Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One (34 page)

Catlin asked, “What happened when you woke up from the chloroform?”

“Well, nothing very much. I felt this attachment on my chest, but didn’t think much about it. Still kinda woozy. I was halfway through decompression. They keep a man there eight hours, drop pressure on him two pounds an hour, nice and slow so he don’t get the bends.”

“Was this the same place they took you, when you met Ali?”

“Yeah, that was their decompression chamber. They had to make a sjambak out of me; there wasn’t anywhere else
they could keep me. Well, pretty soon my head cleared, and I saw this apparatus stuck to my chest.” He poked at the mechanism on the table. “I saw the oxygen tank, I saw
the blood running through the plastic pipes—blue from me to that carburetor arrangement, red on the way back in—and I figured out the whole arrangement. Carbon dioxide still exhales up through your
lungs, but the vein back to the left auricle is routed through the carburetor and supercharged with oxygen. A man doesn’t need to breathe. The carburetor flushes his blood with oxygen, the decompression tank adjusts him to the lack of air-pressure. There’s only one thing to look out for; that’s
not to touch anything with your naked flesh. If it’s in the sunshine
it’s blazing hot; if it’s in the shade it’s cold enough to cut. Otherwise you’re free as a bird.”

“But—how did you get away?”

“I saw those little
rocket-bikes, and began figuring. I couldn’t go back to Singhalût; I’d be lynched on sight as a sjambak. I couldn’t fly to another planet—the bikes don’t carry enough fuel.

“I knew when the ship would be coming in, so I figured I’d
fly up to meet it. I told the guard I was going outside a minute, and I got on
one of the rocket-bikes. There was nothing much to it.”

“Well,” said Frayberg, “it’s a great feature, Wilbur—a great film! Maybe we can stretch it into two hours.”

“There’s one thing bothering
me,” said Catlin. “Who did the steward see up here the first time?”

Murphy shrugged. “It might have been somebody up here skylarking
. A little too much oxygen and you start cutting all kinds of capers. Or it might have been someone who decided he had enough crusading.

“There’s a sjambak in a cage, right in the middle of Singhalût. Prince Ali walks past; they look at each other eye to eye. Ali smiles a little and walks on. Suppose this sjambak tried to escape to the ship. He’s taken aboard, turned over to the Sultan and the Sultan makes an example of him…”

“What’ll
the Sultan do to Ali?”

Murphy shook his head. “If I were Ali
I’d disappear.”

A loudspeaker turned on. “Attention all passengers. We have just passed through quarantine. Passengers may now disembark. Important: no weapons or explosives allowed on Singhalût!”

“This is where I came in,” said Murphy.

Afterword to “Sjambak”

My grandfather’s law office was situated on the ninth floor of the Balboa building on Market Street in San Francisco, and I visited him often. In the outer office was a typewriter, and when I was eight or nine years old I sat at this typewriter and set out to write cowboy stories. I made this attempt a few times but never got much farther than two or three pages. I don’t remember much about these stories, but I was here dipping my toe into what was to be my future career.

When I was about sixteen or seventeen, I was impelled to write some very silly stories describing the adventures of a group of teenagers at a seaside resort. These also have been consigned to the farthest precincts of oblivion.

I have already mentioned…that I wrote a science fiction story for my Creative English course at the university, and that the professor reviewed it in such sardonic terms that, had I been sensitive, my career would have gone glimmering. Fortunately I did not take his remarks to heart.

A few years later, some friends of mine started a science fiction society in Berkeley, which they called
The Chowder and Marching Science Fiction Society of Berkeley
. I wrote them a little story called “Seven Exits from Bocz”, which they published in their magazine.

Eventually I decided to become a professional writer: I started writing stories for sale. The first of these were gadget stories, dealing with some recondite aspect of science. I sold most of them, but I don’t look back on them with any pride. For a fact they were rather boring to write, and after the first few I abandoned this formula.

I then decided that my
métier
was novels, which I began to produce. The first of these I called
Clarges
, though it was published as
To Live Forever
, a title I detest.

The longer I wrote, the more I liked the results. I discovered that if I wrote to please and amuse myself, instead of editors and publishers, the books turned out better. Looking back, I am especially fond of my
Cadwal
sequence, and the latter two books of the
Durdane
set,
Emphyrio
, and more recently
Night Lamp
,
Ports of Call
and
Lurulu
. There are others I like as well: the so-called
Demon Princes
books, and of course the
Cugel
stories,
Rhialto the Marvellous
and the
Lyonesse
cycle.

Among the characters I’ve conceived, I also have my favorites: Navarth, the Mad Poet (
Demon Princes
); Baron Bodissey (
Demon Princes
), who wrote the encyclopedic tautology
Life
; also Henry Belt from “Sail 25”. Among the ladies I like Wayness (
Cadwal
), and Madouc (
Lyonesse
).

—Jack Vance

The Absent-Minded Professor

I stood in the dark in front of the observatory, watching the quick fiery meteor trails streaking down from Perseus. My plans were completed. I had been meticulous, systematic.

The night was remarkable: clear and limpid…a perfect night for what we had arranged, the cosmos and I. And here came Dr. Patcher—old “Dog” Patcher, as the students called him—the lights of his staid sedan sniffing out the road up the hill. I looked at my watch: ten-fifteen. The old rascal was late, probably had spent an extra three minutes shining his high-top shoes, or punctiliously brushing the coarse white plume of his hair.

The car nosed up over the hill, the head-lights sent scurrying yellow shapes and shadows past my feet. I heard the motor thankfully gasp and die, and, after a sedate moment, the slam of the door, then the
crush-crush
of Dr. Patcher’s feet across the gravel. He seemed surprised to see me standing in the doorway, and looked at me sharply as much as to say, “Nothing better to do, Sisley?”

“Good evening, Dr. Patcher,” I said smoothly. “It’s a lovely night. The Perseids are showing very well…Ah! There’s one now.” I pointed at one of the instant white meteor streaks.

Dr. Patcher shook his head with that mulish nicety which has infuriated me since I first laid eyes on him. “Sorry, Sisley, I can’t waste a moment of this wonderful seeing.” He pushed past me, remarking over his shoulder, “I hope that everything is in order.”

I remained silent. I could hardly say “no”; if I said “yes”, he would pry and poke until he found something—anything—at which he could raise his eyebrows: a smudge of oil, the roof opening not precisely symmetrical to the telescope, a cigarette butt on the floor. Anything. Then I would hear a snort of disparagement; a quick gleam of a glance would flick in my direction; the deficiency would be ostentatiously remedied. And at last he would get busy with his work—if work it could be called. Myself, I considered it trivial, a piddling waste of time, a repetition of what better men at better instruments had already accomplished. Dr. Patcher was seeking novae. He would not be satisfied until a nova bore his name—“Patcher’s Nova”. And night after night, when the seeing was best, Dr. Patcher had crowded me away from the telescope, I who had research that was significant and important. Tonight I would show Dr. Patcher a nova indeed.

He was inside now, rustling and probing; tonight he would find nothing a millimeter out of place. I was wrong. “Oh, Sisley,” came his voice, “are you busy?”

I hurried inside. Patcher was standing by the senior faculty closet with his old tweed coat already carefully arranged on a hanger. Instantly I knew his complaint. Patcher affected a white laboratory coat, which he called his “duster”. About twice a month the janitor, in cleaning out the senior faculty closet, would remove the duster and replace it in the junior closet—whether as an act of crafty malice or sheer wool-gathering I had never made up my mind. In any event the ritual ran its course as usual. “Have you seen my duster, Sisley? It’s not in the clothes closet where it should be.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to retort, “Dr. Patcher, I am a professor of astronomy, not your valet.” To which he would make the carping correction: “
Assistant
professor, my dear Sisley,” thus enraging me. But tonight of all nights a state of normality must be assured, since what was to happen would be so curious and unique that only a framework of absolute humdrum routine would make the circumstances convincing.

So I swallowed my temper and, opening the junior closet, handed Patcher his duster. “Well, well,” said Patcher as usual, “what on earth is it doing in there?”

“I suppose the janitor has been careless.”

“We’ll have to bring him up short,” said Patcher. “One place where carelessness can never be tolerated is an observatory.”

“I agree whole-heartedly,” I said, as indeed I did. I am a systematic man, with every aspect of my life conducted along lines of the most rigorous efficiency.

Buttoning his duster, Dr. Patcher looked me up and down. “You seem restless tonight, Sisley.”

“I? Certainly not. Perhaps a little tired, a little fatigued. I was prospecting up Mount Tinsley today and found several excellent specimens of sphalerite.” Perhaps I should mention that my hobby is mineralogy, that I am an assiduous “rock-hound”, and devote a good deal of time to my collection of rocks, minerals and crystals.

Dr. Patcher shook his head a little. “I personally could not afford to dilute my energy to such an extent. I feel that every ounce of attention belongs to my work.”

This was a provocative misstatement. Dr. Patcher was an ardent horticulturalist and had gone so far as to plant a border of roses around the observatory.

“Well, well,” I said, perhaps a trifle heavily, “I suppose each of us must go his own way.” I glanced at my watch. Twenty-five minutes. “I’ll leave the place in your hands, Doctor. If the visibility is good I’ll be here about three—”

“I’m afraid I’ll be using the instrument,” said Patcher. “This is a perfect night in spite of the breeze—”

I thought: it is a perfect night
because
of the breeze.

“—I can’t afford to waste a minute.”

I nodded. “Very well; you can telephone me if you change your mind.”

He looked at me queerly; I seldom showed such good grace. “Good-night, Sisley.”

“Good-night, Dr. Patcher. Perhaps I’ll watch the Perseids for a bit.”

He made no reply. I went outside, strolled around the observatory, re-entered. I cried, “Dr. Patcher, Dr. Patcher!”

“Yes, yes, what is it?”

“Most extraordinary! Of course I’m no gardener, but I’ve never seen anything like it before, a luminescent rose!”

“What’s that?”

“One of the rose bushes seems to be bearing luminescent blossoms.”

“Oh, nonsense,” muttered Patcher. “It’s a trick of vision.”

“A remarkable illusion, if so.”

“Never heard of such a thing,” said Patcher. “I can’t see how it’s possible. Where is this ‘luminescent rose-bush’?”

“It’s right around here,” I said. “I could hardly believe my eyes.” I led him a few feet around the observatory, to where the bed of roses rustled and swayed in the breeze. “Just in there.”

Dr. Patcher spoke the last words of his existence on earth. “I don’t see any—”

I hurried to my car, which I had parked headed down-slope. I started the motor, roared down the hill as fast as the road and my excellent reflexes allowed. Three days ago I had timed myself: six minutes from the observatory to the outskirts of town. Tonight I made it in five.

Slowing to my usual pace, I rounded the last turn and pulled into Sam’s Service Station, stopping the car at a spot which I had calculated to a nicety several weeks earlier. And now I had a stroke of rather good luck. Pulled up in the inside lane was a white police car, with a trooper leaning against the fender.

“Hello, Mr. Sisley,” said Sam. “How’s all the stars in their courses tonight?”

At any other time I might have treated the pleasantry to the cool rejoinder it deserved. Sam, a burly young man with a perpetual smut on his nose, was a typical layman, in a total fog concerning the exacting and important work that we do at the observatory. Tonight, however, I welcomed his remark. “The stars are about as usual, Sam, but if you keep your eyes open, you’ll see any number of shooting stars tonight.”