“But that’s not right!” Fenton protested. “You can’t send a man out as an executioner, and then expect him to die too! Not even aliens—”
“Cklezn killed Jamie while Jamie was drunk. That was the wrong thing for Cklezn to do. So Cklezn’s life is forfeit, and if you go out to the Death-Grounds you’ll be able to claim it. They’re aliens, I tell you. We can’t ever really understand them.”
Fenton took a long drink. He licked his lips smackingly, exhaled, stood up. “How do I get to the Death-Grounds?” he asked.
He left after lunch, when the white dwarf sun was high overhead, blazing furiously. A crowd of interested aliens gathered about the hotel as he left, gun strapped outside his shirt, head shielded by a protective tobee.
McGill walked with him, reeling just a little. Fenton felt completely sober. He didn’t bother to look at the curious Vordillans who peered at him; he walked right through them, out into the dusty, sandy road.
“I’ll go as far as the entrance to the forest,” McGill said. “I’ll put you on the road. You can’t miss the place if you go straight.”
“How will I know when I’ve reached it?”
“You will. It’s a circle about a thousand feet in diameter, smack in the middle of the forest. Not a tree, not a blade of grass—totally bare. Death-Grounds. Cklezn will be there waiting, anyway.”
“Armed?”
“No. He expects you to kill him. Make it a clean death, Fenton. Then come back here and pack up your stuff and get off Vordil. Kill him quick and clean and the chain of death is broken.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to come with me?”
“Damned sure,” McGill said emphatically. “This is your quarrel, friend. You’ll have to settle it alone.”
They walked together through the town, down a twisting little rutted road that wound off in a direction leading away from the spaceport. After a while McGill said, “Okay. This is as far as I’m going. You walk straight and you’ll get there okay.” He pulled out a soiled bandanna and mopped his head. Vordil was the hottest world Fenton had ever seen: hot and dry, but not so that it couldn’t make a fat man sweat.
Fenton took five tens from his wallet and waved them in front of McGill’s nose. “You come with me and you can have these bills for your very own,” he said.
Hesitantly McGill shook his head. “It’s your quarrel,” he repeated stolidly. “I got enough drink-money to last me a while. I’m not going any further.”
Shrugging, Fenton handed him the bills. “Keep them anyway, then. Thanks for your help. I’ll see you tonight, I guess.”
“Yeah. See you later,” McGill said.
He turned away and waddled back the way he came. Fenton began to walk…on, toward the Death-Grounds.
The alienness of the place was borne in on him as he walked. The afternoon was silent, except for the droning of silvery insects four or five inches long that swooned through the slender trees that rose like needles along the road. The grass sprang up thickly—squarish, shovel-shaped blades, a dull, ugly blue-black in color. In the distance rose a low hill, thick with the spike-like trees.
Life ran fairly close on planets that were fairly similar. The people of Vordil IX were almost human; the trees were almost trees, the grass almost grass. But not quite. There were differences, sometimes glaring, sometimes subtle. The birds didn’t sing, here; they barked. Rabbits bounded out of the thick-packed shrubbery—but they were rabbits with snake-like tails and beady blue eyes and savage teeth.
Fenton wondered how it had been for Jamie to walk this path—whether he had been sober enough to see where he was and how alien the things were, or whether it really mattered to him. He pictured big Jamie being dragged along, half-supported by the wiry little Vordillan who was to be his executioner.
He stared ahead, eyes flicking nervously through the trees. Despite all that McGill had told him, he found it hard to believe that Cklezn would be simply waiting for death, and he expected some sort of ambush. He moved forward warily, now, hand ready to spring to the needlegun in the holster.
But no danger presented itself. The alien calm of the afternoon remained unbroken. The road twisted and turned, winding like an epileptic serpent, and Fenton followed every twist and every turn, never knowing when death might step out from behind a curve.
And then he turned one final curve and knew he had reached the Death-Grounds.
Whether man-made or natural, there was no way of telling. But the area was absolutely sterile. Not a blade of grass, not a tree-trunk. It was a circle of utterly bare ground, perhaps a thousand feet in diameter, naked, nothing but black earth.
Cklezn stood waiting in the very center of the circle, his thin arms folded in a startlingly human pose.
Fenton drew his gun and advanced into the circle cautiously. The butt of the needler fit nicely into his palm; his anxious finger lay tensely on the firing-stud. Cklezn stared at him interestedly, without moving.
“This is the Death-Grounds, isn’t it?” Fenton asked. His voice was strangely dry.
“Yes. I have waited for you, Mark Fenton. This is the place for revenge, and this is the time.” He sounded calm, resigned. He didn’t seem to carry any weapons.
“The time for revenge,” Fenton said, lifting the needlegun. Somehow it was strangely hollow, gunning down a willing victim this way. It wasn’t the sort of death that would wash away the burden of Jamie’s murder.
“Why did you kill my brother?” Fenton demanded suddenly. “What did he do?”
“I must not say it,” Cklezn muttered. “Especially not here! Not on the holy ground itself!”
Fenton gestured with the gun. “I want to know what my brother did that made it necessary to kill him.” He smiled craftily. “You’d better tell me, Cklezn. Or else I’ll drag you halfway back to town before I kill you. You wouldn’t like that.”
The alien sucked in his thin lips in a nervous gesture. “No. I must die here—on this ground.”
“Then tell me.”
“Very well,” Cklezn said wearily. “It is wrong, and I will be punished for it…but not half so heavily as if I do not die on the Death-Grounds. Come.” He started to walk toward the edge of the forest.
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t commit a sin while standing on the Death-Grounds itself,” Cklezn said.
Fenton followed him across the bare ground to the forest. The border of the Death-Grounds was precise and even, as if it were weeded every day. Probably it was. Cklezn stepped over onto the grass.
He said, “Your brother spat at a priest during a ceremony. This is unforgivable. He was drunk, and knew not what he did—but he had to die for it.” The alien shuddered and looked away.
Fenton wondered what taboo made it so revolting for Cklezn to utter Jamie’s crime aloud. “For that you killed him?” he asked. “For a drunken act that he never knew he committed…you killed a man?”
Cklezn nodded.
A sudden terrible rage flooded through Fenton. That Jamie should die for such a cheap thing, be led to the fields of slaughter while he was drunk and…
His finger tightened convulsively on the firing stud. He knew how he could exact a fitting revenge, now. He squeezed the stud, once.
A bolt lanced through the fleshy part of the alien’s leg. Cklezn gasped and sank to the ground. A needlegun was not a painless weapon.
He stared at his leg, with the tiny hole drilled through flesh and bone and muscle and nerve. “I killed your brother quickly,” he said. “Do the same for me.”
“Don’t worry,” Fenton said. “I’m not going to torture you. The next shot is to kill.”
Cklezn looked relieved. He began to crawl forward on his hands, over the grass to the nakedness of the Death-Grounds. Fenton grinned.
“Sorry. I don’t want you to die there.”
“But—”
He seized the stricken-looking alien and dragged him back, tugging him remorselessly over the ground away from the Death-Grounds. Ckle
zn clung to the grass, dug his hands into the soil, tried to hold back, but Fenton pulled him on.
Finally they were a hundred yards from the Death-Grounds.
Cklezn rose uncertainly and tried to stagger back, exclaiming constantly both in his own language and Fenton’s. Taking careful aim, Fenton sent a bolt through his other leg.
The alien toppled, face-forward. Fenton heard him sobbing.
“This is the time for revenge,” Fenton said. “Out here. You’ll die the way my brother did…alone, unpriested, in the wrong place. That’s the proper revenge.”
Cklezn wailed once. Fenton nudged the firing-stud and the needlegun leaped in his hand. The bolt whizzed through Cklezn’s throat. The alien jerked, nearly rolled over, then flattened out.
A time for revenge, Fenton thought.
Then sudden hands appeared to wrench the needlegun from his astonished grasp.
He whirled and saw four aliens looking at him sadly. One held the needlegun, pointed directly at him. They had come up so noiselessly he had not suspected it.
Fenton went cold despite the afternoon heat. “This was between me and him. I killed him. He had it coming to him, didn’t he? Give me back my gun!”
The alien with the gun smiled unhappily. “We came to see that it was done right. We had hoped the chain would be ended here. It was not.”
“What in blazes do you mean?”
“Your brother…did something. This man punished him for it. The method he used brought punishment upon his head, and you were the instrument of that punishment. You, too, failed by willfully destroying Cklezn’s soul.” The alien indicated the crumpled body on the grass, and pointed to the Death-Grounds. “He should have died there. Your vengeance was too great, Fenton.”
“You don’t understand. I—”
He broke off and ran forward, hoping to seize the gun. A shaft of pain seared through his thigh. He fell, doubling up, trying to squeeze the bright agony out of his leg. After a moment he looked up and saw the aliens regarding him patiently, sadly.
Fenton thought of Jamie, drunk, uncomprehending as Cklezn drove home the fatal blow. He thought of Cklezn writhing on the ground a hundred yards from the place where he had come to die. Fenton shivered uncontrollably.
“The chain of death ends with you,” the alien said. He nodded to the other three, who lifted the crippled Fenton and bore him forward.
He felt warm soil beneath him—warm, bare soil. Sprawled on the ground, he dug his hands in hard, and waited to die. The aliens had been kind. They had carried him to the Death-Grounds. The one holding the needlegun fired; and Fenton felt absurdly grateful to them as he writhed on the bare ground, waiting for death.
HOUSEMAID NO. 103
(1957)
We return to Bill Hamling and my monthly package of short stories for his two magazines. This one, which I sent him in February, 1957, appeared in the November, 1957 issue of Imaginative Tales, under the byline of “Ivar Jorgensen,” and there’s a story to go with that.
The “Jorgensen” byline was originally the property of Paul W. Fairman, who inaugurated it in the June, 1951 issue of the Ziff-Davis pulp Fantastic Adventures with a novella called “Whom the Gods Would Slay,” a fantasy involving Vikings, Nubians, aliens, and various other assorted characters, which I thought was great stuff when I read it at the time. (I was sixteen.) The magazine accompanied the story with a lengthy biography of the author, claiming Norwegian birth for him and a turbulent, adventurous life, and providing a drawing of a virile, slab-jawed Scandinavian-looking fellow. A second Jorgensen novella followed in the same magazine a few months later, and then some short stories for its companion, Amazing Stories. By then word had slipped out that “Jorgensen” was no Norwegian at all, but actually Paul W. Fairman, the associate editor of Amazing and Fantastic, who had had a few undistinguished stories published under his own name in those magazines as well.
Fairman left Ziff-Davis briefly in 1952 to launch an unrelated science-fiction magazine, If, but after four issues there he returned to Z-D, once again as editor Howard Browne’s right-hand man, and continued to write “Jorgensen” stories for him on the side. When Bill Hamling launched Imagination and Imaginative Tales about the same time, Fairman did some stories for him as well, both as “Jorgensen” and bearing his own byline. But Hamling always had had a fairly casual attitude toward pseudonyms—his main concern was not to use the same byline twice on one contents page, and he would stick any old name on stories to avoid such repetition. And so it came to pass that some stories I had written for Hamling turned up with the “Jorgensen” name on them, much to Paul Fairman’s annoyance, for until Hamling had co-opted the byline it had been Fairman’s property entirely. The situation became even messier because a young editor named Larry T. Shaw, who had replaced Fairman at If in 1953, thought that the name was spelled “Jorgenson,” thus transforming the author from a Norwegian into a Swede. A “Jorgensen” novella that Fairman had sold to himself when he was editing If was still in the magazine’s inventory when Shaw took over, and he published it as by “Jorgenson,” after which nobody was ever quite sure about the correct spelling of the name. Hamling, when he started using the byline, spelled it “Jorgensen,” but in the May, 1957 issue of Imaginative Tales a little story called “Pause in Battle,” which Randall Garrett probably had written, was listed as by “Jorgensen” on the contents page and “Jorgenson” on the first page of the story itself. And when Larry Shaw became the editor of a new space-opera magazine called Science Fiction Adventures, for which I was the main contributor, he ran four of my stories under “Jorgenson” in 1957 and 1958. (One of them eventually appeared as an Ace paperback under that name and spelling.) Fairman later reclaimed the pseudonym for a couple of paperback novels as “Jorgensen,” but it was generally believed that I had written them, and hardly a year now goes by without someone asking me to sign one at a convention. Whereupon I launch into an explanation just as tangled and confusing as the one I have provided here.
My original title for “Housemaid No. 103” was the perfunctory and uninspired “Misogynist,” but Hamling retitled it for publication, and I prefer his title to mine. My title implies that the protagonist, a handsome hunk of a movie star, is a man who just doesn’t much like women, though they keep throwing themselves at him. Anybody reading the story today would immediately conclude that he is gay; but one did not write stories about gay men for magazines like Imaginative Tales in 1957, and the idea that he was gay may not even have occurred to me back then. Very likely I saw him merely as a guy who didn’t care for women, period. Things do change.
——————
The only man in Sollywood who never got mentioned in the scandal sheets was Brad Crayshaw. There wasn’t another leading man (or woman) in the sollies who didn’t get romantically linked at one time or another, but not Crayshaw.
In a way, that added to his popularity. The moony-eyed teenage girls who went to the sollies for their vicarious necking flocked to the Crayshaw films with the same frequency they did to sollies of such stars as Lee Leighton or Mace Marhew. Experts wondered if the glamour of multiple matrimony might be a myth.
The answer came from Brad Crayshaw himself, in one of his rare press interviews.
“Sure, every kid hopes she can marry Mace Marhew. Why not? Seven females already have, and there’s no telling who’s next. But the ones who’re looney over me don’t stand a chance. I’m a woman-hater, that’s all.”
Brad Crayshaw’s misogyny made clear his appeal to the subdeb set: not only did they want to marry him but in his case they ran the extra-special challenge of having to break down Crayshaw’s resistance to feminine charms.
Which was, it seemed, a mighty sturdy resistance.
Brad Crayshaw first skyrocketed to fame in the fall of 2073 when the sollies were given their world premiere simultaneously in New York, Chicago, and Hollywood (which was to have a new name before the following year was out.)
Crayshaw played the part of Paul Buny
an in the sollie of that name. Six feet four, massively built, he was the ideal sollie star; his dimensions merited tridim transmission.
The film played to standees for well over a year and by then Hollywood was Sollywood, Brad Crayshaw was a rich man and the movie industry—the flatties, that is—was a gone bird.
With the coming of sollies a good many of the flattie stars vanished quietly into limbo. Just as the coming of talkie films had finished the careers of such dashing but squeaky-voiced stars as John Gilbert, so did the coming of sollies ruin any flattie actor who depended for his brawn on padding or corsets—and there were some of those. That was out, now—now that the audience could not only see and hear, but feel as well. The film world’s heroes and heroines had to be real.
And Brad Crayshaw was real.
But Brad Crayshaw didn’t care to join the Sollywood game of musical chairs with mates; he didn’t fit in, he didn’t jive, he didn’t run with the herd.
“I don’t get it, Brad,” his manager and agent told him. “There isn’t a woman in Sollywood who wouldn’t trade in a five-year option for a chance to marry you. What goes?”
Crayshaw grinned and poured another shot of gin. “I just don’t aim to wed,” he said in the familiar bass growl so many women adored.
“I don’t like women. I don’t like frills and I don’t like lace, and I don’t want to be tied down and handed a lot of sentimental slush. Got that, Ace?”
Ace got it. He shrugged. “It’s your life, Brad. I won’t try to run it—not while my 10 per cent is still in six figures.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
Ace kept it that way. Two hours later he had arranged for the celebrated interview in which Brad Crayshaw exposed his misogynistic views to the world and by the following morning every unmarried female in the western hemisphere was anxiously discussing the star’s firm statement.
It was criminally unfair, they said, that a man like Brad Crayshaw should abstain from marriage, should remove himself from the matrimonial sweepstakes. He had no right to prefer his hunting and his fishing and the company of his mastiff hound.