In the Beginning (38 page)

She put a cup of coffee in my hand and I sat down facing her and I said, “Ellen, what I’m going to tell you is something you should have known from the start. I want you to hear me out from beginning to end without interrupting.”

I told her the whole thing: how Nat Hamlin had thrived for thirteen years as a top interstellar jewel smuggler, how he had been wanted by half the worlds of the galaxy, how he had finally been caught and Rehabbed into me. I explained why I had taken the Palmyra option, how I had rebuilt my life, how I had begun with a fresh slate. I also told her how much I loved and needed her.

Then I went into the Helgerson episode, and his threat. “That’s why I came here, Ellen. To tell you before he had the chance to. But everything’s ruined for me here anyway. I can’t stop him from exposing me. I’ll leave Palmyra tomorrow, go back to Earth, tell them I’ve changed my mind and want a refacing job done. That way none of Hamlin’s old pals can pop up this way again. And I’ll find some other world somewhere and start over a second time. That’s all, Ellen.”

Her expression hadn’t changed during the whole long narration. Now that she saw I was finished she said, “I wish you could find some way of avoiding the refacing, Paul. I like your face the way it is.”

The implications of what she had said didn’t register for a moment. Then I gaped foolishly and gasped, “You—you’ll come with me?”

“Of course, silly. You should have told me before—but it doesn’t make any difference. I love Paul Macy. Nat Hamlin’s dead, so far as I’m concerned.”

A floodtide of warmth and happiness swept over me. She trusted me! She—loved me! I had been an idiot not to see the depth of that love, to know that I could have told her the truth all along. “You—aren’t like the others, Ellen. The fact that I’m a Rehab doesn’t matter to you.”

There was an odd expression on her face as she said, “Of course it doesn’t matter.”

She got up and took her purse from a dresser drawer. She fumbled through the purse, found something, brought it over and handed it to me. “You’re not the only one with a past, darling.”

I was holding a yellow identity card in my hand. It told me that the girl who was known as Ellen Bryce had been born Joan Gardner, until her sentence two years ago. The card didn’t tell me what the sentence had been for, and I didn’t want to know. But it did tell me that Ellen was a Rehab too.

***

The last barriers of mutual mistrust were down between us. Ellen cried, and maybe I cried a little too, and then we laughed at how silly we had both been to keep our big secrets from each other. I figure half the pain in this universe is brought about by people who hide things unnecessarily and then brood over what they’ve hidden. But we didn’t have any more secrets from each other. Dan Helgerson couldn’t hurt us now.

He couldn’t do anything to what we had between us. If Rehabs don’t trust each other, how can they expect the rest of the world to trust them? I didn’t care what Joan Gardner had done in her twenty-two years of life. Maybe she had chopped her parents into hamburger; maybe she had been the most active call-girl in the galaxy. What did that matter? Joan Gardner was dead, and Ellen Bryce was the girl I held in my arms that night.

It was ridiculous for me to go home that night, and I stayed till dawn and Ellen made breakfast for us. We talked and planned and wondered, and between us we not only set the date but figured out what I was going to do about Helgerson and his threat.

When Helgerson called the next day to find out my answer, I said, “You win. I’ll come in with you at a million a year.”

“I knew you’d smarten up, Nat. We need you and you need us. It’s a good deal. You always had an eye for a good deal.”

“When do I begin?”

“Right away. Suppose you come on over here for lunch and a drink, and I’ll give you a month’s advance as a binder.” He quoted an address on Palmyra City’s swank South Side. “You won’t regret doing this, Nat. We’ll keep it quiet and the Rehab boys won’t ever find out you’re breaking your conditioning.”

“Sure. I’ll be right over.”

I hung up and reeled dizzily against the wall while the shock of the conversation left me. Rehab conditioning is no joke. Not only do they erase the neuroses that led you to become a criminal in the first place, but they stick in a few mental blocks that make it tough to go back to your old ways. I was fighting those blocks now. Waves of pain rolled through me. It was double-edged pain, too—for not only was I fighting the Rehab conditioning, I was also going against an older, still-active block I had about turning stoolpigeon. Nat Hamlin had been vividly expressive on the subject of stoolies. Paul Macy still found the idea repugnant. But I didn’t have any choice. And Helgerson was going to be in for a surprise.

When the pain spasms were gone, I picked up the phone again and asked for the Rehab desk of the local Crime Commission office. The face of Commissioner Blair, the man who had placed me on Palmyra, appeared on the screen: relaxed, pink-cheeked, smiling.

“Hello, there, Paul. What’s up?”

“You know Dan Helgerson, Commissioner?”

His brows furrowed. “The name doesn’t register.”

I said, “You can check him against your master lists later. He’s wanted for jewel swindles on fifty worlds or so. He was one of Nat Hamlin’s old buddies.”

“And what about him, Paul?”

I winced at the inner pain. I said, “Helgerson’s on Palmyra, Commissioner. He’s been in touch with me and he’s trying to blackmail me into setting up a jewel-smuggling ring here. He says if I don’t come across, he’ll spread the word that I’m a Rehab.” I saw the alarm and anger appear on Blair’s face. “I told him I agreed to his terms, and he’s expecting me for lunch today. But of course—I can’t really go back into partnership with him—”

“Naturally not. Give me the address of the place where he’s expecting you, and we’ll pick him up. If he’s wanted as you say, we can book him on that charge—and even if he isn’t, we can grab him on Invasion of Privacy. A Rehab’s entitled to live in peace. You don’t have to wear the mark of Cain on your forehead for the things Nat Hamlin did.”

I was weak-kneed and sweat-soaked by the time I hung up. But I was smiling in satisfaction. Dan Helgerson was going to be awfully surprised when the police and not me showed up at his hotel.

Nat Hamlin had had two attributes for which he was admired throughout the galaxy by his fellow crooks. He never doublecrossed a buddy and he declared repeatedly that he would rather cut his throat than turn stoolie. Helgerson had given his address because he knew he could trust Nat Hamlin.

But Helgerson had made a big mistake. He underestimated the Rehab conditioning. He wasn’t dealing with Nat Hamlin at all. He was dealing with a guy named Paul Macy, and Macy wasn’t hampered by any of Hamlin’s attributes.

***

The trial was a closed-chamber affair that took eight hours. Helgerson sat across the room, glaring at me in anger and disbelief. Even then, he couldn’t believe that Nat Hamlin had called copper on him.

The central office of the Galactic Crime Commission sent in a full dossier on Helgerson by ultrafax, and the judge read through it, heard my testimony, and quickly sentenced Helgerson to be remanded to Earth for Rehabilitation. The case didn’t make the Palmyra papers, because my identity as a Rehab had to be kept quiet.

Ellen and I were married the next day; I got a leave of absence and we departed on our honeymoon. The first stop was Earth, where I visited the Rehab Center and asked for a minor refacing—just enough to keep other buddies of Nat Hamlin’s from recognizing me. They altered my hair color from black to reddish-brown, thinned out my nose, widened my mouth, shortened my jaw, and gave me a mustache. Ellen had designed the new face herself. It looked pretty much like the old me, but there were minor differences. When we got back to Palmyra, it wouldn’t be hard for Ellen to explain that I had had an aircar crackup and had needed some plastic surgery.

From Earth we went on to Durrinor, the playground-world, and our three months there were as close to Eden as I expect to get. The time came, finally, sadly, to return to Palmyra. We had a private cabin aboard the spaceship; we still thought of ourselves as honeymooners, and intended to keep on thinking of ourselves that way for the rest of our lives.

The first night on board the spaceliner we had just finished getting settled and unpacked in our stateroom when the doorchime sounded. I opened the door. My jaw slid down an inch or two.

Dan Helgerson was standing outside the door, and he was wearing the blue-and-gold uniform of a crewman. He smiled pleasantly. “Good evening, sir. Welcome aboard the
Queen of the Stars.
I hope you enjoy your trip, sir.” Then his expression changed as he recognized me behind the minor changes. “Ah—you’re Nat—Nat Hamlin—”

“No,” I said. “Paul Macy, just as it says on the doorplate, Dan.”

He shook his head. “Not Dan. The name is Joseph, sir. Joseph Elson. I’m your purser, and it’ll be my pleasure to serve you during this trip. If you need me, just ring. Thank you—Mr. Macy.”

“Thank you—Joseph.”

We smiled at each other, and he shut the door. Joseph Elson, eh? Well, Joseph Elson it was, then. I hoped I wouldn’t accidentally call him Dan during the course of the trip. A Rehab deserves that much courtesy, after all.

Mournful Monster

(1959)

1958 was a bad year for the science-fiction magazines. Their sales had been dropping ever since the peak year of 1953, when an all-time record 39 different titles were published (and helped to kill each other off by overcrowding the newsstands.) In 1958 the American News Company, the main magazine distributor, abruptly went out of business, taking with it a lot of magazines that it had been financing through advances against earnings. And the continued boom in paperback publishing was squeezing the surviving all-fiction magazines into a marginal existence.

Many of the s-f magazines I had been writing for in the previous four years began to shut up shop or to cut back drastically on frequency of publication, and I was beginning to feel uneasy about my ability to earn a living through the sort of mass production of stories that had carried me through those years. In particular I worried about
W.W. Scott’s Super-Science,
which had become my mainstay. It was a poky little magazine at best, which probably had never shown much of a  profit, and I wondered how much longer I was going to be able to sell it all those $240 novelets.

Against this gloomy background the sudden upsurge of monster fiction provided one commercial bright spot. In the late 1950s a magazine called
Famous Monsters of Filmland,
which specialized in photo-essays on classic Hollywood horror movies of the “Frankenstein” and “Wolf-Man” sort, had shot up overnight to a huge circulation. A couple of the science-fiction editors, desperately trying to find something that worked, experimented with converting their magazines to vehicles for horror fiction. Thus Larry Shaw’s
Infinity
and
Science Fiction Adventures,
for which I had been a steady contributor, vanished and were replaced by two titles called
Monster Parade
and
Monsters and Things.
(I wrote for them too.) And over at
Super-Science Fiction,
Scottie concluded that the only way to save his magazine was to convert it to a book of monster stories also. Word went out to all the regular contributors, of whom I was the most productive, that all material purchased thenceforth would have to have some monster angle in it. I didn’t find that difficult, since most of the stories I was doing for him were space adventures featuring fearsome alien beings, and I would simply need to make the aliens a little bigger and more fearsome.

Strangely, Scottie didn’t change the title of the magazine. This was odd, because the presence of “Science” in it wasn’t something likely to appeal to horror fans. Instead he plastered the words SPECIAL MONSTER ISSUE! in big yellow letters above the name of the magazine on the April, 1959 issue, commissioned a painting that featured a gigantic and notably hideous creature sweeping a couple of space-suited humans up in its claws, and retitled every story in inventory to give it a monster-oriented twist: “The Huge and Hideous Beasts,” for example, or “The Abominable Creature.” (His gift for the utterly flat-footed title may have stood him in good stead here.)

The lead story for the issue was one that I was writing in July, 1958, just as the change in policy went into effect. Evidently I found it necessary to restructure the story midway through for the sake of monsterizing it, because on my frayed and tattered carbon copy of the manuscript I find a penciled note in my own handwriting indicating a switch in the plot as of page 26: “They are continuing along when they see a huge monster looming ahead. They lay low, but the monster pursues them. They hear it crackling along behind them. They trip it, but it claws its way out of the trap and comes at them.” And so on to the end of the story as you will see it here. Whatever non-monster denouement I might originally have had in mind is lost forever in the mists of time.

I turned the story in with the title I had originally given it, “Five Against the Jungle,” a nice old-fashioned pulp title which of course was not right for the revamped Super-Science, so Scottie changed it to “Mournful Monster.” By so doing, he gave away, to some extent, the fact that it wasn’t really a horror story—that the monster, while appropriately monstrous, was actually a sympathetic figure. But so, after all, was Frankenstein’s monster, and that didn’t harm the commercial appeal of the movie. The prime subtext of the whole monster genre, I decided, must really be existential alienation.

It was almost time for the regular midweek flight to leave. On the airstrip, the technicians were giving the two-engine jet a last-minute checkup. In fifteen minutes, according to the chalked announcement on the bulletin board, the flight would depart—making the two-thousand-mile voyage across the trackless, unexplored wilderness that lay between the Terran colonies of Marleyville and New Lisbon, on the recently settled planet of Loki in the Procyon system.