Early Days: More Tales From the Pulp Era

  So I got a bright idea. I figured out a way to emblazon May Loreen’s perfection across the Milky Way. The Greeks of old would have said I was reaching too high, riding for a fall. Committing hybris, in other words. Well, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but maybe I would have gone ahead and done it anyway, even if Cassandra came up to me and told me what was going to happen.

  There was this Interstellar Fair, you see. The Grand Show of the universe, held once every three hundred years. It was scheduled to take place on the planet of Validus, a couple of hundred thousand light-years from Earth in one of the star-clusters.

  This place was so far out, that no Earthman had ever been there. Of course, there are plenty of planets where no Earthmen have ever been; they tell me that there’s an infinite number of planets in the universe, and only a finite number of Earthmen, many of whom never get much further from home than an occasional gay fling at the Lunar Bubble.

  Three hundred years ago, when the last Interstellar Fair was held on Validus, Earthmen were still putting around the Solar System in ion-drive ships. The nullwarp was still a couple of decades in the future, and regular commerce with other stars was undreamed-of. So there was no Earth exhibit at the Validusian Fair that was held in 2081.

  But this time, Earth had been invited to participate. There were no diplomatic relations at the moment between Earth and Validus, but the Validusians had made known their invitation through a couple of intermediary planets, and in the name of Earth the invitation had been accepted by World President Onomodze.

  And I got my big idea.

  There was all this fuss about setting up the Terran exhibit at the fair. We were sending our best symphony orchestra, and an exhibit of Terran paintings, and samples of Terran handicrafts, and just about everything else that represented a notable Terran achievement.

  Except one thing. We weren’t sending anybody to represent the matchless beauty of Terran femininity.

  I pulled strings. I spoke to a friend who spoke to a friend. And suddenly I had myself an invitation to visit President Onomodze at the Capitol Building in Accra.

  Half an hour later, I was on a transatlantic jet bound for the world capital. Not very much later that day, I was in Accra, being whisked from the airport to the Capitol by special limousine. And by dinnertime that night, I was sipping excellent brandy in the Presidential suite while President Onomodze himself riffled through my tridims of May Loreen and nodded in keen appreciation.

  At length he looked up at me and flashed his famous grin. “She is beautiful. She is a marvel!”

  “You’ll send her?”

  “Of course!”

  And so I returned home with the good news: we were being sent to the Fair! The publicity, of course, was tremendous. May Loreen had been chosen above all women to represent Terran pulchritude on Validus, and you can imagine what kind of honor that was. May was elated. We’d be rolling in megabucks by the time the grand tour was over.

  The trip to Validus took six weeks, even by nullwarp, which ought to give some idea of how far away it is. The World Government, of course, paid for our passage both ways, and threw in enough to pay for May’s hairdressers, wardrobe attendants, and other miscellaneous camp followers. Three or four reporters went along in the ship too, sending back daily dispatches about Miss Universe and her retinue.

  As it worked out, we were practically the first Fair guests to arrive on Validus. The Terran exhibit hall was being built by local labor, since it was impossible to transport Terran workmen all the way there and back. The hall was almost finished, and the Terran personnel who had arrived ahead of us were installed in a hotel nearby, all together. The Validusians gave us a big welcome but they didn’t seem too happy about having much contact with us. Nor, in truth, did we go out of our way to pal around with the locals, because they were repulsive-looking little creatures.

  The Validusians were humanoid in general set-up. Maybe that only accentuated their frightfulness. I can get used to an extraterrestrial who looks like a slimy one-legged blue egg, but the ones with humanoid forms always give me the willies. And these were definitely unpretty.

  They were three or four feet high, with the right number of arms and legs and heads. Their skins were the color of boiled lobsters, a dismal reddish hue, and there was a thick, wrinkled, leathery look about their hides that made them even uglier. In place of hair they had a lot of purple spikes packed close together and standing three inches high or so on top of their big heads. Thick antennae sprouted from each temple, ending in a little buttony sort of thing the size of a pea. Their noses were grisly little slits and their eyes looked like bulging peeled potatoes with a raisin stuck in the middle. You can see why we kept to ourselves and didn’t mingle much with the locals during the time the Fair was getting organized. We kept busy, though, sending back elaborate stories of what Miss Universe was up to on Validus, how members of other races had remarked in awe on her beauty, and such. I remember one snatch of press-agentry particularly well, for reasons you’ll learn later:

  “…Sktialimin Krenin, a ranking musician in the Rigelian thonkin orchestra, declared after viewing Miss Universe, ‘Her perfection is immediately evident.’ Here on Validus all races join in tribute to the loveliness of May Loreen, proving that there is an absolute standard of beauty at whose summit stands the glorious Miss Universe, May Loreen…”

  Yes, I’m going to remember that little puff for the rest of my weary days. It haunts me. Oh, my departed Athenian ancestors!

  I’ll skip over the days before the Fair opened. They were days we spent consuming exotic beverages and doing a remarkable amount of time-wasting.

  The affair currently termed the Miss Universe Scandal of 2381 took place the night before the official grand opening of the Validusian Fair. I wasn’t there. Maybe things would have gone differently if I had been; I don’t know, but I like to think they would have.

  Celebrities from all over the universe would be on hand for the grand opening. It was my idea to open the Terran exhibit by having May come out, wearing a sexy swimsuit and her Miss Universe badge, and welcome everyone to Earth’s first participating effort in a Validusian fair. The way I figured it, she would be a knockout.

  Well, there was a rehearsal the night before. Sam Carmody, who was Coordinator of the Terran Exhibit, wanted everyone to run through his part in advance. It was a logical request.

  Only…I had been on a bit of a bender two nights before the Grand Opening, and I hadn’t quite recovered yet. A Denebian had showed up with a bottle of milk white Denebian booze, than which there is no more boozier, and somehow the Denebian and I downed that entire quart bottle—no paltry fifth—within a few hours.

  I understand that the Denebian’s shell softened as a result. Me, I got off without any physical damage. But I woke in a fog, with the granduncle of all hangovers, and there wasn’t any question of my attending the dress rehearsal. I was going to have to stay in bed and consume miscellaneous wonder drugs to clear the impurities, congeners, and extraterrestrial fusel-oils out of my overhung head.

  Dimly I remember May Loreen standing over my bed and murmuring, “Poor Nick! How do you feel?”

  I didn’t answer, I just groaned.

  She said, “Aren’t you going to come with me to the rehearsal?”

  I groaned again. This time I opened my eyes and found them staring into a notable and highly famed bosom. I raised my glance, smiled feebly at May, and croaked, “Good luck.” Then I shut my eyes again; the light from the bulb overhead was pounding my seemingly-exposed optic nerve mercilessly.

  Mentally I pictured that lovely body in its skimpy swimsuit perched at the edge of my bed while I lay crumpled up with self-inflicted ills, and I groaned again. Slitting one eye open, I caught a glimpse of May hip-wiggling her way out of my room. The door closed.

  And, though I didn’t know it then, all sort of trouble was beginning.

  I spent that night in total delirium. But I’ve managed to piece together everything that happened. An
d it went something like this:

  May, after coming to pay her sympathy call to me, started down the hall, a veritable Aphrodite, on her way to the dress—or, in her case, undress—rehearsal. She rounded a corridor suddenly and was scared half out of her wits by two piercing shrieks of pure horror.

  For a moment or two, she was too startled to think. Then she saw the source of the shrieks, two utterly terrified little Validusians, scrambling away from her in a panicky retreat, frightened practically to jelly by her sudden appearance.

  I’ll give her credit for keeping her presence of mind. She saw they were wearing translator belts, so she smiled at them—that mega buck smile of hers—and said in English, “Don’t be afraid of me. I won’t hurt you.”

  The two Validusians turned and looked at her suspiciously. May told me she was pretty revolted by their repulsiveness, but she remembered that she was here as an official representative of Earth, and she acted accordingly. She posed for them. And, slowly, the Validusians recovered their mental equilibrium.

  “Forgive us for this display of terror,” they begged her. “The sudden sight of you, unexpected, without proper preparation…”

  “I’m sorry I frightened you,” May said gently. She was a couple of feet taller than they were, and no doubt the experience of turning a corner and nearly colliding with a gigantic alien being, even one as lovely as May Loreen, had nearly finished them.

  “We are the ones who must apologize,” said the Validusians. “You are the Earthwoman?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You are exactly as they said you were!” they exclaimed. “Even beyond the descriptions we received!”

  “Why, thank you,” May said, flattered. “How sweet of you.”

  She noticed that the aliens still weren’t coming very close to her. They looked like a couple of timid hobgoblins, huddling together near the wall.

  But one of them said, “We were on our way to visit you when we—ah—met so abruptly.”

  “To visit me?”

  Yes, to visit her. It turned out that the pair of Validusians had a proposition for her.

  They were Validusian movie producers, of all things—specialists in tridims. Ordinarily they dealt through underlings, but this was so important that they had come personally to attend to it. What they wanted, as they explained out there in the hall, was to cast May in a movie they were making.

  May said, “Well, I’ll have to discuss it with Mr. Seferiades—he’s my agent…”

  “Will it take long?”

  “It all depends,” she said.

  They were very anxious to get her services. So anxious, in fact, that they named a sum beyond rational comprehension as her fee. It sounded to May like the Terran global budget for an entire fiscal year. Even as I think about it now, I have to admit it was a devil of a lot of money: the biggest single offer we had ever received, as a matter of fact.

  May was awed by the offer from the two Validusians. She was so awed that she excused herself, went dashing back to my bedroom, woke me up, and poured the whole story in my ears.

  “And they’re offering fantastic money, Nick, fantastic! But they say they have to film me right away, and they want to know if it’s okay. What do you say, Nick? Isn’t it tremendous? All that money!”

  They tell me that I opened my mouth and made a couple of incoherent sounds, and immediately dropped back into my alcoholic stupor. I wish I knew what those sounds were.

  Whatever they were, May Loreen took them as an affirmative. She didn’t bother consulting a lawyer. She didn’t bother consulting anyone. She signed the contract, the first time she had ever signed a contract without my consultation, and then she went downstairs for the dress rehearsal.

  Three days later, with the Fair in full swing, I woke up sober, finally. May told me all about the contract she had signed. She told me all about the check they had given her. She told me all about Validusian movie techniques. It seems the Validusian producers were in a hurry, and they had filmed their May Loreen sequences while I slept.

  As she talked, May watched my expression changing.

  “But—but—you said it was all right for me to make the film!” she protested.

  “I said? Me? I’ve been doped up on Denebian joy-juice all week. I didn’t approve anything! I didn’t know anything about this! May, do you realize you may very well have signed yourself into bondage on this planet for the rest of your life? You—you…”

  I fell back against my pillow, gasping for breath. A movie had been made. With May Loreen in it. And it had all been done behind my back.

  I sobbed like a baby.

  You know most of what happened after that. The two glib little Validusian producers got their film out in record time. The translation from Validusian is kind of awkward, but they tell me the name of the film is “The White-Skinned Hideous Horror From A Distant World.”

  Yeah. A monster movie.

  Starring May Loreen. As the monster.

  When I found out what the score was, I did my best to buy up the film. I offered untold millions for the film, the negatives, the prints, even the studio. No go. The Validusians weren’t selling. They had a fortune in those film-cans, and they weren’t parting with it.

  So “The White-Skinned Hideous Horror From A Distant World” is the biggest money-making hit of all time, even though there have been scads of imitators in the six years since it was made. The film is still making the rounds of the distant galaxies; the enthusiastic promoters are peddling it in Andromeda now, I hear.

  The gimmick is that to the Validusianoid race, there’s no more hideous sight than a Terran. We look even uglier to them than they do to us. On first sight, a Terran scares the bejeepers out of one of them. And it’s the same on thousands of worlds.

  Those Validusian producers were brave beings. They almost jumped out of their skins when May turned that corner. But they stuck to their guns and they got what they wanted.

  They made the greatest horror film of all time, it seems. People queue up for miles to get into the theater, and when May appears, dressed in a revealing swimsuit that leaves very little to the imagination, it really rocks them. Hundreds have died of heart failure while watching the film. And still they go. They love it.

  Well, you see what happened to us. Word got back to Earth fast that the paragon of Earthly beauty was a loathsome monster to half the universe. I never saw a bubble deflate as fast as May Loreen’s. She got out of the mess with a bank account up in seven figures, and managed to marry a childhood sweetheart and vanish from the public eye as fast as she could. Last I heard she was living in the Procyon system and had just had twins.

  Me? I haven’t dared to go back to Earth yet, and I’m not going to. Half the people think I was guiled into letting her sign, and the rest think more rightly that I was out of commission while the Validusians sold May a bill of goods. Either way I look bad. So I salvaged a good hunk of my earnings and here I am on Zeno XII amid the palm-trees.

  Why am I here? Simple. There’s a local law that prohibits the showing of motion pictures on Zeno XII. There are also no beauty contests here. As time goes by, maybe I’ll forget the whole thing. But I doubt it. Somehow I’m never going to live down the fact that in the distant reaches of the universe beings are gaping and screaming in marrow-frozen terror as the lovely form of May Loreen, the fairest flower of Terra, crosses the silver screen.

  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE SPACE!

  (1958)

  My days of writing stories around cover paintings for Bob Lowndes were just about at their end, though, because by late 1958 his science-fiction magazines were tottering toward oblivion like so many other magazines of the time, and as an economy move his publisher had eliminated the expense of cover paintings altogether. The February, 1959 Original was the last issue to use a color illustration. (I wrote the cover story for it, “Delivery Guaranteed,” one of my favorites, working from an Emshwiller cover showing a man and a woman in spacesuits, traveling through space aboard a wo
oden raft propelled by a medieval-looking cannon.) After that, for the remaining year or so of the Lowndes magazines’ survival, the covers were simple one-color jobs decorated with black-and-white illustrations extracted from the interior of the magazine.

  Even though I now had to think up my own story ideas instead of having Ed Emshwiller do the work for me, I still brought Lowndes stories all through late 1958 and early 1959, until the axe fell on his magazines. One of them was this one, another playful piece quite different from the earnest adventure stories I had been writing for Super-Science Stories and before that for Imagination and Amazing Stories. Lowndes ran it in the May, 1959 issue of The Original under the Robert Silverberg byline.

  From then on there would be no more space opera for me, and after a period of relative quiescence as a science-fiction writer in the early 1960s I would reemerge with such novels as To Open the Sky, The Time Hoppers, and Thorns by way of indicating that I was going to be traveling on a different path thenceforth. But I have no regrets over having written all those reams and reams of space-adventure stories back in the 1950s for Amazing, Super-Science, and their competitors. The more of them I wrote, the greater my technical facility as a writer became, something that would stand me in good stead later on. They provided me, also, with the economic stability that a young married man just out of college had to have. Nor was I wasting creative energy that might better have been devoted to writing more ambitious fiction. You would be wrong if you thought that I had stories of the level of “Sundance” or “Enter a Soldier” or “The Secret Sharer” in me in 1957. I may have been a prodigy, but that prodigious I was not, not in my early twenties. Beyond a doubt, though, I was capable back then of “The Ultimate Weapon” and “Planet of Parasites” and the rest of the works reprinted here. So—with an affectionate salute to my hard-working self of more than half a century ago—I bring them out of the pages of the long-vanished magazines that gave them birth and offer them once again to exemplify the sort of work I was doing when I first set out, with an odd mixture of trepidation and confidence, on what was destined to become a sixty-year career.