Collected Short Fiction Page 4

  “In return for the aforementioned services, Heslich will turn over, give, bequeath, devise and bestow, wholly and forever, upon the Devil, his soul.

  The Devil mopped his brow, and admiringly declared, “Heslich, I am astonished that your repute is not wider than it is. Even though intelligence travels slowly of necessity, your acumen should echo throughout the world. Your name, were affairs as they should be, would be a synonym for legitimate sharpness.”

  The Magister, emboldened by praise, asked, “Then you agree to the terms?”

  “Why, no,” said the Devil. “I don’t see why I should.”

  He picked Heslich up between his blistering thumb and forefinger, and carried him off to Hell.

  The contract lay on the floor of the cave, unsigned and unfulfilled.

  Explicit

  1940

  Lurani

  She is not as mortal women, strange Lurani of the Sea,

  As the desert she is alien; as the night wind she is free;

  And her flesh is lightly tinted with the sheen of waters still,

  With the green of placid waters, and her touch is damp and chill.

  As the lily of the swamplands, as the stately lily lolling,

  She is tall and finely fashioned, and her dark hair, gently falling,

  Is alive: it creeps and quivers over shoulder, thigh, and breast—

  Slowly creeps and curls, caressing the soft contours of her breast.

  In the eyes of my Lurani, in her deep eyes, gently gleaming,

  I can see strange thoughts, exotic, and desires that set me dreaming

  Of the mighty Sea triumphant, as she strokes me with her hand,

  As she languorously strokes me with her curious webbed hand.

  I have lain beside Lurani in her pythonlike embrace

  Through the nights that were immortal, and the evil in her face

  Evermore shall keep me ardent, while her dark eyes o’er me gloat,

  Till the night I feel her tresses tighten round my throat.

  The Song of the Rocket

  They live and die in the empty sky between Earth and Sun and Mars,

  The thin, hard men who turn again to the cornet and the stars.

  You can hear them talk of the things that stalk; of alien plant and beast;

  In Saturn’s towers they pass the hours with many a lonely feast.

  They tell of the wings of the vampire-things that prowl the Venerian night,

  And some may speak of the chilled and bleak Neptunian things of light.

  But go where they may, they never stay, for the ship that soars like a bird

  Calls every man of this rawhide clan, and its song is ever heard.

  And go where they will, they stand not still, for never can they stay

  While the rockets dart through the brain and heart, and their song is from far away.

  Stepsons of Mars

  Guns are not enough, when the enemy is too strong. But if you can find out their weak point, and if you have one man who has the weapon to be used against it . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  Forced Enlistment

  WHEN you’re unemployed on Mars, you’re unemployed for sure. Because the Martians—which means the Earth colonists—have a peculiar idea that every individual must occupy a definite niche in the scheme of things—or else become a derelict wanderer. Martin Sloane and his pal, Red Keating, were learning that very well. Too well in fact; so they tried to forget it by tossing away their last few dollars in the various dives that lined the Street of Lights in Iopa. When their money was gone, they wouldn’t be able to forget any more—but the time to worry about that was when it was gone.

  They had strayed in and out of seven of the Street’s saloons, and were now in the stage where they chuckled to themselves about the pleasing swaying motion of Iopa’s streets. And they were singing, quite pleasantly singing at the top of their powerful voices.

  That was when they ran into a broad-shouldered and stocky person who wore three chevrons on the sleeve of his grey tunic. The sergeant sprawled in the street for only a second, then bounced up again like one of those non-tiltable dolls and swore offensive oaths in three languages.

  Red Keating brooked no insults from a simple soldier, and he swayed up to him with intent to assault. But Sloane wasn’t quite so drunk. He shoved Keating back and intervened.

  “Sarge,” he said, patting the incensed non-com on the chest, “pay no heed wha’soever to my bull-headed friend, who is very, very drunk. We ’pologize mos’ profoun’ly for knockin’ you into th’ gutter an’ spoilin’ your pretty uniform. Wouldn’ have done it for worlds; was accident, pure and simple . . . Pure like me . . . simple like m’pal over there.”

  The sergeant was almost convinced. In fact, he wanted to forget the matter entirely, when Red, who had been patiently listening to his friend’s words, decided to lend a hand. His homely Irish mug bent in a simian grin and he attempted to throw a friendly arm about the sergeant’s shoulders, but succeeded only in rabbit-punching him and again sprawling him face down in the gutter. This was too much for the already overtaxed trooper, who fished a whistle from a pocket of his blouse and blew lustily on it, summoning several soldiers to his aid.

  Not long after, Sloane and Keating were being marched down the street, each held by three grim and determined guardsmen.

  SLOANE yawned and rubbed his eyes. He had a vague idea that he was in jail again. On the other side of the narrow room Red was dumped across a cot, happily snoring like an amorous walrus, his battered face checked by an odd shadow. Tracing it to its source, Keating found it to be cast by a barred window set in the stone wall of a small cell. Looked familiar, he thought, taking in the two cots, sink, and rat-hole.

  He shook his head and leaned over to rouse his companion-in-misery. Red sat up and stretched.

  “Ouch!” he said brightly, squinting at their surroundings. “Who picked these sumptuous accommodations?”

  “As I recall it,” said Sloane, gingerly feeling his head, “it was decided for us by twenty hulking brutes, armed with lead pipe. What happened after they got through wiping their feet on us?”

  “I’ll swear they sat on us. They sat on us, and that is where everything goes blank. Positively blank,” Red answered. “I presume we’re in the calabozo?”

  “Obvious. They should be coming in any minute now to take our orders for breakfast. Personally, I don’t want any; I’d much rather crawl into a corner—any corner—and die. What’s the antidote for kisju, Red? Or would there be any?” Before Red could reply, the cell door clanked open and a soldier appeared in the opening, his large ears flapping in his distress.

  “Captain wants you two guys,” he announced, looking uneasily at the pair. They stared in fascination at his ears. “C’mon,” he insisted. “Down this way.” They proceeded down the corridor, the guard prudently keeping his hand on the butt of an enormous positron pistol bumping against his hip.

  “Did you notice those ears?” Sloane whispered. “I’ll bet when he’s in a hurry—”

  “In there,” the guard interrupted, gesturing toward a door on which was lettered “Officer of the Day.”

  The O.D. was a mustached Frenchman attired in the colorful uniform worn by the officers of the Tellurian Army of Maintenance, known familiarly as the “Tellies”. This was a force enlisted from the various armies of Earth to keep order on the Red Planet and to protect the interests of the transportation tycoons who sent monthly shipments of luano crystals to the hospitals at home where the valuable mineral, native only to Mars, was used in the treatment of cancer.

  The O.D., Captain Redon, according to the plate on his desk, was striding up and down the room when they entered, puffing on a special cigarette made of oxygenized tobacco, which was the only kind that would burn steadily in the planet’s rarified atmosphere.

  Red nudged his friend. “Looks happy.” The captain stopped in mid-stride and glared at them. The guard whispered a frightened “Shhh!”


  Redon savagely snuffed his cigarette and sat down at the desk. He motioned the guard away. There was silence for a moment, and the two unrepentant malefactors looked about them interestedly. The walls of the office were covered with illustrations from Parisian publications. Red looked from one particularly outspoken photograph to the captain: “Tch-tch,” he said.

  The captain flushed. “Come here,” he said softly—oh, so softly.

  They came.

  “I understand that you were arrested last night in the Street of Lights, in an advanced state of alcoholism . . .”

  “He means we were drunk,” the irrepressible Red murmured.

  “. . . and while in that condition,” continued Redon, heroically ignoring the interruption, “assaulted and threatened the life of Sergeant James MacBride. Is that correct?”

  “We heard it different,” ventured Red.

  “That is substantially correct,” Sloane contradicted, who was aware that diplomacy, not belligerence, was in order here. He stepped heavily on Red’s number ten foot to acquaint him with that fact. Red smiled beatifically at the captain, and kicked Sloane in the shin—hard.

  “I guess I was mistaken, at that,” he amended. “But we didn’t threaten the big lug’s life. We just knocked him into the gutter.”

  “I see. Simply a boyish prank,” the captain said acidly. “I am glad, however, that you have chosen to avoid unpleasantness by not lying about the affair. I have a peculiar distaste for liars. There are now two courses open to you. You may accept sentence of nine months apiece at field labor on Homhill ’Port—or you may choose the alternative of enlisting in the Tellurian Army for a period of three years at regular pay. Which is it?”

  BOTH men knew what “field labor” meant. Absolute peonage, heart-breaking toil under the blistering sun at the Interplanetary Spaceport, filling in the deep, intolerably hot pits made by the incandescent exhausts of the great liners as they blasted their way through the thin atmosphere to some other planet. Then at night you dropped your shovel and trudged back to the military barracks, and in spite of the bitter, burning cold you flopped on your hard pallet like a corpse and slept until morning to do it all over again. There was no need for them to confer. They would join the Tellies. Why, lots of impecunious Earthmen had been, known to enlist for the mere adventure of it. It was a lark . . . Soldier-of-fortune stuff. Besides, all their money had gone for kisju, and the dollar a day the Tellies got was infinitely preferable to the questionable food and lodging handed out to the field laborers.

  They exchanged glances. Sloane nodded and turned to Redon.

  “Okay, we’ll join your army, Captain,” he said. “Where do we draw our pretty uniforms?”

  “Good.” Redon rose and touched a bell. “I congratulate you on your choice. The Army will make men of you.” He looked at their lean, flat, muscular bodies. “Even better men; trained and disciplined. I’m sure you’ll get more than enough excitement in the ordinary life of the—ah—Tellies. Guard, take these men to Lieutenant Mueller. They are to be fully outfitted and assigned to Training Depot Number Seven. That will be all.”

  Lieutenant Mueller was a short, stout, roly-poly of a German who might have been a butcher before his army life. He watched in a fatherly sort of a way, sucking placidly on a gurglingly soupy pipe, while Keating and Sloane wrote brief autobiographies on their enlistment forms.

  “Martin Sloane, American, twenty-six, single. Education: Monticello government school, graduate of Darwich College. Previous military experience: United States Army, five years.”

  “Raymond Keating, American, twenty-eight, single. Education: Dayton government school. Previous military experience: United States Army, five years; Legion Etrangere, two years.”

  Mueller inspected the papers with a critical eye, corrected one or two small mistakes, and mumbled an inaudible and perfunctory oath of enlistment at them. The next stop was a supply room, to which Mueller personally conducted them. Then, for the first time, he actually spoke to them.

  “Slip the supply sergeant a pack of butts,” he said, amazingly, “and you may get a decent fit. So long, boys.”

  None of the uniforms on the long stacks of shelves were precisely the right size for the two recruits, which somehow didn’t seem quite relevant at the moment. The shoes were a bit large at one end but paper stuffed in the toes, or the wearing. of three extra pairs of socks, would fix that. The peaked, snappy caps were, on the other hand, entirely too small; although this wouldn’t matter long, as the gloomy horse-faced sergeant informed them, since they’d be on desert duty all too soon, where skull-caps and transparent, shoulder-length flexol capes would be the uniform of the day. Their cast-off civilian clothing was stuffed into zippered bags, to be returned, when and if. The sergeant pessimistically indicated a pile of bags that would never be claimed. Red looked at them, and sighed. His mind was dwelling on the contrast between the G. I. cotton underpants he was now wearing, and the blue silk he’d previously prided himself on.

  “Y’know, Mart,” he murmured, as they slopped out of the supply room, leaving the sergeant to his melancholy meditations, “this is just like the army back home. Only two sizes: too damned big and too damned small.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Mysterious Martians

  THE barrack room was an uncozy place. Rows of olive-green metal cots stretched from two walls to an aisle in the center. Beneath each cot was a wheeled coffin in which the soldier was expected to keep his equipment, oiled and in such klim-bim order as would bring no tongue-lashing after Saturday inspections. The rookies’ spare time was spent in cleaning and oiling their positron rifles, fresh from the arsenals at Osteo and packed with a gummy cosmoline that defied removal, short of picking the particles of grease from each individual pore of the metal. It was said that this condition was purposely ordered by the powers that be, expressly to keep the poor recruit fruitfully occupied and keep him out of trouble. They were also expected to keep their uniforms laundered and in repair. Equipment and garrison belts hanging on the hook on the left side of the locker. Dress blouse, followed by G. I. field blouse, both to be buttoned when hung up. Slacks, dress breeches, G. I. field breeches—also buttoned. Cotton or Bombay dress shirts, G. I. field shirt—buttoned. Ties to be hung from the hook on the right-hand side of the locker.

  There were a couple of hooks in the back of the locker, too, but nobody ever knew what they were for. Hadn’t been used in years.

  On the shelf of the locker were ranged, in equally strict and religious order as prescribed by T. R. Seventeen, the close-fitting helmet and earphones by which orders were transmitted in the thin broth of the Martian atmosphere, and a garrison cap. Dress gloves were hidden beneath the cap, and were never worn. There was still a bit of room, on the floor of the by now overcrowded locker, which was reserved for a shoe-box containing polish, cleaning rags, a brush, a can of oil, and a face towel. Then there were a pair of garrison shoes and a pair of boots, both never, never to be found unlaced.

  All this had to be removed once a day, generally before breakfast, and the lockers dusted and the bunks made up. Then ho! for the parade ground and fifteen minutes of close-order drill, and then breakfast. After the meal, which was really quite good, consisting of cereal, fruit, bacon and eggs, and coffee—all you wanted, if you were smart—the men marched back to barracks and smoked or slept an extra five minutes, or cleaned up the room, until assembly and drill.

  Theirs was a rigorous, sternly disciplined life, but, withal, easy enough, once they learned their way around. Keating and Sloane, ex-soldiers and experienced in the devious ways of dodging work and trouble, adjusted themselves almost immediately.

  One afternoon Red ran out of the first sergeant’s office waving a yellow slip around his head.

  “Hey, Mart!” he yelled. “Passes to town! C’mon, unwind yourself!”

  Sloane looked up from his task, which happened to be watering one of the mules that had been imported from Earth in an abortive experiment with draft anim
als.

  “Sam here seems to have a touch of the mis’ry. Doesn’t appear to be at all well. Must be the atmosphere and general unfamiliarity of the joint.” He surveyed the bleak surroundings. “Nope, not a bit like Missouri.”

  “Poor Sam,” Red commented. “I remember when he first got here. He got sore at young Allen, for some reason or other. He waited his chance, and when the time came, he meandered over to where the kid was tieing his bootlace. He reared up and was all set and cocked to let Allen have it. Sam kicked out all right, but not having read any books on the subject, he forgot about the blasted Martian recoil and landed flat on his face. He picked himself up and wandered away, unhappy-like; I never saw such a puzzled look on an animal’s face before. And Allen went peacefully about his business, never knowing what missed him.”

  Sloane laughed. “Poor Sammy; he’s just pining away. I don’t suppose he’ll last much longer . . . I never did like playing nursey to a Missouri mule anyway.”

  “Yeah. But how about these passes? We going to paint the town red?”

  “The whole damned planet’s red already. We’ll just see that it doesn’t get blue tonight.”

  Red grinned sourly. “Pun my word,” he said, and ran.

  Martin and Keating turned off the Street of Lights into Thoris Place in search of a new saloon. Halfway down the block stood a decrepit, dark-fronted place, sandwiched between a dance-hall and a cheap hotel.

  An age-rotted sign over the entrance proclaimed to all who cared to see that this was Slimy Mary’s.

  “Prob’ly a very beaut’ful lady,” hiccoughed Red, “festerin’ in this sink of iniq—inki—aw, in this sink. Whadda say, let’s rescue her.”

  “Oh, hell,” Sloane groaned, “you starting that again? What the heck, though . . . you’re quite probably right. But first permit me to straighten thy visor, sir knight—there. Very ’andsome. Now . . .”