In the Beginning: Tales From the Pulp Era

  “Now,” Hassolt said.

  “How about the girl?”

  “She stays here,” Hassolt said. “I just want to get away myself. The two of you can stay here. I’m not going to take any more chances. That she-devil wrecked the other ship.”

  “So I guide you to my ship and let you blast off, and I stay here and face the music?”

  “You’ll have the girl. Come on now,” Hassolt said. His face was drawn and terror-pale.

  “Okay,” McDermott said. “I’ll take you to the ship.”

  He could understand Hassolt’s jittery impatience. The natives might not like their king taking a runout powder, and Hassolt intended to get out while he still could. His ransom project didn’t matter, now; having found out what the real function of the king was on this planet, he wanted off in a hurry, at any cost.

  Which, McDermott reflected, leaves me and the girl here. And I’m the substitute king.

  And a boiling volcano waiting for me at the end of my year-long reign, he thought.

  They left the girl behind in the village and slipped off into the thick jungle as the first shadows of night began to descend. McDermott led, and Hassolt, following behind him, made it plain that he was keeping the gun not very far from the small of McDermott’s back all the time. The Corpsman hacked stolidly forward into the jungle, retracing his steps.

  “It was only three miles, you say?”

  “Maybe four,” McDermott replied. “Don’t worry, Hassolt. I’ll take you to the ship. I’d rather be a live coward than a dead hero.”

  They pressed on. After a while they passed the lifeship and the wreckage of the mother ship, and McDermott knew they were on the right path. The sun dropped below the horizon; the sky darkened, and two small jagged moons, bright and pitted, drifted into the sky. The air was cooler now. McDermott thought of the girls back at the village. And of the volcano.

  “You thought you had a pretty good deal, eh, Hassolt? Servants and food and booze and a girl, all set up for the rest of your life. You don’t think you might have gotten tired of it after a while?”

  “Shut up.”

  “But then they let you know what was waiting for you, and you decided to run out. Lucky for you that I came along with my nice shiny ship,” McDermott said. He was thirsting for a drink of any kind.

  Half an hour later, they reached the ship. McDermott turned and saw Hassolt staring at it almost lovingly. He said, “You know how to operate it?”

  “I’ll manage. You come aboard and show me.”

  They boarded the ship, which stood silently in the forest as night descended. Hassolt prowled around, looking at the controls. It was obvious to McDermott that the kidnapper was not familiar with the XV-110 model.

  He turned to Hassolt and said, “Look here—you don’t know how to run this ship and I do. Why don’t you let me stay on board as pilot?”

  Hassolt chuckled. “You think I’m crazy? Take a Corpsman aboard? Look, that girl wrecked the other ship, and I’m going to travel in this one alone. Show me which button to push and then clear off.”

  “That’s definite, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Come here.”

  He led Hassolt to the control panel and gave him a brief rundown on the operation of the ship. The beady-eyed kidnapper took it all in with deep interest.

  The rum-bottle was still sitting in the grav-holder next to the pilot’s seat, where McDermott had left it for consumption on the return journey. In the darkened ship, it looked like some control lever to the left of the chair.

  “Now, this lever over here,” McDermott said.

  He grasped the bottle firmly as if it were a control. Suddenly he ripped it from its holder and in the same motion swung it back into Hassolt’s skull. The bottle broke with a loud crack, and Hassolt dropped to the ground as if poleaxed. McDermott bent over him and took the blastgun gun from his hands. Hassolt was still breathing.

  Tenderly he scooped Hassolt up and dragged him out of the ship, across the clearing, and propped him up against a tree outside of the firing-range. Then McDermott stood for a long moment, thinking.

  It was dark now. Jungle-beasts honked and hooted in the night. It was a seven-mile hike round trip back to the village to get the girl, and when he got there he probably would be swarmed over immediately and held. By now the natives probably had discovered that their king and the newcomer had vanished. They wouldn’t let him slip out of sight a second time.

  McDermott shook his head regretfully. He climbed back into the ship and readied it for blastoff.

  Too bad about the girl, he thought. But it was suicide to go back to get her.

  He thought: it wouldn’t be such a bad life—for a while. He’d be waited on hand and foot, and there’d be plenty of that pungent liquor, and of course he would have the girl. But at the end of the year there would be the volcano waiting for both of them.

  Better that one of us should escape, he thought. Too bad about the girl. I’ll tell Davis that the lifeship blew up on landing, and that both of them were killed and their bodies beyond salvage.

  You ought to go back and get her, something said inside him. But he shook his head and began setting up the blasting pattern. If he went back, he’d never get a second chance to escape. No boy-scout stuff, McDermott; you’re too old for that. Pull out while you can.

  And Hassolt and the girl would meet the volcano in a year. He shrugged sadly and jabbed down on the button that activated the jets.

  The ship sprang away from Breckmyer IV. McDermott felt a pang of sadness for the girl, and then forgot her. The rescue mission had failed; leave it at that. His chief regret was that he had needed to use the bottle of rum to club down Hassolt. It was the last bottle. It was going to be a long dry voyage back to Albireo, McDermott thought mournfully.

  EXILED FROM EARTH

  (1958)

  Though most of the stories I wrote for Super-Science were done to order and formula, sometimes I used W.W. Scott as a salvage market for material I had originally aimed at one of the upper-level magazines. He didn’t mind that it didn’t fit his usual action-adventure mode, so long as I didn’t do it too often and the story had, at least, some science-fictional color. He and I were pretty much dependent on each other now, he for the material I supplied so effortlessly, I for those resonant two-cents-a-word checks. March 1958 alone saw me sell him two s-f stories, “The Traders” and “The Aliens Were Haters,” and five crime pieces, “Doublecrosser’s Daughter,” “Deadly Widow,” “Rollercoaster Ride,” “Let Him Sweat,” and “The Ace of Spades Means Death,” plus some batches of science fillers. The pay came to over a thousand dollars, a regal sum in preinflation 1958 money. How I thought up all the story ideas, God alone knows: I can only tell you that when I sat down each morning and put paper in the typewriter, a story would be there waiting to be written.

  In this case the story that had been waiting to be written, in mid-October of 1957, involved an old actor out in the stars who wanted to go back to Earth and play Hamlet one last time—something that I thought Horace Gold of Galaxy might be interested in, for a cent a word more than Scottie would pay. I called it “You Can’t Go Back.” Horace didn’t fancy it. Neither did Bob Mills, who had replaced Tony Boucher as the editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So early in April of 1958, I took it down to Scottie. He bought it unhesitatingly, changed its title on the spot to “Exiled from Earth,” and ran it under the byline of “Richard F. Watson” in the December, 1958 issue of Super-Science, where it kept company with my other two recent submissions, “The Aliens Were Haters” (under my own name) and “The Traders” (as Calvin M. Knox). Scottie renamed the latter story “The Unique and Terrible Compulsion.” As I said earlier, some of his title changes were improvements, but not all.

  ——————

  The night old Howard Brian got his impossible yen to return to Earth, we were playing to an almost-full house at Smit’s Terran Theater on Salvor. A crowd like that one really warms a directo
r’s heart. Five hundred solemn-mouthed, rubber-faced green Salvori had filed into the little drab auditorium back of the circus aviary, that night. They had plunked down two credits apiece to watch my small troupe of exiled Terran actors perform.

  We were doing King Lear that night—or rather, a boiled-down half-hour condensation of it. I say with I hope pardonable pride that it wasn’t too bad a job. The circus management limits my company to half an hour per show, so we won’t steal time from the other attractions.

  A nuisance, but what could we do? With Earth under inflexible Neopuritan sway, we had to go elsewhere and take whatever bookings we could. I cut Lear down to size by pasting together a string of the best speeches, and to Sheol with the plot. Plot didn’t matter here, anyway; the Salvori didn’t understand a word of the show.

  But they insisted on style, and so did I. Technique! Impeccable timing. Smit’s Players were just about the sole exponents of the Terran drama in this sector of the outworlds, and I wanted each and every performance to be worthy of the world that kind cast us so sternly forth.

  I sat in the back of the theater unnoticed and watched old Howard Brian, in the title role, bringing the show to its close. Howard was the veteran of my troupe, a tall, still majestic figure at seventy-three. I didn’t know then that this was to be the night of his crackup.

  He was holding dead Cordelia in his arms and glaring round as if his eyes were neutron-smitters. Spittle flecked his gray beard.

  “Howl, howl, howl, howl! Oh, you are men of stones:

  Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so

  That heaven’s vaults should crack. She’s gone forever.

  I know when one is dead, and when one lives;

  She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;

  If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

  Why then she lives.”

  As Howard reached that tingling line, She’s dead as earth, I glanced at my watch. In three minutes Lear would be over, and the circus attendants would clear the auditorium for the next show, the popular Damooran hypnotists. Silently I slipped from my seat, edged through the brightly-lit theater—Salvori simply can’t stand the dark—and made my way past a row of weeping aliens toward the dressing-room, to be on hand to congratulate my cast.

  I got there during the final speech, and counted the curtain-calls: five, six, seven. Applause from outside still boomed as Howard Brian entered the dressing-room, with the rest of the cast following him. Howard’s seamed face was beaded with sweat. Genuine tears glittered in his faded eyes. Genuine. The mark of a great actor.

  I came forward and seized his hand. “Marvelous job tonight, old man. The Greenies loved every second of it. They were spellbound.”

  “To hell with the Greenies,” Howard said in a suddenly hoarse voice. “I’m through, Erik. Let someone else play Lear for your gaggle of gawping green-faced goggle-eyed aliens in this stale-sawdust circus.”

  I grinned at the old man. I had seen him in this crochety bitter mood before. We all were subject to it, when we thought of Earth. “Come off it, Howard!” I chuckled. “You don’t mean to tell me you’re retiring again? Why, you’re in your prime. You never were better than—”

  “No!” Howard plopped heavily into a chair and let his gaudy regal robes swirl around him. He looked very much the confused, defeated Lear at that moment. “Finished,” he breathed. “I’m going back to Earth, Erik. La commedia è finita.”

  “Hey!” I shouted to the rest of the company. “Listen to old Uncle Vanya here! He’s going back to Earth! He says he’s tired of playing Lear for the Greenies!”

  Joanne, my Goneril, chuckled, and then Ludwig, the Gloucester, picked it up, and a couple of others joined in—but it was an awkward, quickly dying chuckle. I saw the weary, wounded look on old Howard’s face. I grinned apologetically and snapped, “Okay! Out of costume double fast, everyone. Cast party in twenty minutes! Kethii and roast dwaarn for everybody!”

  “Erik, can I talk to you in your office?” Howard murmured to me.

  “Sure. Come on. Talk it all out, Howard.”

  I led the gaunt old actor into the red-walled cubicle I laughingly call my office, and dialed two filtered rums, Terran style. Howard gulped his drink greedily, pushed away the empty glass, burped. He transfixed me with his long gray beard and glittering eye and said, “I need eleven hundred credits to get back to Earth. The one-way fare’s five thousand. I’ve saved thirty-nine hundred.”

  “And you’re going to toss your life’s savings into one trip?” I shook my head emphatically. “Snap out of it, Howard! You’re not on stage now. You aren’t Lear—not a doddering old man ready to die.”

  “I know that. I’m still young—inside. Erik, I want to play Hamlet in New York. I want it more than anything else there is. So I’ve decided to go back to New York, to play Hamlet.”

  “Oh,” I said softly. “Oh, I see.”

  Draining my glass, I stared reflectively at Howard Brian. I understood for the first time what had happened to the old actor. Howard was obviously insane.

  The last time anyone had played Hamlet in New York, I knew, it had been the late Dover Hollis, at the climax of his magnificent career. Hollis had played the gloomy prince at the Odeon on February 21, 2167. Thirty-one years ago. The next day, the Neopuritan majority in Congress succeeded in ramming through its anti-sin legislation, and as part of the omnibus bill the theaters were closed. Play-producing became a felonious act. Members of the histrionic professions overnight lost what minute respectability they had managed to attain. We were all scamps and scoundrels once again, as in the earliest days of the theater.

  I remembered Dover Hollis’ 2167 Hamlet vividly, because I had been in it. I was eighteen, and I played Marcellus. Not too well, mind you; I never was much of an actor.

  Howard Brian had been in that company too, and a more villainous Claudius had never been seen on America’s shores. Howard had been signed on to do Hamlet, but when Dover Hollis requested a chance to play the part Howard had graciously moved aside. And thereby lost his only chance to play the Dane. He was to have reclaimed his role a week later, when Hollis returned to London—but, a week later, the padlocks were on the theater doors.

  I said to Howard, “You can’t go back to Earth. You know that, don’t you?”

  He shook his head obstinately. “They’re casting for Hamlet at the Odeon again. I’m not too old, Erik. Bernhard played it, and she was an old woman, with a wooden leg, yet. I want to go.”

  I sighed. “Howard, listen to me: you accepted free transportation from the Neopuritan government, like all the rest of us, on the condition that you didn’t try to return. They shipped you to the outworlds. You can’t go back.”

  “Maybe they’re out of power. Maybe the Supreme Court overthrew the legislation. Maybe—”

  “Maybe nothing. You read Outworld Variety, the same as the rest of us. You know how things stand on Earth. The Supreme Court is twelve to three Neopuritan, and the three old holdouts are at death’s door. Congress is Neopuritan. A whole new generation of solemn little idiots has grown up under a Neopuritan president. It’s the same all over the world.” I shook my head. “There isn’t any going back. The time is out of joint, Howard. Earth doesn’t want actors or dancers or singers or other sinful people. Until the pendulum swings back again, Earth just wants to atone. They’re having a gloom orgy.”

  “Give me another drink, Erik,” Howard said hollowly. I dialed it for him. He slurped half of it down and said, “I didn’t ask you for a sermon. I just want eleven hundred credits. You can spare it.”

  “That’s questionable. But the money’s irrelevant, anyway. You couldn’t get back to Earth.”

  “Will you let me try?”

  His dry cheeks were quivering, and tears were forming in his eyes. I saw he was in the grip of an obsession that could have only one possible end, and I knew then that I had lost my best actor. I said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Guarantee me the mon
ey. Then get me a visa and book passage for me. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  I was silent.

  He said, “We’ve been together thirty years, Erik. I remember when you were a kid actor who didn’t know blank verse from a blank check. But you grew up into the best director I ever worked with.”

  “Thanks, Howard.”

  “No. No thanks needed. I did my best for you, even on this rotten backwater. Remember my Prince Hal? And I did Falstaff too, ten years later. And Willy Loman, and Mark Diamond, and the whole Ibsen cycle.”

  “You were great,” I said. “You still are.”

  “We never did Hamlet, though. You said you couldn’t bear to condense it for the Greenies. Well, now’s my chance. Send me to Earth. Lend me the dough, see the Consul for me, fix things up. Will you do that for me, Erik?”

  I drew in my breath sharply. I realized I had no choice. From this night on, Howard would be no good to me as an actor; I might just as well try to let him die happy.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  “You’re a prince, Erik! An ace among men and the director of directors. You—”

  I cut him off. “It’s time for the cast party. We don’t want to miss out on that sweet burbling kethii.”

  As usual, we were very very gay that night, with the desperate gaiety of a bunch of actors stranded in a dismal alien world where we were appreciated for the way we did things but not for what we did. We were just another act in Goznor’s Circus, and there wasn’t one of us who didn’t know it.

  I woke the next morning with a kethii head, which is one way of saying that my eyeballs were popping. The odor of slops got me up. My flat is in the Dillborr quarter of Salvor City, and Dillborr is the rough Salvori equivalent for Pigtown. But Earthmen actors are severely restricted as to living quarters on worlds like Salvor.

  I dressed and ran myself through the reassembler until my molecules were suitably vitalized and I felt able to greet the morning. Ordinarily I’d have slept till noon, getting up just in time to make the afternoon rehearsal, but this day I was up early. And I had told the cast that I was so pleased with Lear I was cancelling the regular daytime runthrough, and would see them all at the usual evening check-in time of 1900.