Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (23 page)

"How about you, Bill?" Donley asked me. "Got any plans?"

I winked heavily and jerked a thumb warningly toward McCleary, making sure
McCleary couldn't see the gesture.

"My vacation is really going to be out of the world this time," I said.
"Me and the wife are going to Mars. Dry, you know. Even better than
Arizona for her sinus."

Even with the wink they were caught off guard for a minute.

"Mars?" Donley said feebly, edging his chair away. "Yeah, sure. Great
place. Never been there myself though."

Young just gaped, then grinned as he caught on. "I understand it's a
wonderful spot," he chipped in.

I casually peeled a hard-boiled egg the wife had packed in my lunch bucket
and leaned back in my swivel chair. "It's really swell," I said dreamily
but loud enough so McCleary couldn't help but overhear. "Drifting down the
Grand Canal at evening, the sun a faint golden disk behind the crystal
towers of Marsport …" I let my voice drift into a long sigh and
reached for Donley's sack of grapes.

About this time McCleary had gnawed his way through a big pastrami
sandwich and waddled over. He stood there expectantly, but we carefully
ignored him.

"Always wanted to go myself," Donley said in the same tone of voice he
would have used to say he'd like to go to California someday. "Pretty
expensive though, isn't it?"

"Expensive?" I raised a studiedly surprised eyebrow. "Oh, I suppose a
little, but it's worth it. The wife and I got a roomette on the
Princess
of Mars
for $139.50. That's one way, of course."

"Mars!" Young sighed wistfully.

There was a moment of silence, with all three of us paying silent tribute
to the ultimate in vacations. McCleary slowly masticated a leaf of
lettuce, his initial look of suspicion giving way to half-belief.

"Let's hear some more about it," Young said enthusiastically, suddenly
recovering from his reverie.

"Oh, there isn't much more," I said indifferently. "We plan to stay at the
Redsands Hotel in Marsport—American plan. Take in Marsport, with
maybe a side trip to Crystallite. If we have time we might even take a
waterway cruise to the North Pole …"

I broke off and dug Donley in the ribs.

"Man, you never fished until you have a Martian flying fish at the end of
the line!" I grabbed a ruler off the desk and began using it as an
imaginary rod and reel. "Talk about fight … oh, sorry, Mac." My
ruler had amputated part of a floppy lettuce leaf that hung from
McCleary's sandwich.

I settled down in my chair again and started paying attention to my lunch.
"Nothing like it," I added between mouthfuls of liverwurst.

"How about entertainment?" Young winked slyly.

"Well, you know—the wife will be along," I said. "But some of the
places near the Grand Canal—and those Martian mist maidens! Brother,
if I was unattached …"

"There ain't any life on Mars," McCleary said, suspicious again.

All three of us looked at him in shocked silence.

"He says there's no life on Mars!" Donley repeated.

"You ever been there, McCleary?" I asked sarcastically.

"No, but just the same …"

"All right," I cut in, "then you don't know whether there is or isn't. So
kindly reserve your opinion until you know a little about the subject
under discussion."

I turned back to Donley and Young.

"Really a wonderful place for your health. Dry, thin air, nice and cool at
night. And beautiful! From Marsport you can see low-slung mountains in the
distance, dunes of soft, red sand stretching out to them. If I were you,
Bob, I'd forget all about the Ozarks and sign up on the rocket."

"There ain't any rockets going to Mars," McCleary said obstinately.

"Isn't," I corrected. "I mean, there is. Besides, McCleary, just because
you never heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist."

"The government's still working on V-2," McCleary said flatly. "They
haven't even reached the moon yet."

I sighed softly, acting disgusted at having to deal with somebody as
stupid as McCleary. "Mac, that's the government, and besides, they're
dealing with military rockets. And did you ever hear of the government
perfecting something before private industry? Who perfected the telephone,
the radio, television? The government? No, private industry, of course!
Private industry has always been ahead of the government on everything,
including rockets. Get on the stick, Mac."

McCleary started in on his lettuce leaf again, looking very shrewd.

"How come I never heard of it before now?" he asked, springing the
clincher argument.

"Look, Mac, this is relatively new. The company's just starting, can't
afford to take full-page ads and that sort of thing. Just give 'em time,
that's all. Why, a couple of years from now you'll be spending your
vacation on Venus or Jupiter or some place like that. From now on,
California and the Bahamas will be strictly old hat."

McCleary looked half-believing.

"Where'd you get your tickets?"

I waved vaguely in the direction of downtown. "Oh, there must be at least
a couple of agencies downtown. Might even be able to find them in the
phone book. Look under "Interplanetary Rocket Lines" or something like
that. You might have a little difficulty, of course. Like I say, they're
not too well advertised."

McCleary was about to say something more, but then the one o'clock bell
rang and we went back to the office grind.

Well, McCleary didn't say anything more about it the next day, even though
we'd throw in a chance comment about Mars every now and then, as if it
were the most natural thing in the world, but Mac didn't rise to the bait.
We gradually forgot about it.

The next couple of weeks came and went and then my two weeks in August. As
I said before, my vacation dough had gone to pay the doctor, so I stayed
at home and watered the begonias.

The Monday morning after vacation, we were all back in the office, if
anything looking more fagged than we had when we left. When lunchtime
rolled around, Donley and Young and I piled our lunches on Donley's desk—his
desk was near a window on the north side of the building so we could get
the breeze—and talked about what we had done during vacation.

McCleary ambled up, and like it usually does after McCleary comes around,
the conversation just naturally died down. After a two-minute silence, I
finally took the hook.

"Okay, Mac," I said, "I know you're just dying to tell us. Where did you
go?"

He almost looked surprised. "To Mars," he said, like he might have said
Aunt Minnie's.

The three of us looked blank for a minute, and then we caught on. It took
us a while to recover from laughing, and my sides were still aching when I
saw McCleary's face. It definitely had a hurt look on it.

"You don't think I did," he accused us.

"Oh, come off it, McCleary," I said crossly. "A gag's a gag, but it can be
carried too far. Where'd you go? California, Oregon, some place like
that?"

"I said I went to Mars," McCleary repeated hotly, "and I can prove it!"

"Sure," I said. "Like I can prove the world's flat and it's supported by
four elephants standing on a turtle's back like the old Greeks …"

I cut off. McCleary had thrown a couple of pasteboards on the desk, and I
picked them up. The printing on them was like you see on a Pullman ticket.
It said something about a roomette, first-class passage on the
Martian
Prince,
for $154.75, and there was even a place where they had the tax
figured. In two blanks at the top of the ticket, they had it filled out to
E. C. McCleary and wife.
The bottom half was torn off, just like
they do with train tickets.

"Very clever," I said, "but you shouldn't have gone to all that trouble to
have these printed up."

McCleary scowled and dropped a little bunch of kodachrome slides on the
desk. I took one and held it up to the light. It showed Mac and his wife
mounted on something that looked like a cross between a camel and a zebra.
They were at the top of a sand dune, and in the distance you could see the
towers of a city. The funny thing was the towers looked a little—but
not much—like minarets, and the sand dunes were colored a beautiful
pink.

I passed it on to Donley and Young and started leafing through the rest.
They were beautiful slides. McCleary and spouse in front of various
structures in a delicately tinted marble and crystal city. McCleary in a
pink and black boat on a canal that looked as wide as the Mississippi.
McCleary standing on a strangely carved sandstone parapet, admiring a
sunset caused by a sun looking half as big as ours. And everywhere were
the dunes of pink sand.

"Pictures can be faked, Mac," I said.

He looked hurt and got some things out of his desk—a sateen pillow
with scenes like those on his snapshots, an urn filled with pink sand, a
tiny boat like a gondola, only different, a letter opener made out of
peculiar bubbly pink glass. They were all stamped "Souvenir of Mars," and
that kind of junk you don't have made up for a gag. I know mass-produced
articles when I see them.

"We couldn't afford the first-class tour," McCleary said expansively, "but
I figure we can cover that next year." He turned to me puzzledly. "I asked
the passenger agent about the
Princess of Mars,
and he said he had
never heard of the ship. And it's Mars City, not Marsport. Couldn't
understand how you made a mistake."

"It was easy," I said weakly. I pointed to the pasteboard ducats. "Where'd
you get these, Mac?"

He waved generously in the direction of downtown. "Like you said, there's
a couple of agencies downtown …"

You know, sometimes I think we misjudged McCleary. It takes a while to get
to know a guy like Mac. Maybe his Louie
is
brighter than Johnny,
and maybe his chugmobile
is
something terrific.

For the last few years, all on account of Mac, my two weeks in August have
really been well spent. Beautiful! Why, from Mars City you can see
low-slung mountains in the distance and dunes of soft, red sand stretching
out to them. And the sunsets when you're standing on the parapets of that
delicate crystal city … And, man, fishing in the Grand Canal
…

How do you get to Mars? There's probably a couple of agencies in your own
town. You can look them up in your phone book under "Vacation at the
Planets of Pleasure" or something like that. They might be a little
difficult to find though.

You see, they're not very well advertised yet.

The End

© 1951 by Frank M. Robinson. First published in
Galaxy Science
Fiction,
February 1951.

Barry N. Malzberg

I have met the enemy and he is me. Or me is he. Or me and he are we; I
really find it impossible to phrase this or to reach any particular
facility of description. The peculiar and embarrassing situation in which
I now find myself has lurched quite out of control, ravaging its way
toward what I am sure will be a calamitous destiny, and, yet, I have
always been a man who believed in order, who believed that events no
matter how chaotic would remit, would relent, would suffer containment in
the pure limpidity of The Word engraved patiently as if upon stone. I must
stop this and get hold of myself.

I have met the enemy and he is me.

Staring into the mirror, watching the waves and the ripples of The Change,
seeing in the mirror that beast take shape (it is always in the middle of
the night; I am waiting for the transference to occur during the morning
or worse yet at lunch hour in the middle of a cafeteria; waves may
overtake me and I will become something so slimy and horrible even by the
standards of midtown Manhattan that I will cause most of the congregants
to lose their lunch), I feel a sense of rightness. It must always have
been meant to be this way. Did I not feel myself strange as a child, as a
youth, as an adolescent? Even as an adult I felt the strangeness within
me; on the streets they stared with knowledge which could not have
possibly been my own. Women turned away from me with little smiles when I
attempted to connect with them, my fellow employees here at the Bureau
treated me with that offhandedness and solemnity which always bespeaks
private laughter. I know what they think of me.

I know what they think of me.

I have spent a lifetime in solitude gauging these reactions to some
purpose, and I know that I am separate from the run of ordinary men as
these men are separate from the strange heavings and commotion, ruins and
darkness which created them. Staring in the mirror. Staring in the mirror
I see.

Staring in the mirror I see the beast I have become, a thing with
tentacles and spikes, strange loathsome protuberances down those
appendages which my arms have become, limbs sleek and horrible despite all
this devastation, limbs to carry me with surging power and constancy
through the sleeping city, and now that I accept what I have become, what
the night will strike me, I am no longer horrified but accepting. One
might even say exalted at this moment because I always knew that it would
have to be this way, that in the last of all the nights a mirror would be
held up to my face and I would see then what I was and why the mass of men
avoided me. I know what I am, those calm, cold eyes staring back at me in
the mirror from the center of the monster know too well what I am also,
and turning them from the mirror, confronting the rubbled but still
comfortable spaces of my furnished room, I feel the energy coursing
through me in small flashes and ripples of light, an energy which I know,
given but that one chance it needs, could redeem the world. The beast does
not sleep. In my transmogrification I have cast sleep from me like the
cloak of all reason and I spring from these rooms, scuttle the three
flights of the brownstone to the street and, coming upon it in the dense
and sleeping spaces of the city, see no one, confront no one (but I would
not, I never have) as I move downtown to enact my dreadful but necessary
tasks.