemy; it must die! He who profanes the Name of our Tribe—he is the Enemy; he must die." I repeated the familiar words of the Three Evil Acts with the warriors. I knew them by heart. Corlos went on with the ritual.