The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® (5 page)

I recovered my balance. “Try to milk me of a hundred grand when there’s been no crime?” I snapped. “I’ll say there’s been an error! If I weren’t a forgiving man, I’d clap the bunch of you in jail for attempting to defraud an Earthman! Get out of here! And take that would-be murderer with you!”

They got, and they got fast, burbling apologies as they went. They had tried to fox an Earthman, and that’s a dangerous sport. They dragged the cocooned form of the Stortulian with them. The air seemed to clear, and peace was restored. I signaled to Auchinleck and he slammed the door.

“All right.” I looked at Gorb and jerked a thumb at the Kallerian. “That’s a nice trick. How does it work?”

Gorb smiled pleasantly. He was enjoying this, I could see. “Kallerians of the Clan Gursdrinn specialize in a kind of mental discipline, Corrigan. It isn’t too widely known in this area of the Galaxy, but men of that clan have unusual mental control over their bodies. They can cut off circulation and nervous-system response in large chunks of their bodies for hours at a stretch—an absolutely perfect imitation of death. And, of course, when Heraal put the sword through himself, it was a simple matter to avoid hitting any vital organs en route.”

The Kallerian, still at gunpoint, hung his head in shame.

I turned on him. “So—try to swindle me, eh? You cooked up this whole fake suicide in collusion with those cops.”

He looked quite a sight, with that gaping slash running clear through his body. But the wound had begun to heal already. “I regret the incident, Earthman. I am mortified. Be good enough to destroy this unworthy person.”

It was a tempting idea, but a notion was forming in my showman’s mind. “No, I won’t destroy you. Tell me—how often can you do that trick?”

“The tissues will regenerate in a few hours.”

“Would you mind having to kill yourself every day, Heraal? And twice on Sundays?”

Heraal looked doubtful. “Well, for the honor of my clan, perhaps—”

Stebbins said, “Boss, you mean—”

“Shut up. Heraal, you’re hired—seventy-five dollars a week plus expenses. Stebbins, get me a contract form—and type in a clause requiring Heraal to perform his suicide stunt at least five but no more than eight times a week.”

I felt a satisfied glow. There’s nothing more pleasing than to turn a swindle into a sure-fire crowd-puller.

“Aren’t you forgetting something, Corrigan?” asked Ildwar Gorb in a quietly menacing voice. “We had a little agreement, you know.”

“Oh. Yes.” I moistened my lips and glanced shiftily around the office. There had been too many witnesses. I couldn’t back down. I had no choice but to write out a check for five grand and give Gorb a standard alien-specimen contract. Unless…

“Just a second,” I said. “To enter Earth as an alien exhibit, you need proof of alien origin.”

He grinned, pulled out a batch of documents. “Nothing to it. Everything’s stamped and in order—and anybody who wants to prove these papers are fraudulent will have to find Wazzenazz XIII first!”

We signed and I filed the contracts away. But only then did it occur to me that the events of the past hour might have been even more complicated than they looked. Suppose, I wondered, Gorb had conspired with Heraal to stage the fake suicide, and run in the cops as well—with contracts for both of them the price of my getting off the hook?

It could very well be. And if it was, it meant I had been taken as neatly as any chump I’d ever conned.

Carefully keeping a poker face, I did a silent burn. Gorb, or whatever his real name was, was going to find himself living up to that contract he’d signed—every damn word and letter of it!

We left Ghryne later that week, having interviewed some eleven hundred alien life forms and having hired fifty-two. It brought the register of our zoo—pardon me, the Institute—to a nice pleasant 742 specimens representing 326 intelligent life forms.

Ildwar Gorb, the Wazzenazzian—who admitted that his real name was Mike Higgins, of St. Louis—turned out to be a tower of strength on the return voyage. It developed that he really did know all there was to know about alien life forms.

When he found out I had turned down the four-hundred-foot-long Vegan because the upkeep would be too big, Gorb-Higgins rushed off to the Vegan’s agent and concluded a deal whereby we acquired a fertilized Vegan ovum, weighing hardly more than an ounce. Transporting that was a lot cheaper than lugging a full-grown adult Vegan. Besides which, he assured me that the infant beast could be adapted to a diet of vegetables without any difficulty.

He made life a lot easier for me during the six-week voyage to Earth in our specially constructed ship. With fifty-two alien life forms aboard, all sorts of dietary problems arose, not to mention the headaches that popped up over pride of place and the like. The Kallerian simply refused to be quartered anywhere but on the left-hand side of the ship, for example—but that was the side we had reserved for low-gravity creatures, and there was no room for him there.

“We’ll be traveling in hyperspace all the way to Earth,” Gorb-Higgins assured the stubborn Kallerian. “Our cosmostatic polarity will be reversed, you see.”

“Hah?” asked Heraal in confusion.

“The cosmostatic polarity. If you take a bunk on the left-hand side of the ship, you’ll be traveling on the right-hand side all the way there!”

“Oh,” said the big Kallerian. “I didn’t know that. Thank you for explaining.”

He gratefully took the stateroom we assigned him.

Higgins really had a way with the creatures, all right. He made us look like fumbling amateurs, and I had been operating in this business more than fifteen years.

Somehow Higgins managed to be on the spot whenever trouble broke out. A high-strung Norvennith started a feud with a pair of Vanoinans over an alleged moral impropriety—Norvennithi can be very stuffy sometimes. But Gorb convinced the outraged being that what the Vanoinans were doing in the washroom was perfectly proper. Well, it was, but I’d never have thought of using that particular analogy.

I could list half a dozen other incidents in which Gorb-Higgins’ special knowledge of outworld beings saved us from annoying hassles on that trip back. It was the first time I had ever had another man with brains in the organization, and I was getting worried.

When I first set up the Institute back in the early 2920s, it was with my own capital, scraped together while running a comparative biology show on Betelgeuse IX. I saw to it that I was the sole owner. And I took care to hire competent but unspectacular men as my staffers—men like Stebbins, Auchinleck, and Ludlow.

Only now I had a viper in my bosom, in the person of this Ildwar Gorb-Mike Higgins. He could think for himself. He knew a good racket when he saw one. We were birds of a feather, Higgins and I. I doubted if there was room for both of us in this outfit.

I sent for him just before we were about to make Earthfall, offered him a few slugs of brandy before I got to the point. “Mike, I’ve watched the way you handled the exhibits on the way back here.”

“The other exhibits,” he pointed out. “I’m one of them, not a staff man.”

“Your Wazzenazzian status is just a fiction cooked up to get you past the immigration authorities, Mike. But I’ve got a proposition for you.”

“Propose away.”

“I’m getting a little too old for this starcombing routine,” I said. “Up to now, I’ve been doing my own recruiting, but only because I couldn’t trust anyone else to do the job. I think you could handle it, though.” I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another. “Tell you what, Mike—I’ll rip up your contract as an exhibit, and I’ll give you another one as a staffman, paying twice as much. Your job will be to roam the planets finding new material for us. How about it?”

I had the new contract all drawn up. I pushed it toward him, but he put his hand down over mine and smiled amiably as he said, “No go.”

“No? Not even for twice the pay?”

“I’ve done my own share of roaming,” he said. “Don’t offer me more money. I just want to settle down on Earth, Jim. I don’t care about the cash. Honest.”

It was very touching, and also very phony, but there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t get rid of him that way—I had to bring him to Earth.

The immigration officials argued about his papers, but he’d had the things so clearly faked that there was no way of proving he wasn’t from Wazzenazz XIII. We set him up in a key spot of the building.

The Kallerian, Heraal, is one of our top attractions now. Every day at two in the afternoon, he commits ritual suicide, and soon afterward rises from death to the accompaniment of a trumpet fanfare. The four other Kallerians we had before are wildly jealous of the crowds he draws, but they’re just not trained to do his act.

But the unquestioned number-one attraction here is confidence man Mike Higgins. He’s billed as the only absolutely human life form from an extraterrestrial planet, and though we’ve had our share of debunking, it has only increased business.

Funny that the biggest draw at a zoo like ours should be a home-grown Earthman, but that’s show business.

A couple of weeks after we got back, Mike added a new wrinkle to the act. He turned up with a blond showgirl named Marie, and now we have a woman from Wazzenazz too. It’s more fun for Mike that way. And downright clever.

He’s too clever, in fact. Like I said, I appreciate a good confidence man, the way some people appreciate fine wine. But I wish I had left Ildwar Gorb back on Ghryne instead of signing him up with us.

Yesterday he stopped by at my office after we had closed down for the day. He was wearing that pleasant smile he always wears when he’s up to something.

He accepted a drink, as usual, and then he said, “Jim, I was talking to Lawrence R. Fitzgerald yesterday.”

“The little Regulan? The green basketball?”

“That’s the one. He tells me he’s only getting fifty dollars a week. And a lot of the other boys here are drawing pretty low pay too.”

My stomach gave a warning twinge. “Mike, if you’re looking for a raise, I’ve told you time and again you’re worth it to me. How about twenty a week?”

He held up one hand. “I’m not angling for a raise for me, Jim.”

“What then?”

He smiled beatifically. “The boys and I held a little meeting yesterday evening, and we—ah—formed a union, with me as leader. I’d like to discuss the idea of a general wage increase for every one of the exhibits here.”

“Higgins, you blackmailer, how can I afford—”

“Easy,” he said. “You’d hate to lose a few weeks’ gross, wouldn’t you?”

“You mean you’d call a strike?”

He shrugged. “If you leave me no choice, how else can I protect my members’ interests?”

After about half an hour of haggling, he sweated me into an across-the-board increase for the entire mob, with a distinct hint of further raises to come. But he also casually let me know the price he’s asking to call off the hounds. He wants a partnership in the Institute; a share in the receipts.

If he gets that, it makes him a member of management, and he’ll have to quit as union leader. That way I won’t have him to contend with as a negotiator.

But I will have him firmly embedded in the organization, and once he gets his foot in the door, he won’t be satisfied until he’s on top—which means when I’m out.

But I’m not licked yet! Not after a full lifetime of conniving and swindling! I’ve been over and over the angles and there’s one thing you can always count on—a trickster will always outsmart himself if you give him the chance. I did it with Higgins. Now he’s done it with me.

He’ll be back here in half an hour to find out whether he gets his partnership or not. Well, he’ll get his answer. I’m going to affirm, as per the escape clause in the standard exhibit contract he signed, that he is no longer of scientific value, and the Feds will pick him up and deport him to his home world.

That leaves him two equally nasty choices.

Those fake documents of his were good enough to get him admitted to Earth as a legitimate alien. How the World Police get him back there is their headache—and his.

If he admits the papers were phony, the only way he’ll get out of prison will be when it collapses of old age.

So I’ll give him a third choice: He can sign an undated confession, which I will keep in my safe, as guarantee against future finagling.

I don’t expect to be around forever, you see—though, with that little secret I picked up on Rimbaud II, it’ll be a good long time, not even barring accidents—and I’ve been wondering whom to leave the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science to. Higgins will make a fine successor.

Oh, one more thing he will have to sign. It remains the Corrigan Institute as long as the place is in business.

Try to out-con me, will he?

BLAZE OF GLORY

Originally  published in
Galaxy
, August 1957.

They list John Murchison as one of the great heroes of space—a brave man and true, who willingly sacrificed himself to save his ship. He won his immortality on the way back from Shaula II.

One thing’s wrong, though. He was brave, but he wasn’t willing. He wasn’t the self-sacrificing type. I’m inclined to think it was murder, or maybe execution. By remote control, you might say.

I guess they pick spaceship crews at random—say, by yanking a handful of cards from the big computer and throwing them up at the BuSpace roof. The ones that stick get picked. At least, that’s the only way a man like Murchison could have been sent to Shaula II in the first place.

He was a spaceman of the old school, tall, bullnecked, coarse-featured, hard-swearing. He was a spaceman of a type that had never existed except in storytapes for the very young—the only kind Murchison was likely to have viewed. He was our chief signal officer.

Somewhere, he had picked up an awesome technical competence; he could handle any sort of communication device with supernatural ease. I once saw him tinker with a complex little Caphian artifact that had been buried for half a million years, and have it detecting the 21-centimeter “hydrogen song” within minutes. How he knew the little widget was a star-mapping device I will never understand.

But coupled with Murchison’s extraordinary special skill was an irascibility, a self-centered inner moodiness flaring into seemingly unmotivated anger at unpredictable times, that made him a prime risk on a planet like Shaula II. There was something wrong with his circuit-breaker setup: you could never tell when he’d overload, start fizzing and sparking, and blow off a couple of megawatts of temper.

You must admit this is not the ideal sort of man to send to a world whose inhabitants are listed in the E-T Catalogue as
“wise, somewhat world-weary, exceedingly gentle, non-aggressive to an extreme degree and thus subject to exploitation. The Shaulans must be handled with great patience and forbearance, and should be given the respect due one of the galaxy’s elder races.”

I had never been to Shaula II, but I had a sharp mental image of the Shaulans: melancholy old men pondering the whichness of the why and ready to fall apart at the first loud voice that caught them by surprise. So it caught me by surprise when the time came to affix my hancock to the roster of the
Felicific
, and I saw on the line above mine the scribbled words
Murchison, John F., Signalman First Class
.

I signed my name—
Loeb, Ernest T., Second Officer
—picked up my pay voucher, and walked away somewhat dizzily. I was thinking of the time I had seen Murchison, John F., giving a Denebolan frogman the beating of his life, for no particular reason at all. “All the rain here makes me sick” was all Murchison cared to say; the frogman lived and Big Jawn got an X on his psych report.

Now he was shipping out for Shaula? Well, maybe so…but my faith in the computer that makes up spaceship complements was seriously shaken.

* * * *

We were the fourth or fifth expedition to Shaula II. The planet—second of seven in orbit round the brightest star in Scorpio’s tail—was small and scrubby, but of great strategic importance as a lookout spot for that sector of the galaxy. The natives hadn’t minded our intrusion, and so a military base had been established there after a little preliminary haggling.

The
Felicific
was a standard warp-conversion-drive ship holding thirty-six men. It had the usual crew of eight, plus a cargo of twenty-eight of Terra’s finest, being sent out as replacements for the current staff of the base.

We blasted on 3 July 2530, a warmish day, made the conversion from ion-drive to warp-drive as soon as we were clear of the local system, and popped back into normal space three weeks later and two hundred light-years away. It was a routine trip in all respects.

With the warp-conversion drive, a ship is equipped to travel both long distances and short. It handles the long hops via subspace warp, and the short ones by good old standard ion-drive seat-of-the-spacesuit navigating. It’s a good system, and the extra mass the double drive requires is more than compensated for by the saving in time and maneuverability.

The warp-drive part of the trip was pre-plotted and just about pre-traveled for us; no headaches
there
. But when we blurped back into the continuum about half a light-year from Shaula the human factor entered the situation. Meaning Murchison, of course.

It was his job to check and tend the network of telemetering systems that acted as the ship’s eyes, to make sure the mass-detectors were operating, to smooth the bugs out of the communications channels between navigator and captain and drive-deck. In brief, he was the man who made it possible for us to land.

Every ship carried a spare signalman, just in case. In normal circumstances the spare never got much work. When the time came for the landing, Captain Knight buzzed me and told me to start lining up the men who would take part, and I signaled Murchison first.

His voice was a slow rasping drawl. “Yeah?”

“Second Officer Loeb. Prepare for landing, double-fast. Navigator Henrichs has the chart set up for you and he’s waiting for your call.”

There was a pause. Then: “I don’t feel like it, Loeb.”

It was my turn to pause. I shut my eyes, held my breath, and counted to three by fractions. Then I said, “Would you mind repeating that, Signalman Murchison?”

“Yes, sir. No, sir, I mean. Hell, Loeb, I’m fixing something. Why do you want to land now?”

“I don’t make up the schedules,” I said.

“Then who in blazes does? Tell him I’m busy!”

I turned down my phones’ volume. “Busy doing what?”

“Busy doing nothing. Get off the line and I’ll call Henrichs.”

I sighed and broke contact. He’d just been ragging me. Once again, Murchison had been ornery for the sheer sake of being ornery. One of these days he was going to refuse to handle the landing entirely.

And that day, I told myself, is the day we’ll crate him up and shove him through the disposal lock.

Murchison was a little island. He had his skills, and he applied them—when he felt like it. But only when he believed that he, Murchison, would profit. He never did anything unwillingly, because if he couldn’t find it in himself to do it willingly he wouldn’t do it at all. It was impossible to
make
him do something.

Unwisely, we tolerated it. But someday he would get a captain who didn’t understand him, and he’d be slapped with a sentence of mutiny during a fit of temperament. For his sake, I hoped not. The penalty for mutiny in space is death.

* * * *

With Murchison’s cooperation gratefully accepted, we targeted on Shaula II, which was then at perihelion, and orbited it. Down in his little cubicle Murchison worked like a demon, taking charge of the ship’s landing system in a tremendous way. He was a fantastic signalman when he wanted to be.

Later that day the spinning red ball that was Shaula II hung just ahead of us, close enough to let us see the three blobs of continents and the big, choppy hydrocarbon ocean that licked them smooth. The Terran base on Continent Three beamed as a landing-guide; Murchison picked it up, fed it through the computer bank to Navigator Henrichs, and we homed in for the landing.

The Terran base consisted of a couple of blockhouses, a sprawling barracks, and a good-sized radar parabola, all set in a ring out on an almost mathematically flat plain. Shaula II was a great world for plains; Columbus would have had the devil’s time convincing people
this
world was round!

Murchison guided us to a glassy-looking area not far from the base, and we touched down. The
Felicific
creaked and groaned a little as the landing jacks absorbed its weight. Green lights went on all over the ship. We were free to go outside.

A welcoming committee was on hand: eight members of the base staff, clad in shorts and topees. Regulation uniforms went by the board on oven-hot Shaula II. The eight looked awfully happy to see us.

Coming over the flat sandy plain from the base were a dozen or so others, running, and behind them I could see even more. They were understandably glad we were here. Twenty-eight of them had spent a full year on Shaula II; they were eligible for their parity-program year’s vacation.

There were some other—things—moving towards us. They moved slowly, with grace and dignity. I had expected to be impressed with the Shaulans, and I was.

They were erect bipeds about four feet tall, with long thin arms dangling to their knees; their grey skins were grainy and rough, and their dark eyes—they had three, arranged triangularly—were deepset and brooding. A fleshy sort of cowl or cobra-hood curled up from their necks to shield their round hairless skulls. The aliens were six in number, and the youngest-looking of them seemed ancient.

A brown-faced young man wearing shorts, topee, and tattooed stars stepped forward and said, “I’m General Gloster. I’m in charge here.”

The Captain acknowledged his greeting. “Knight of the
Felicific
.
We have your relief men with us.”

“I sure as hell hope you do,” Gloster said. “Be kind of silly to come all this way without them.”

We all laughed a little over that. By now we were ringed in by at least fifty Earthmen, probably the entire base complement (we didn’t rotate the entire base staff at once, of course), and the six aliens.  The twenty-eight kids we had ferried here were looking around the place curiously, apprehensive about this hot, dry, flat planet that would be their home for the next sidereal year. The crew of the
Felicific
had gathered in a little knot near the ship. Most of them probably felt  the way I did; they were glad we’d be on our way home in a couple  of days.

Murchison was squinting at the six aliens. I wondered what he was thinking about.

* * * *

The bunch of us traipsed back the half mile or so to the settlement; Gloster walked with Knight and myself, prattling volubly about the progress the base was making, and the twenty-eight newcomers mingled with the twenty-eight who were being relieved. Murchison walked by himself, kicking up puffs of red dust and scowling in his usual manner. The six aliens accompanied us at some distance.

“We keep building all the time,” Gloster explained when we were within the compound. “Branching out, setting up new equipment, shoring up the old stuff: That radar parabola out there wasn’t up, last replacement-trip.”

I looked around. “The place looks fine, General.” It was strange calling a man half my age
General
, but the Service sometimes works that way. “When do you plan to set up your telescope?”

“Next year, maybe.” He glanced out the window at the featureless landscape. “We keep building all the time. It’s the best way to stay sane on this world.”

“How about the natives?” the Captain asked. “You have much contact with them?”

Gloster shrugged. “As much as they’ll allow. They’re a proud old race—pretty near dried up and dead now, just a handful of them left. But what a race they must have been once! What minds! What culture!”

I found Gloster’s boyish enthusiasm discomforting. “Do you think we could meet one of the aliens before we go?” I asked.

“I’ll see about it.” Gloster picked up a phone. “McHenry? There any natives in the compound now? Good. Send him up, will you?”

Moments later one of the shorts-clad men appeared, hand in hand with an alien. At close range the Shaulan looked almost frighteningly old. A maze of wrinkles gullied its noseless face, running from the triple optics down to the dots of nostrils to the sagging, heavy- lipped mouth.

“This is Azga,” Gloster said. “Azga, meet Captain Knight and Second Officer Loeb, of the
Felicific
.”

The creature offered a wobbly sort of curtsey and said, in a deep, resonant, almost-human croak, “I am very humble indeed in your presence, Captain Knight and Second Officer Loeb.”

Azga came out of the curtsey and the three eyes fixed on mine. I felt like squirming, but I stared back. It was like looking into a mirror that gave the wrong reflection.

Yet I enjoyed my proximity to the alien. There was something calm and wise and good about the grotesque creature; something relaxing, and terribly fragile. The rough grey skin looked like precious leather, and the hood over the skull appeared to shield it from worry and harm. A faint musty odor wandered through the room.

We looked at each other—Knight, and Gloster, and McHenry,  and I—and we remained silent. Now that the Shaulan was here,  what could we say? What new thing could we possibly tell the  ancient creature?

I resisted an impulse to kneel. I was fumbling for words to express my emotion when the sharp buzz of the phone cut across the room.

Gloster nodded curtly to McHenry, who answered. The man listened for a moment. “Captain Knight, it’s for you.”

Puzzled, Knight took the receiver. He held it long enough to hear about three sentences and turned to me. “Loeb, get a landcar from someone in the compound and get back to the ship. Murchison’s carrying on with one of the aliens.”

* * * *

I hotfooted down into the compound and spotted an enlisted man tooling up his landcar. I pulled rank and requisitioned it, and minutes later I was parking it outside the
Felicific
and was clambering hand-over-hand up the catwalk.

An excited-looking recruit stood at the open airlock.

“Where’s Murchison?” I asked.

“Down in the communicator cabin. He’s got an alien in there with him. There’s gonna be trouble.”

I remembered Denebola, and Murchison kicking the stuffings out of a groaning frogman. I groaned a little myself, and dashed down the companionway.

The communications cabin was Murchison’s
sanctum sanctorum
, a cubicle off the astro deck where he worked and kept control over the
Felicific
’s communications network. I yanked open the door and saw Murchison at the far end of the cabin holding a massive crescent wrench and glaring at a Shaulan facing him. The Shaulan had its back to me. It looked small and squat and helpless.

Murchison saw me as I entered. “Get out of here, Loeb. This isn’t your affair.”

“What’s going on here?” I snapped.

“This alien snooping around. I’m gonna let him have it with the wrench.”

“I meant no harm,” the alien boomed sadly. “Mere philosophical interest in your strange machines, nothing more. If I have offended a folkway of yours I humbly apologize. It is not the way of my people to give offence.”

I walked forward and took a position between them, making sure I wasn’t within easy reach of Murchison’s wrench. He was standing there with his nostrils spread, his eyes cold and hard, his breath pumping noisily. He was angry, and an angry Murchison was a frightening sight.

He took two heavy steps toward me. “I told you to get out. This is my cabin, Loeb. And neither you or any aliens got any business in it.”

“Put down that wrench, Murchison. It’s an order.”

He laughed contemptuously. “Signalman First Class don’t have to take orders from anyone but the Captain if he thinks the safety of the ship is jeopardized. And I do. There’s a dangerous alien in here.”