Early Days: More Tales From the Pulp Era

  YOU DO SOMETHING TO ME

  (1958)

  With this story I was just about at the end of the phase of my career that had been devoted to writing quick, uncomplicated stories for the low-end science-fiction magazines. All the magazines that published that kind of story had folded, by the middle of 1959, or else had shifted their policies in the direction of the more sophisticated kind of s-f that Astounding and Galaxy were publishing. Since I was committed, by that time, to a life as a full-time writer who depended for his income on high-volume production, I needed to change markets, and I did. This was the period when I drifted off into writing fiction and articles for such men’s magazines as Exotic Adventures, Real Men, and Man’s Life, and when I found another new slot for my immense productivity in the suddenly hyperactive genre of soft-core erotic paperbacks, where I began turning out two and even three books a month—Suburban Wife, Love Thieves, Summertime Affair, and an almost infinite number of others of that ilk. And just ahead for me lay an entirely new career as a writer of popular books on archaeological subjects (Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations, Sunken History, Empires in the Dust, etc.) By the mid-1960s I would be writing hardly any science fiction at all, not so much because I had left the field as because the field, as represented by its numerous monthly and bi-monthly magazines, had left me. I would not return until things began to change later in that decade, which brought a resurgence of magazines and a vast and dizzying upsurge in the publication of science-fiction paperbacks.

  But in 1958 I still thought of myself mainly as a science-fiction writer, as I had set out to be, and, even though the number of science-fiction magazines was greatly diminished in the late 1950s, my records for the second half of 1958 and the first half of 1959 show that I was still writing the occasional story for the ones that had survived. My pulp markets were gone, but the top-of-the-line magazines remained, and, with my skills honed by all those years of prolific productivity, I was selling pretty consistently to those magazines. I see one in the November, 1958 Galaxy, and one in Astounding for January, 1959, Astounding again in February, yet another there in March, one in Frederik Pohl’s prestigious Star Science Fiction in May, Galaxy once more in August—quite a steady pattern of sales, not enough to support me on a full-time basis but enough to make the point that I wasn’t just a mass producer of action stories for the lower echelon of magazines.

  Bob Lowndes’ two high-quality/low budget magazines, Future Science Fiction and The Original Science Fiction Stories, were still tottering along somehow in those bleak days of falling circulation and disappearing magazines, and I continued to write for him, too, mainly out of friendship but also because he would let me do any story I cared to do, whereas the editors of Astounding and Galaxy had quite rigid ideas about what they were willing to publish.

  Lowndes still indulged in the old pulp-magazine custom of having artists do cover paintings and then asking writers to dream up stories that fit the existing illustration. In September, 1958 Bob showed me a lively painting by my friend Ed Emshwiller depicting a blonde beauty queen with a “Miss Universe” band draped around her midsection, and two goggle-eyed aliens with orange skin and purple hair fleeing from her in horror. That very quickly suggested a plot to me, and I wrote the light-hearted “You Do Something to Me,” which Lowndes ran in the February, 1959 issue of Future under my best established pseudonym, “Calvin M. Knox.”

  ——————

  Now that everybody else at this end of the galaxy has put in their two units’ worth about the affair currently known as the Miss Universe Scandal of 2381, I figure it’s high time I said my own say—just for the records, you understand.

  I’m Nick Seferiades, and I’m a talent agent by trade. It was my fool luck to be agenting for May Loreen when she became Miss Universe of 2381. I guided that girl right up to the pinnacle of celestial glamour. I was going to make her name a household word on a thousand and one planets.

  Well, I sure did!

  Yeah.

  But not the way I would have liked. Not the way I would have liked at all. So here I am, Nick Seferiades, the Golden Greek of the entertainment world, cooling my heels in the balmy obscurity of Zeno XII. I watch the palm trees drooping in the blazing sun, and I sip palm-wine and swim in the coral-blue sea, and once a month I clip my coupons and go to the bank. Not a bad life at all, you say? No, I suppose not. But not the life for me, here in quiet retirement fifty light-years from Broadway.

  I miss the whirl. I miss the gaiety. I miss the champagne and the sweetly-flowing dough.

  But I don’t dare go back, all because of May Loreen. How the deuce can I, when I’m a laughing-stock on every human world of the galaxy?

  Here’s what happened, straight from the horse’s—straight from the shoulder, I mean. I kid you not, this is the true and undoctored story. I don’t have any motive for doctoring now, do I? I couldn’t repair my reputation even if I papered the Asteroid Belt with affidavits.

  It started with a phone-call on, according to my records, the fourth of February 2379. I was busy arranging a spring tour for one of my clients. I snapped on the screen and saw the fat, jowly face of Ted de Vera glowering at me. His cigar was sticking so far out of the tridim image that I pulled my head back like a scared turtle.

  “Got a girl for you, Nick,” de Vera said in that obscene belly-rumble that passes for his voice.

  I raised an eyebrow. Ted de Vera rarely touted a female without cause. “Tell me more.”

  “She’s a knockout, Nick. She’s got everything except polish. She needs a master hand to guide her. I think you’re the man.”

  “Nice of you to say it. Where can I get a look at this paragon?”

  “Say the word and she’ll be at your office in half an hour,” de Vera promised. His eyes glinted. “I’m sure you’ll go for her. Gimme the usual deal?”

  I sighed. “The usual,” I said. “Five percent of my ten percent. Plus the same on all residuals. You’re a parasite, Ted.”

  “I’ve got an eye for the girls, laddie. Don’t begrudge me my meager moolah.”

  Half an hour later my door scanner lit up, and I took a look at what was standing in the golden field and realized that that old lecher de Vera had bonged the gong once again. The man had an infallible eye for sex appeal. The girl waiting outside had everything.

  I straightened my ruff and tidied my desk and said, “Come in?”

  The door opened. The girl glided in and said in a thin, pinched, nervous voice, “Mr. Seferiades?”

  At least she knew how to pronounce it. “Call me Nick. You’re the girl Mr. de Vera recommended, aren’t you? I didn’t quite catch the name…”

  “Marion,” she said. “Marion Tweedy. My friends call me Molly.”

  “Sit down, Molly,” I said.

  She sat, hiking her dress up to her lovely knees with a kind of artless sexiness that made me feel twenty years younger and thirty pounds lighter in a flash. I was momentarily dazzled by a lot of bright white perfect teeth. I got control after a moment more, and said, “I suppose you want to become an actress, Molly.”

  She nodded. “But I don’t think I have much talent. I mean—they say I’m pretty, and I suppose I am, but I don’t think I can act. I just don’t feel sincere playing the part of somebody else.”

  I pretended to jot down notes. “Don’t let that trouble you, Molly. Just stick with me, and you’ll be famous before you know it. How would you like to be Miss Universe, as a starter?”

  She gasped. “Miss…”

  “Why not? You’ve got what it takes, and I know how to promote. But Molly Tweedy won’t ever make the grade. You’ll need a new name, for certain.” I frowned. “May Something. I need a last name.”

  “May Lawrence?” she suggested. “Lawrence is my father’s first name.”

  “Uh-uh. Lawrence has masculine connotations. It’ll never go over subliminally-wise. We need something softer, more feminine. Loreen. Yeah. That’s it. May Loreen.”

  “May Loreen,”
she said, as if trying her name on for size. “It sounds strange.”

  “Don’t fret,” I told her. “It takes time to get used to a new name. But May Loreen’s going to be a name that goes echoing through the universe!”

  By the end of that day she was signed and sealed. What a find! And pure as the Himalaya snow. If I had been younger or more lecherous, I might have tried the casting-couch routine, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And I sensed that if I left May Loreen alone and didn’t make any passes, our business relationship would be a lot more successful in the long run.

  So I showed her where the screen was, and she got behind it and changed into the swimsuit she’d brought along, while I fidgeted and twitched and longed for X-Ray vision. My jaw sagged when she came out. May Loreen was as perfect a specimen of H. saps female as I had ever beheld.

  She was tallish, five feet five, with long, lovely legs that tapered in what I was sure was a mathematically precise curve. Her figure checked out at 37-23-37, which they tell me is the 24th Century idea of perfection. Her skin was creamy unblemished delight that contrived to look both milk-white and healthily tanned at the same time. Her blonde hair tumbled prettily. Her eyes were alive and sparkling, her lips full but not heavy, her nose a gem.

  This girl was it, I told myself. This Girl Was It. She had everything.

  Everything, that is, except the poise and sophistication that a glamour queen needed. But with her other natural equipment I wasn’t worried.

  I took her under my wing in the most platonic way you can imagine. I paid a visit to her parents—a grouchy old pipe-smoking truckdriver and a weatherbeaten faded little woman—and promised them that within three years they could retire to a villa on Venus. I came away from there with their blessing and with a renewed sense of bewilderment about how something like May could spring from such unpromising stock.

  I moved May into a midtown apartment, put her on salary of $150 a week, and set her up with my usual team: the dance-and-posture coach, the voice coach, the whole bunch. It was a regular Pygmalion job. But such raw material! A female like May Loreen comes along once in a dozen lifetimes.

  At my instructions, she made no attempt to get romantically involved; I didn’t want her falling in love with some $30-a-week clerk and queering her chances for the big prizes that lay ahead. So she spent her weekends reading and listening to music, and otherwise improving her mind, at a little country place I maintained for such purposes.

  She progressed magnificently. I watched her personality unfolding like a flower. No longer was she the shy little girl, astonished and upset by the fact of her own beauty; she glowed radiantly, now, proud of her unique endowment and determined to make the most of it.

  Carefully, I planned out her career. We would enter her in the beauty contests, use them as springboards up into the tridim studios. In three years, I figured, she would be considered a full-fledged starlet. In five years, she would be a star actress, with billings all over the galaxy. At that time, at the height of her fame, she would make a spectacular marriage to some rising male star. The marriage, I figured, would need to last about twenty months for maximum effectiveness. At the end of four years as a first-magnitude star, she would retire, quitting while she would still be beautiful and famous and only 32. By that time I would have set up an investment program for her that would bring her a handsome income, would bring me ten percent of a handsome income, and would bring Ted de Vera five percent of my ten percent, all for the rest of our lives.

  So it didn’t quite happen that way. It was all because of that damned Galactic World Fair. But I’m jumping too far ahead of myself, now. I ought to be putting this down in sequence, so you know how it happened.

  All during the spring and summer of 2379, we worked on May Loreen, and the results were superb. I began engineering a little groundswell of publicity that would grow to floodtide in twelve months’ time. By the end of ’79 everybody who mattered knew that there was a girl named May Loreen around, who was being groomed by Nick Seferiades for lofty heights. And such was the magic of my name, in those days, that May’s stock began to boom.

  I entered her for Miss New York State in January of 2380, and she took it with such ease it was ridiculous. All she had to do was promenade up and down in that skin-tight white bathing suit of hers, smile and wiggle her fanny, and the judges flopped over like Venusians out of water. It was a cinch to grab off Miss United States next. One of the contestants tried to combine seduction with coercion on one of the judges, but it didn’t work. The gal would have probably won on her own in any other year—we managed to hush her indiscretion up.

  There was a flock of tridim offers, but I turned them all down.

  As Miss United States, May was eligible for that year’s Miss Earth contest, and won that also—although for a while I was worried about a belle from China who had the judges wowed with her fragile-porcelain kind of beauty. The month May Loreen captured the Miss Earth title, her photo was on the cover of two dozen magazines. It was blinding to stand at a newsstand and look up.

  After Miss Earth comes the Miss Universe contest. Now, as everyone knows, the “Miss Universe” label is a misnomer. The contest is limited to female members of the species H. sapiens only, since there aren’t any very convenient standards for judging one planet’s kind of beauty against another’s. Once upon a time, there was a contest for beauty queens of different planets, cooked up by a smartypants promoter who lived to rue the day. The gimmick was that the winner would be the entrant who most closely approximated the standard perfection of her own world.

  So a creature looking like a warthog crossed with a dugong showed up as the entry from Alpheraz V. Turned out that the people of Alpheraz V are all but extinct, and that Miss Alpheraz was the only living adult female of her species—so she had to be the most beautiful of her kind. She demanded and got the award, and the promoter was never heard from again.

  Ever since that classic fiasco, Miss Universe has been open to humans only—and I don’t mean humanoids, but human-type humans. Naturally, there were more humans on Earth than anyplace else in the galaxy. Of the fifty candidates for Miss Universe, thirty were from Earth—and most of them were girls that May had already beaten in one contest or another. The rest of the girls came from the colony worlds. Miss Mars looked like a coalminer, Miss Venus like a longshoreman, Miss Ganymede like a snow-shovel. It couldn’t be helped. Beauty queens don’t emigrate to the colony worlds. They stay in orbit between New York and Paris, keeping far away from any planet where they would be required to soil their hands with work.

  On Mars, if a girl doesn’t fill her work quota and doesn’t have an awfully good excuse, she gets shot. There’s no room for slackers up there. But such a place isn’t conducive to developing such useless things as beauty queens.

  In short, the other candidates for Miss Universe didn’t matter. May Loreen was a shoo-in. She was such a shoo-in that when I tried to place bets on her I couldn’t find a bookie in the Western Hemisphere who would touch my money. They don’t make book on walkovers.

  I don’t have to tell you who won, do I? It was a breeze, a romp, a runaway. May Loreen captivated the judges from the start. You could see from the faces of the other girls that they didn’t think they stood a chance, either. Some of them didn’t even bother to keep their shoulders back and their lungs inflated as they crossed the stage.

  I phoned Ted de Vera that night, after the result was announced. The contest was held in the Lunar Bubble, and de Vera was in Chicago, so the call set me back a shiny fat figure. But I didn’t care about a mere hundred-buck phone bill. Not then.

  I chortled, “We did it, Ted! May won!”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “Of course not. But think of it, Ted—your discovery, hailed as the most perfect woman of all time!”

  “I always had a good eye,” de Vera said modestly. “I’ll be looking forward to my check.”

  It was all going to be straight up after that night. We t
hrew a big party, and got wonderfully high; you’d be amazed how fast—and on how little—you can get sozzled in the Lunar Bubble, with that low grav, especially if some wise guy monkeys a little with the atmosphere that’s being fed into your section of the dome. We were half lit on oxygen drinks before the festivities got started, and were gloriously pickled not much later.

  I remember May kissing me, full square on the lips, as an expression of glee. The sensation was so uncanny that it nearly sobered me on the spot. May was a Good Girl, but if she went around kissing people gaily all night, some of her virtue might evaporate pretty fast. So I laid off the sauce the rest of that night and kept an eye on her, just in case she forgot her training and decided to intertwine with one of the judges under a table.

  My chaperoning worked out pretty well. May got back to Earth at the end of that week with her honor intact; I was determined that this was one beauty queen who would remain unsullied until the strategic moment came.

  The money flowed in marvelously. If I had accepted all the modeling offers, May would have been posing thirty-six hours a day for the next three centuries. I hired a staff of ten to winnow the mail. Video network men fell all over themselves trying to arrange guest spots for May Loreen at five grand per minute. Tridim scouts pleaded for her signature on seven-year contracts. I bided my time, milking it for all it was worth. May Loreen was going to be a lifetime annuity for me, and I wasn’t going to let her go cheap.

  And right at this point, I made my big mistake. If I had been a better Greek, maybe I would have known. But not dumb Nick Seferiades.

  The Greeks had a word for it: hybris. Overweening pride. I know all about it, now. King Agamemnon insisted on having a red carpet rolled out for him, and the gods conspired to knock him off by way of showing a lesson in humility. Well, the same with me. I had this girl, May Loreen. The best that ever was. You looked at her, and it did something to you. She was perfection itself.