Early Days: More Tales From the Pulp Era

  First accept my apologies for the beastly thing I tried to do to you today. I was shocked out of my mind, I guess, by your exposure of me. Perhaps it would have been best if I had let you die, but I don’t want another sin on my ledger, so I’ve sent Khalimuru out into the jungle to fetch you back. And in a few minutes I will take a very permanent way of resigning from the Merchant Service, leaving the outpost here in your capable hands.

  You were, of course, correct in that I was giving drugs to the aliens. I have been doing so for nearly ten years, even though I have never ceased to be aware of the dreadful nature of my act. All I can say by way of excuse is that I had no choice. Ten years ago I treated a native with neopriozone, not knowing the narcotic effect it would have on him. When he recovered, he compelled me to give him more. Since then, many of the other natives have become addicts, and they likewise have forced me to supply the drug to them. Their method of compulsion is so uniquely terrible that I cannot bear to describe it here. I fear you will experience it soon enough.

  In closing, I ask you to forgive me for what I have done on this world, and to pray for me. Perhaps I will have peace where I am going. I have had none in this life for many years.

  Anton Lidman

  Garth straightened up and methodically folded the suicide note into halves, then into quarters, and slipped it into the pocket of his shorts. His mind was still getting used to the events of the last few minutes. It took time to change gears; for half an hour he had figured he was being led to his death in the jungle, and now he came back to find Lidman a suicide, and the entire outpost in his hands.

  And the note did little but puzzle. Evidently Lidman had touched off the neopriozone addictions accidentally, unaware of what he was doing. But what did he mean when he said the natives had used a “uniquely terrible” way of compelling him to keep supplying them with the drug?

  He shrugged. First things had to come first, and in this tropical climate a quick burial was most important. Garth strode to the porch of the trading post and signaled to several of the aliens.

  He ordered them to dig a grave six feet long and two feet deep at the edge of the jungle.

  Garth next headed upstairs and took out his little radio transmitter, the one that he would no longer need to keep hidden. He turned it on and tapped out another message to the home office:

  DAVE GARTH, DANNEROI, REPORTING. TO MARTIN KINGSLEY, BUENOS AIRES OFFICE.

  LIDMAN A SUICIDE WHEN CONFRONTED WITH EVIDENCE OF DRUGGING. LEFT A NOTE ADMITTING HIS GUILT. AS PREVIOUSLY UNDERSTOOD AM TAKING FULL CONTROL OF DANNEROI OUTPOST AND WILL WAIT FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

  GARTH

  Then, calling four of the natives, he assigned them to pallbearing duties. There was no need for a coffin, not in this climate; wood placed in that ground would rot in a month or two anyway. With an alien at each leg and one at each shoulder, the body of Anton Lidman was borne across the clearing he had built, and gently he was placed in his grave.

  Garth said a few words, and then signaled for the grave to be closed. When the new mound of soil rose high over the body, Garth inserted a stick as a marker. Later, at his leisure, he could possibly carve a tombstone for the old man.

  He looked around at the natives.

  “Boss Lidman is dead. From now on I am Boss.”

  “From now on you are Boss.”

  Garth smiled sadly. He had long waited for this, the chance to operate his own trading outpost; he was top man on Danneroi, and perhaps someday, when he had built the station up to five or ten-man status, he would really be important in the Service. But he felt no sense of glory, no exaltation. He had hounded an old man to suicide, and that somewhat tarnished everything.

  He returned to the trading post. According to the schedule, Lidman had been expecting an ore consignment from a northern tribe later in the day. Garth wanted to get a little rest, to ease his nerves a little before he settled down to the job of running the trading post.

  Trouble began half an hour later.

  It started with Khalimuru knocking timidly on the door of Garth’s bedroom upstairs. He had not yet moved into Lidman’s room.

  “Boss Garth? Are you there?”

  “Come in. What’s the matter?”

  “The people are waiting down there, Boss Garth.”

  Instantly Garth snapped to attention. “What people? The ore shipment isn’t due for two hours yet!”

  “Not the ore shipment,” Khalimuru said sadly. “It is the outpost people. At this time Boss Lidman used to give them dream-stuff. They want to know, you going to give it to them too.”

  Garth felt a quiver of alarm. “Tell them—tell them I’ll be right down. I’ll talk to them.”

  There were seven or eight of the outpost people waiting on the porch for him when he emerged. He was sweating and tense; this was the moment he had feared ever since his first glimpse of Lidman’s body. The moment when he would be called on to distribute drugs to the aliens.

  He coughed to get some of the tension out of his nervous system. The aliens were eyeing him expectantly, almost holding their breaths in anticipation of what he was going to tell them.

  He said, “I understand you’re here because this was the time when Boss Lidman gave you the dream-stuff. This stuff.”

  He held up a neopriozone capsule and the aliens seemed to sigh with desire for it. Garth noticed now that they all had the glazed eyes of addicts.

  He said, “Boss Lidman did a wrong thing by giving this to you. It is evil. Boss Lidman killed himself because of this. From now on, there will be no more of the dream-stuff for you.”

  After a long pause one of the aliens said mournfully, “We must have it.”

  “No. From now on no more.”

  He fingered the blaster at his hip, just in case they decided to get ugly. But there was no visible reaction, just an intangible sadness of mood that seemed to descend over them.

  Mildly another alien said, “Boss Lidman always let us have it. Why must things change?”

  “Boss Lidman did wrong to give you the dream-stuff.”

  “And you will not?”

  “I will not.”

  “Then we will kill ourselves,” said the alien.

  For an instant Garth did not really understand. Then he frowned and said, “You don’t need to do that. There are cures for addiction.”

  “We do not want cures. We want the dream-stuff, and if you do not give it to us we will kill ourselves.”

  Abruptly one of the aliens—Garth recognized him as the downstairs houseboy—stepped off the porch and faced the group. He seemed to be smiling. As if by magic, one of the native knives had appeared in his hand—a vicious little weapon, eight inches long, with a curved, razor-keen blade that glinted brightly in the reddish late-afternoon sunlight.

  “You will change your mind, Boss Garth,” the houseboy said in flat, calm tones. “When we did this for Boss Lidman he changed his mind. You will change yours.”

  “You will get no drugs from me!” Garth said firmly.

  The houseboy shrugged. Still smiling, he lifted the knife and, in a gesture that took no more than a second to perform, jabbed it into his stomach and sliced upward, laying himself open almost to the throat. The smile did not fade as the houseboy fell to the ground. A pool of blood began to spread outward.

  Garth goggled unbelievingly. Before he could speak, a second Danneroian had come forward and he, too, was brandishing a knife.

  “Will you give us the dream-stuff, Boss Garth?”

  Thickly Garth said, “You must be out of your minds! Killing yourselves!”

  “Will you give it to us?”

  “No! No!”

  Garth averted his eyes in horror as the second alien disemboweled himself. Currents of shock ran through him; he felt sick.

  As a third alien stepped forward to kill himself, Garth shouted, “No! Wait! Here, take the damned drug! Take it!”

  He hurled the capsule of Neopriozone at the alien, and, dashing within, picked up the
keys he had taken from dead Lidman’s body. Hurriedly he found the medical cabinet key, opened it, took a handful of drug capsules from the rack, and hurled them at the group of aliens.

  Shuddering, he ran upstairs.

  For a long while he sat on the edge of his cot, bathed in sweat, trying to erase the nightmarish sight of two dead aliens from his mind. Now he understood why Lidman had called the aliens’ compulsion “uniquely terrible.” They indeed had a dreadful weapon. Either he supplied them with the drug or they disemboweled themselves right before his eyes. Life was cheap on this young world, it seemed.

  Garth stared at his quivering hands. With those hands he had given drugs to the aliens. He had broken the rule he held most sacred.

  I had no choice, he told himself grimly.

  Heaving sobs racked him. He stared out the window, down at the happy group of aliens. They had what they wanted. No one seemed to care that two had died for it. They had these Earthmen figured out. We’re softhearted. They know how to make us give them what they want.

  It was incredible that Lidman had been able to stand it so long. Always smiling, always obedient, the natives had nevertheless imposed a dread tyranny over him. There was always the unvoiced threat of self-destruction compelling him to hand out the drug, until he himself had broken the spell with a pistol shot.

  Garth looked forward, into the years to come. Long years of nightmare on Danneroi, as he went about his duties and tried to pretend he wasn’t breaking the law. It was too much. He was an honorable man. He could never bring himself to distribute drugs, day in and day out, for the rest of his life.

  Sobbing incoherently, he reached for the radio transmitter. He thought a moment, knowing that what he would write now would smash his career, would end his usefulness in the Merchant Service. He would be given a psycho discharge. But there was no help for it. He was caught in a vise-like grip.

  If he refused the drugs, the aliens would slaughter themselves. If he gave them the drug, he was breaking his own staunch moral code. There was only one way out. Garth realized he was on the edge of cracking up.

  With trembling fingers he tapped out a message to the home office:

  THESE ALIENS ARE DEVILISH. SEND SOMEONE ELSE IN A HURRY. I RESIGN. HELP! HELP! HELP!

  WATERS OF FORGETFULNESS

  (1958)

  Things were getting wobblier and wobblier for my science-fiction markets as the complicated year of 1958 moved along and magazine sales of all kinds began to diminish, and “Waters of Forgetfulness,” which I wrote for W.W. Scott in May of 1958, would prove to be the last straightforward science-fiction novelet I would do for him before the magazine underwent a desperate mutation in a last-gasp effort to survive.

  An interstellar spaceliner has been shipwrecked on an unexplored planet. A member of the search team finds it and learns that the survivors have undergone—changes—as the alien environment exerts its influence on their metabolisms. And then he—well, he gets entangled in those changes too, and then—then—

  It ran under the name of Eric Rodman, who was becoming a well established name in Super-Science, though perhaps the astute regular reader, if there were any such, might have noticed a certain thematic resemblance between Rodman’s novelets and those of Calvin M. Knox. But then came the transformation of Super-Science from a conventional s-f magazine into a monster-fiction magazine, and I found it necessary to vary my method just a bit to meet the new requirements.

  The regular s-f magazines had continued to shut up shop all during 1958. Such titles as Infinity, Science Fiction Adventures, Fantastic Universe, and Hamling’s Imagination and Imaginative Tales, among others for which I had been a frequent contributor, came to the end of their days. 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 monster-based horror fiction. 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, of course, 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 that 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. Whatever non-monster denouement I might originally have had in mind is lost forever in the mists of time. And my original title, “Five Against the Jungle,” became Scottie’s “Mournful Monster,” which I included in my earlier volume of my early stories, In the Beginning.

  I went on writing lead novelets for Scottie for a little while longer, but the tone was different now. The June, 1959 issue brought the world “Beasts of Nightmare Horror” by “Richard F. Watson,” an epic of—surprise!—space colonists up against the onslaught of alien monsters. The August, 1959 Super-Science yielded more of the same in “Planet of the Angry Giants” by “Dirk Clinton.” Then came the October, 1959 issue with “Dan Malcolm”’s “The Loathsome Beasts,” and that was that. Super-Science’s eighteenth issue was its last. I had three stories in that October, 1959 issue, but when I turned them in, in March of 1959, Scottie sadly notified me that he would need no more science-fiction stories from me after that. Though Trapped and Guilty were going to continue (for the time being), Super-Science had walked the plank.

  I would miss it. It had supported me in grand style for three years, and the income from it would be hard to replace. The jig was up for those $240 novelettes, and my days as a high-volume producer of space opera were just about over, too.

  ——————

  Halderson had just about given up the search for survivors of the missing spaceliner James P. Drew when his detectors picked up the faint, sputtering S.O.S. signal.

  He sprang to his phones and tried to boost the signal, just in case coordinates were coming over as well as the bare, unadorned S.O.S. But the dim piping faded away and died within seconds. Halderson moistened his lips. The input tape had recorded the signal; he activated the playback switch, cut in the noise filters, and listened.

  Yes. It was unmistakable, for all its indistinctness. It had only lasted a few seconds, but that was long enough for his detectors to pick it up. There were survivors of the James P. Drew! They were calling for help!

  The super-luxury liner James P. Drew had disappeared somewhere in the thickly-populated Second Octant area of the galaxy about ten days before. It had been bound
for Darrinoor out of Earth, and it had carried eight hundred wealthy first-class passengers plus a crew of nearly sixty. Just what had happened to the Drew was highly uncertain. Its messages had grown increasingly fragmentary and incoherent, and they were practically impossible to understand in the final minutes of the giant ship’s fire. It appeared that there had been a series of explosions aboard ship, beginning in the drive compartment and culminating with a grand outburst that split the liner apart.

  Like all superliners of the Earth Line, the James P. Drew had been fully equipped with lifeships. It carried thirty ships, each built to hold ten or twelve people but each capable of holding as many as thirty if necessary. And there were hundreds of planets in the Second Octant to which survivors might have gone. Some of the planets were heavily settled; others were still utterly unexplored. But there were numerous Earthtype planets for the escaping survivors.

  For ten days since the disappearance, over a hundred Disaster Patrol scouts had been combing the entire Second Octant area, hoping to pick up a message transmission from a group of survivors or, perhaps, to find one of the lifeships adrift in space. The scouts had drawn blanks so far. Not one had come upon a trace of the survivors of the James P. Drew disaster.

  Disaster Scout Halderson had been on the verge of giving up and returning to home base. His small ship only carried two weeks’ supplies, anyway, and he saw no point in continuing the fruitless search for the missing millionaires. It was too bad about them, of course; but space travel was not completely safe, and accidents did happen.

  He had been about to notify home base of his decision to return when his ultra-sensitive detectors picked up the feeble impulses of the call, coming in on the special wavelength that had been reserved for James P. Drew lifeships.

  He played it back on his recording tapes. Yes, there was no doubt about it. The brief message had said, “S.O.S…S.O.S…James P. Drew survivors…S.O.S…S.O.S…”