In the Beginning (34 page)

McDermott grinned. “Three miles. Three and a half, maybe. More or less due east.”

Hassolt waggled the blastgun. “Come on: Take me to it.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

McDermott stared levelly at the kidnapper for an instant, and let some of the euphoria induced by the alien drink leave his mind. Narrowing his eyes in unbelief, he said, “Are you serious?”

“Stop wasting time. I want you to take me to the ship
now.”

The girl was staring in bewilderment at him. McDermott said, “You sure got tired of the kinging business fast, Hassolt. You loved it here two hours ago.”

“I didn’t know two hours ago what I know now. You know what they do to their king and queen at the end of the year? They throw them into a live volcano! It’s their way of showing thanks to the volcano-god for having brought them safely through the year. Then they pick a new king and queen.”

McDermott started to chuckle. “So it’s the old savage story, huh? Treat you like a king for a year and chuck you to the lava!”

“I happened to come along a few days after the old king and queen had been sacrificed,” Hassolt said. “Usually they choose the new ones from their tribe, but they prefer to have strangers. Like the girl and me.”

McDermott continued chuckling. “But what’s your hurry? If the new year’s only a few days old, you have plenty of time.”

“I don’t care to stick around. Take me to your ship now, McDermott.”

“Suppose I don’t?”

Hassolt stared meaningfully at the gun. McDermott said calmly, “If you shoot me, I can’t guide you to the ship, can I?”

Tightly Hassolt said, “In that case I’d find it myself. You can either take me there and stay alive, or refuse and die. Take your choice.”

McDermott shrugged. “You have me there. I’ll take you.”

“Let’s go, then. Now.”

“It’s late. Can’t you wait till morning? It’ll be dark by the time we get there.”

“Now,” Hassolt said.

“How about the girl?”

“She stays here,” Hassolt said. “I just want to get away myself. The two of you can stay here. I’m not going to take any more chances. That she-devil wrecked the other ship.”

“So I guide you to my ship and let you blast off, and I stay here and face the music?”

“You’ll have the girl. Come on now,” Hassolt said. His face was drawn and terror-pale.

“Okay,” McDermott said. “I’ll take you to the ship.”

***

He could understand Hassolt’s jittery impatience. The natives might not like their king taking a runout powder, and Hassolt intended to get out while he still could. His ransom project didn’t matter, now; having found out what the real function of the king was on this planet, he wanted off in a hurry, at any cost.

Which, McDermott reflected, leaves me and the girl here. And I’m the substitute king.

And a boiling volcano waiting for me at the end of my year-long reign, he thought.

They left the girl behind in the village and slipped off into the thick jungle as the first shadows of night began to descend. McDermott led, and Hassolt, following behind him, made it plain that he was keeping the gun not very far from the small of McDermott’s back all the time. The Corpsman hacked stolidly forward into the jungle, retracing his steps.

“It was only three miles, you say?”

“Maybe four,” McDermott replied. “Don’t worry, Hassolt. I’ll take you to the ship. I’d rather be a live coward than a dead hero.”

They pressed on. After a while they passed the lifeship and the wreckage of the mother ship, and McDermott knew they were on the right path. The sun dropped below the horizon; the sky darkened, and two small jagged moons, bright and pitted, drifted into the sky. The air was cooler now. McDermott thought of the girls back at the village. And of the volcano.

“You thought you had a pretty good deal, eh, Hassolt? Servants and food and booze and a girl, all set up for the rest of your life. You don’t think you might have gotten tired of it after a while?”

“Shut up.”

“But then they let you know what was waiting for you, and you decided to run out. Lucky for you that I came along with my nice shiny ship,” McDermott said. He was thirsting for a drink of any kind.

Half an hour later, they reached the ship. McDermott turned and saw Hassolt staring at it almost lovingly. He said, “You know how to operate it?”

“I’ll manage. You come aboard and show me.”

They boarded the ship, which stood silently in the forest as night descended. Hassolt prowled around, looking at the controls. It was obvious to McDermott that the kidnapper was not familiar with the XV-110 model.

He turned to Hassolt and said, “Look here—you don’t know how to run this ship and I do. Why don’t you let me stay on board as pilot?”

Hassolt chuckled. “You think I’m crazy? Take a Corpsman aboard? Look, that girl wrecked the other ship, and I’m going to travel in this one alone. Show me which button to push and then clear off.”

“That’s definite, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Come here.”

He led Hassolt to the control panel and gave him a brief rundown on the operation of the ship. The beady-eyed kidnapper took it all in with deep interest.

The rum-bottle was still sitting in the grav-holder next to the pilot’s seat, where McDermott had left it for consumption on the return journey. In the darkened ship, it looked like some control lever to the left of the chair.

“Now, this lever over here,” McDermott said.

He grasped the bottle firmly as if it were a control. Suddenly he ripped it from its holder and in the same motion swung it back into Hassolt’s skull. The bottle broke with a loud crack, and Hassolt dropped to the ground as if poleaxed. McDermott bent over him and took the blastgun gun from his hands. Hassolt was still breathing.

Tenderly he scooped Hassolt up and dragged him out of the ship, across the clearing, and propped him up against a tree outside of the firing-range. Then McDermott stood for a long moment, thinking.

It was dark now. Jungle-beasts honked and hooted in the night. It was a seven-mile hike round trip back to the village to get the girl, and when he got there he probably would be swarmed over immediately and held. By now the natives probably had discovered that their king and the newcomer had vanished. They wouldn’t let him slip out of sight a second time.

McDermott shook his head regretfully. He climbed back into the ship and readied it for blastoff.

Too bad about the girl, he thought. But it was suicide to go back to get her.

He thought: it wouldn’t be such a bad life—for a while. He’d be waited on hand and foot, and there’d be plenty of that pungent liquor, and of course he would have the girl. But at the end of the year there would be the volcano waiting for both of them.

Better that one of us should escape, he thought. Too bad about the girl. I’ll tell Davis that the lifeship blew up on landing, and that both of them were killed and their bodies beyond salvage.

You ought to go back and get her,
something said inside him. But he shook his head and began setting up the blasting pattern. If he went back, he’d never get a second chance to escape.
No boy-scout stuff, McDermott; you’re too old for that. Pull out while you can.

And Hassolt and the girl would meet the volcano in a year. He shrugged sadly and jabbed down on the button that activated the jets.

The ship sprang away from Breckmyer IV. McDermott felt a pang of sadness for the girl, and then forgot her. The rescue mission had failed; leave it at that. His chief regret was that he had needed to use the bottle of rum to club down Hassolt. It was the last bottle. It was going to be a long dry voyage back to Albireo, McDermott thought mournfully.

Exiled from Earth

(1958)

Though most of the stories I wrote for
Super-Science
were done to order and formula, sometimes I used W.W. Scott as a salvage market for material I had originally aimed at one of the upper-level magazines. He didn’t mind that it didn’t fit his usual action-adventure mode, so long as I didn’t do it too often and the story had, at least, some science-fictional color. He and I were pretty much dependent on each other now, he for the material I supplied so effortlessly, I for those resonant two-cents-a-word checks. March 1958 alone saw me sell him two s-f stories, “The Traders” and “The Aliens Were Haters,” and five crime pieces, “Doublecrosser’s Daughter,” “Deadly Widow,” “Rollercoaster Ride,” “Let Him Sweat,” and “The Ace of Spades Means Death,” plus some batches of science fillers. The pay came to over a thousand dollars, a regal sum in preinflation 1958 money. How I thought up all the story ideas, God alone knows: I can only tell you that when I sat down each morning and put paper in the typewriter, a story would be there waiting to be written.

In this case the story that had been waiting to be written, in mid-October of 1957, involved an old actor out in the stars who wanted to go back to Earth and play Hamlet one last time—something that I thought Horace Gold of
Galaxy
might be interested in, for a cent a word more than Scottie would pay. I called it “You Can’t Go Back.” Horace didn’t fancy it. Neither did Bob Mills, who had replaced Tony Boucher as the editor of
Fantasy and Science Fiction.
So early in April of 1958, I took it down to Scottie. He bought it unhesitatingly, changed its title on the spot to “Exiled from Earth,” and ran it under the byline of “Richard F. Watson” in the December, 1958 issue of
Super-Science,
where it kept company with my other two recent submissions, “The Aliens Were Haters” (under my own name) and “The Traders” (as Calvin M. Knox). Scottie renamed the latter story “The Unique and Terrible Compulsion.” As I said earlier, some of his title changes were improvements, but not all.

The night old Howard Brian got his impossible yen to return to Earth, we were playing to an almost-full house at Smit’s Terran Theater on Salvor. A crowd like that one really warms a director’s heart. Five hundred solemn-mouthed, rubber-faced green Salvori had filed into the little drab auditorium back of the circus aviary, that night. They had plunked down two credits apiece to watch my small troupe of exiled Terran actors perform.

We were doing
King Lear
that night—or rather, a boiled-down half-hour condensation of it. I say with I hope pardonable pride that it wasn’t too bad a job. The circus management limits my company to half an hour per show, so we won’t steal time from the other attractions.

A nuisance, but what could we do? With Earth under inflexible Neopuritan sway, we had to go elsewhere and take whatever bookings we could. I cut
Lear
down to size by pasting together a string of the best speeches, and to Sheol with the plot. Plot didn’t matter here, anyway; the Salvori didn’t understand a word of the show.

But they insisted on style, and so did I. Technique! Impeccable timing. Smit’s Players were just about the sole exponents of the Terran drama in this sector of the outworlds, and I wanted each and every performance to be worthy of the world that kind cast us so sternly forth.

I sat in the back of the theater unnoticed and watched old Howard Brian, in the title role, bringing the show to its close. Howard was the veteran of my troupe, a tall, still majestic figure at seventy-three. I didn’t know then that this was to be the night of his crackup.

He was holding dead Cordelia in his arms and glaring round as if his eyes were neutron-smitters. Spittle flecked his gray beard.

“Howl, howl, howl, howl! Oh, you are men of stones:

Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so

That heaven’s vaults should crack. She’s gone forever.

I know when one is dead, and when one lives;

She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;

If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

Why then she lives.”

As Howard reached that tingling line,
She’s dead as earth,
I glanced at my watch. In three minutes
Lear
would be over, and the circus attendants would clear the auditorium for the next show, the popular Damooran hypnotists. Silently I slipped from my seat, edged through the brightly-lit theater—Salvori simply can’t stand the dark—and made my way past a row of weeping aliens toward the dressing-room, to be on hand to congratulate my cast.

I got there during the final speech, and counted the curtain-calls: five, six, seven. Applause from outside still boomed as Howard Brian entered the dressing-room, with the rest of the cast following him. Howard’s seamed face was beaded with sweat. Genuine tears glittered in his faded eyes.
Genuine.
The mark of a great actor.

I came forward and seized his hand. “Marvelous job tonight, old man. The Greenies loved every second of it. They were spellbound.”

“To hell with the Greenies,” Howard said in a suddenly hoarse voice. “I’m through, Erik. Let someone else play Lear for your gaggle of gawping green-faced goggle-eyed aliens in this stale-sawdust circus.”

I grinned at the old man. I had seen him in this crochety bitter mood before. We all were subject to it, when we thought of Earth. “Come off it, Howard!” I chuckled. “You don’t mean to tell me you’re retiring again? Why, you’re in your prime. You never were better than—”

“No!” Howard plopped heavily into a chair and let his gaudy regal robes swirl around him. He looked very much the confused, defeated Lear at that moment. “Finished,” he breathed. “I’m going back to Earth, Erik.
La comeddia è finita.”

“Hey!” I shouted to the rest of the company. “Listen to old Uncle Vanya here! He’s going back to Earth! He says he’s tired of playing Lear for the Greenies!”

Joanne, my Goneril, chuckled, and then Ludwig, the Gloucester, picked it up, and a couple of others joined in—but it was an awkward, quickly dying chuckle. I saw the weary, wounded look on old Howard’s face. I grinned apologetically and snapped, “Okay! Out of costume double fast, everyone. Cast party in twenty minutes!
Kethii
and roast
dwaarn
for everybody!”

“Erik, can I talk to you in your office?” Howard murmured to me.