The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® (18 page)

Burkhardt shrugged. “The past is of no concern to me.”

“You actually think Lily will marry you?”

“I do,” Burkhardt said. “She’ll jump at it. The publicity values will be irresistible. The sollie star with five broken marriages to millionaires now stooping to wed her youthful love, who is now a penniless ex-colonist.”

Elliott moistened his lips unhappily. “Perhaps you’ve got something there,” he admitted. “Lily might just do a thing like that. But how long would it last? Six months, a year—until the publicity dies down. And then she’ll dump you. She doesn’t want a penniless husband.”

“She won’t dump me.”

“You sound pretty confident, Burkhardt.”

“I am.”

For a moment there was silence. Then Elliott said, “You seem determined to stick your head in the lion’s mouth. What is it—an obsession to marry her?”

“Call it that.”

“It’s crazy. I tell you, she’s a witch. You’re in love with an imaginary goddess. The real Lily Leigh is the most loathsome female ever spawned. As the first of her five husbands, I can take oath to that.”

“Did you come here just to tell me that?”

“Not exactly,” Elliott said. “I’ve got a proposition for you. I want you to come into my firm as a Vice-President. You’re system-famous, and we can use the publicity. I’ll start you at sixty thousand. You’ll be the most eligible bachelor in the universe. We’ll get you a rejuvenation and you’ll look twenty-five again. Only none of this Lily Leigh nonsense. I’ll set you up, you’ll marry some good-looking kid, and all your years on Whatsit Nine will be just so much nightmare.”

“The answer is no.”

“I’m not doing this out of charity, you understand. I think you’ll be an asset to me. But I also think you ought to be protected against Lily. I feel I owe you something, for what I did to you unknowingly eighteen years ago.”

“You don’t owe me a thing. Thanks for the warning, Mr. Elliott, but I don’t need it. And the answer to the proposition is No. I’m not for sale.”

“I beg you—”

“No.”

Color flared in Elliott’s cheeks for a moment. He rose, started to say something, stopped. “All right,” he said heavily. “Go to Lily. Like a moth drawn to a flame. The offer remains, Mr. Burkhardt. And you have my deepest sympathy.”

* * * *

At his press conference that afternoon, Burkhardt revealed her name. The system’s interest was at peak, now; another day without the revelation and the peak would pass, frustration would cause interest to subside. Burkhardt told them. Within an hour it was all over the system.

Glamorous Lily Leigh, for a decade and a half queen of the solidofilms, was named today as the woman for whom John Burkhardt bought himself out of indenture. Burkhardt explained that Miss Leigh, then an unknown starlet, terminated their engagement in 2319 to marry California industrialist Richardson Elliott. The marriage, like Miss Leigh’s four later ones, ended in divorce.

“I hope now to make her my wife,” the mystery man from Novotny IX declared. “After eighteen years I still love her as strongly as ever.”

Miss Leigh, in seclusion at her Scottsdale, Arizona home following her recent divorce from sollie-distributing magnate James Thorne, refused to comment on the statement.

For three days, Lily Leigh remained in seclusion, seeing no one, issuing no statements to the press. Burkhardt was patient. Eighteen years of waiting teaches patience. And Donnie had told him, as they trudged through the grey slush of rising spring, “
The man who rushes ahead foolishly forfeits all advantage in a contest of wills.”

Donnie carried the wisdom of a race at the end of its span. Burkhardt remained in his hotel suite, mulling over the advice of the little alien. Donnie had never passed judgment on the merits and drawbacks of Burckhardt’s goal; he had simply advised, and suggested, and taught.

* * * *

The press had run out of things to say about Burkhardt, and he declined to supply them with anything new to print. So, inevitably, they lost interest in him. By the third day, it was no longer necessary to hold a press conference. He had come back; he had revealed his love for the sollie queen, Lily Leigh; now he was sitting tight. There was nothing to do but wait for further developments, if any. And neither Burkhardt nor Lily Leigh seemed to be creating further developments.

It was hard to remain calm, Burkhardt thought. It was queer to be here on Earth, in the quiet autumn, while winter fury raged on Novotny IX. Fury of a different kind raged here, the fury of a world of five billion eager, active human beings, but Burkhardt kept himself aloof from all that. Eighteen years of near-solitude had left him unfit for that sort of world.

It was hard to sit quietly, though, with Lily just a visicall away. Burkhardt compelled himself to be patient. She would call, sooner or later.

She called on the fourth day. Burckhardt’s skin crawled as he heard the hotel operator say—in tones regulated only with enormous effort—“Miss Leigh is calling from Arizona, Mr. Burkhardt.”

“Put the call on.”

She had not used the visi-circuit. Burkhardt kept his screen blank too.

She said, without preliminaries, “Why have you come back after all these years, John?”

“Because I love you.”

“Still?”

“Yes.”

She laughed—the famous LL laugh, for his benefit alone. “You’re a bigger fool now than you were then, John.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted.

“I suppose I ought to thank you, though. This is the best publicity I’ve had all year. And at my age I need all the publicity I can get.”

“I’m glad for you,” he said.

“You aren’t serious, though, about wanting to marry me, are you? Not after all these years. Nobody stays in love that long.”

“I did.”

“Damn you, what do you want from me?” The voice, suddenly shrill, betrayed a whisper of age.

“Yourself,” Burkhardt said calmly.

“What makes you think I’ll marry you? Sure, you’re a hero today, The Man Who Came Back From The Stars. But you’re nothing, John. All you have to show for eighteen years is calluses. At least back then you had your youth. You don’t even have that any more.”

“Let me come to see you, Lily.”

“I don’t want to see you.”

“Please. It’s a small thing—let me have half an hour alone with you.”

She was silent.

“I’ve given you half a lifetime of love, Lily. Let me have half an hour.”

After a long moment she said, simply, hoarsely, “All right. You can come. But I won’t marry you.”

* * * *

He left New York shortly before midnight. The Colonization Bureau had hired a private plane for him, and he slipped out unnoticed, in the dark. Publicity now would be fatal. The plane was a jet, somewhat out of date; they were using photon-rockets for the really fast travel. But, obsolete or no, it crossed the continent in three hours. It was just midnight, local time, when the plane landed in Phoenix. As they had arranged it, Lily had her chauffeur waiting, with a long, sleek limousine. Burkhardt climbed in. Turbines throbbed; the car glided out toward Lily’s desert home.

It was a mansion, a sprawled-out villa moated off—a
moat,
in water-hungry Arizona!—and topped with a spiring pink stucco tower. Burkhardt was ushered through open fern-lined courtyards to an inner maze of hallways, and through them into a small room where Lily Leigh sat waiting.

He repressed a gasp. She wore a gown worth a planet’s ransom, but the girl within the gown had not changed in eighteen years. Her face was the same, impish, the eyes dancing and gay. Her hair had lost none of its glossy sheen. Her skin was the skin of a girl of nineteen.

“It’s like stepping back in time,” he murmured.

“I have good doctors. You wouldn’t believe I’m forty, would you? But everyone knows it, of course.” She laughed. “You look like an old man, John.”

“Forty-three isn’t old.”

“It is when you let your age show. I’ll give you some money, John, and you can get fixed up. Better still, I’ll send my doctors to you.”

Burkhardt shook his head. “I’m honest about the passing of time. I look this way because of what I’ve done these past eighteen years. I wouldn’t want a doctor’s skill to wipe out the traces of those years.”

She shrugged lightly. “It was only an offer, not a slur. What do you want with me, John?”

“I want you to marry me.”

Her laughter was a silvery tinkle, ultimately striking a false note. “That made sense in 2319. It doesn’t now. People would say you married me for my money. I’ve got lots of money, John, you know.”

“I’m not interested in your money. I want
you.”

“You think you love me, but how can you? I’m not the sweet little girl you once loved. I never was that sweet little girl. I was a grasping, greedy little girl—and now I’m a grasping, greedy old woman who still looks like a little girl. Go away, John. I’m not for you.”

“Marry me, Lily. We’ll be happy. I know we will.”

“You’re a stupid monomaniac.”

Burkhardt only smiled. “It’ll be good publicity. After five marriages for profit, you’re marrying for love. All the worlds love a lover, Lily. You’ll be everyone’s sweetheart again. Give me your hand, Lily.”

Like a sleepwalker, she extended it. Burkhardt took the hand, frowning at its coldness, its limpness.

“But I don’t love you, John.”

“Let the world think you do. That’s all that matters.”

“I don’t understand you. You—”

She stopped. Burckhardt’s grip tightened on her thin hand. He thought of Donnie, a grey shadow against the snow, holding his hand, letting the power flow from body to body, from slim alien to tall Earthman.
It is all a matter of channeling your desires,
he had said.
Any creature that thinks can learn how to assert its will. The technique is simple.

Lily lowered her head. After a moment, she raised it. She was smiling.

* * * *

“It won’t last a month,” Richardson Elliott grunted, at the sight of the announcement in the paper.

“The poor dumb idiot,” Jim Thorne said, reading the news at his Martian ranch. “Falling in love with a dream-Lily that never existed, and actually marrying her. She’ll suck him dry. But at least it gets me off the alimony hook. I ought to be grateful.”

On nine worlds, people read the story and talked about it. Many of them were pleased; it was the proper finish for the storybook courtship. But those who knew Lily Leigh were less happy about it. “She’s got some angle,” they said. “It’s all a publicity stunt. She’ll drop him as soon as the fanfare dies down. And she’ll drop him so hard he won’t ever get up.”

Burkhardt and Lily were married on the tenth day after his return from space. It was a civil ceremony, held secretly. Their honeymoon trip was shrouded in mystery. While they were gone, gossip columnists speculated. How could the brittle, sophisticated, much-married Lily be happy with a simple farmer from a colony-world?

Two days after their return to Earth from the honeymoon Burkhardt and his wife held a joint press conference. It lasted only five minutes. Burkhardt, holding his wife’s hand tightly, said, “I’m happy to announce that Miss Leigh is distributing all of her possessions to charity. We’ve both signed up as indentured colonists and we’re leaving for Novotny IX tomorrow.”

“Really, Miss Leigh?”

“Yes,” Lily said. “I belong at John’s side. We’ll work his old farm together. It’ll be the first useful thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

The newsmen, thunderstruck, scattered to shout their story to the waiting worlds. Mr. and Mrs. John Burkhardt closed the door behind them.

“Happy?” Burkhardt asked.

Lily nodded. She was still smiling. Burkhardt, watching her closely, saw the momentary flicker of her eyes, the brief clearing-away of the cloud that shrouded them—as though someone were trapped behind those lovely eyes, struggling to get out. But Burckhardt’s control never lapsed. Bending, he kissed her soft lips lightly.

“Bedtime,” he said.

“Yes. Bedtime.”

Burkhardt kissed her again. Donnie had been right, he thought. Control was possible. He had channeled desire eighteen years, a
nd now Lily was his. Perhaps she was no longer Lily as men had known her, but what did that matter? She was the Lily of his lonely dreams. He had created her in the tingling moment of a handshake, from the raw material of her old self.

He turned off the light and began to undress. He thought with cozy pleasure that in only a few weeks he would be setting foot once again on the bleak tundra of Novotny IX—this time, with his loving bride.

NEUTRAL PLANET

Originally published in
Science Fiction Stories
, July 1957.

From the fore viewing bay of the Terran starship
Peccable,
the twin planets Fasolt and Fafnir had become visible—uninhabited Fasolt a violet ball the size of a quarter-credit piece dead ahead, and Fafnir, home of the gnorphs, a bright-red dot far to the right, beyond the mighty curve of the big ship’s outsweeping wing.

The nameless, tiny blue sun about which both worlds orbited rode high above them, at a sharp 36 degrees off the ecliptic. And, majestic in its vastness, great Antares served as a huge bright-red backdrop for the entire scene.

“Fasolt dead ahead,” came the word from Navigation. “Prepare for decelerating orbit.”

The eighteen men who comprised the Terran mission to the gnorphs of Fafnir moved rapidly and smoothly toward their landing stations. This was a functioning team; they had a big job, and they were ready for it.

In Control Cabin, Shipmaster Deev Harskin was strapping himself into the acceleration cradle when the voice of Observer First Rank Snollgren broke in.

“Chief? Snollgren. Read me?”

“Go ahead, boy. What’s up?”

“That Rigelian ship—the one we saw yesterday? I just found it again. Ten light-seconds off starboard, and credits to crawfish it’s orbiting in on Fasolt!”

Harskin gripped the side of the cradle anxiously. “You sure it’s not Fafnir they’re heading for? How’s your depth-perception out there?”

“A-one. That boat’s going the same place we are, chief!”

Sighing, Harskin said, “It could have been worse, I guess.” He snapped on the all-ship communicator and said, “Gentlemen, our job has been complicated somewhat. Observer Snollgren reports a Rigelian ship orbiting in on Fasolt, and it looks likely they have the same idea we have. Well, this’ll be a test of our mettle. We’ll have a chance to snatch Fafnir right out from under their alleged noses!”

A voice said, “Why not blast the Rigelians first? They’re our enemies, aren’t they?”

Harskin recognized the voice as belonging to Leefman—a first-rate linguist, rather innocent of the niceties of interstellar protocol. No reply from Harskin was needed. The hoarse voice of Military Attaché Ramos broke in.

“This is a neutral system, Leefman. Rigelian-Terran hostilities are suspended pending contact with the gnorphs. Someday you’ll understand that war has its code too.”

Alone in Control Cabin, Shipmaster Harskin smiled. It was a good crew; a little overspecialized, perhaps, but more than adequate for the purpose. Having Rigelians on hand would be just so much additional challenge. Shipmaster Harskin enjoyed challenges.

Beneath him, the engines of the
Peccable
throbbed magnificently. He was proud of his ship, proud of his crew. The
Peccable
swept into the deadly atmosphere of Fasolt, swung downward in big looping spirals, and headed for land.

Not too far behind came the Rigelians. Harskin leaned back and let the crash of deceleration eddy up over him, and waited.

* * * *

Fasolt was mostly rock, except for the hydrogen-fluoride oceans and the hydrogenous air. It was not an appealing planet.

The spacesuited men of the
Peccable
were quick to debouch and extrude their dome. Atmosphere issued into it. “A little home away from home,” Harskin remarked.

Biochemist Carver squinted balefully at the choppy hydrofluoric-acid sea. “Nice world. Good thing these goldfish bowls aren’t made out of glass, yes? And better caution your men about using the dome airlock. A little of our oxygen gets out into that atmosphere and we’ll have the loveliest rainstorm you ever want to see—with us a thousand feet up, looking down.”

Harskin nodded. “It’s not a pleasant place at all. But it’s not a pleasant war we’re fighting.”

He glanced up at the murky sky. Fafnir was full, a broad red globe barely a million miles away. And, completing the group, there was the feint blue sun about which both worlds revolved, the entire system forming a neat Trojan equilateral with vast Antares.

Snollgren appeared. The keen-eyed observer had been in the ship, and apparently had made it from the
Peccable
to the endomed temporary camp on a dead run, no little feat in Fasolt’s 1.5-g field.

“Well?” Harskin asked.

The observer opened his face plate and sucked in some of the dome’s high-oxygen atmosphere. “The Rigelians,” he gasped. “They’ve landed. I saw them in orbit.”

“Where?”

“I’d estimate five hundred miles westward. They’re definitely on this continent.”

Harskin glanced at the chronometer set in the wrist of Snollgren’s spacesuit. “We’ll give them an hour to set up their camp. Then we’ll contact them and find out what goes.”

* * * *

The Rigelian captain’s name was Fourteen Deathless. He spoke Galactic with a sharp, crisp accent that Harskin attributed to his ursine ancestry.

“Coincidence we’re both here at the same time, eh, Shipmaster Harskin? Strange are the ways of the Guiding Forces.”

“They certainly are,” Harskin said. He stared at the hand-mike, wishing it were a screen so he could see the sly, smug expression on the Rigelian’s furry face. Obviously, someone had intercepted Harskin’s allegedly secret orders and studied them carefully before forwarding them to their recipient.

Coincidences didn’t happen in interstellar war. The Rigelians were here because they knew the Earthmen were.

“We have arrived at a knotty problem in ethics,” remarked Captain Fourteen Deathless. “Both of us are here for the same purpose, that of negotiating trading rights with the gnorphs. Now—ah—which of us is to make the first attempt to deal with these people?”

“Obviously,” said Harskin, “the ship which landed on Fasolt first has prior claim.”

“This is suitable,” said the Rigelian.

“We’ll set out at once, then. Since the
Peccable
landed at least half an hour before your ship, we have clear priority.”

“Interesting,” Captain Fourteen Deathless said. “But just how do you compute you arrived before we did? By our instruments we were down long before you.”

Harskin started to sputter, then checked himself. “Impossible!”

“Oh? Cite your landing time, please, with reference to Galactic Absolute.”

“We put down at…” Harskin paused. “No. Suppose you tell me what time you landed, and then I’ll give you our figures.”

“That’s hardly fair,” said the Rigelian. “How do we know you won’t alter your figures once we’ve given ours?”

“And how do
we
know, on the other hand…?”

“It won’t work,” said the alien. “Neither of us will allow the other priority.”

Shrugging, Harskin saw the truth of that. Regardless of the fact that the
Peccable
actually
had
landed first, the Rigelians would never admit it. It was a problem in simple relativity; without an external observer to supply impartial data, it was Fourteen Deathless’ word against Harskin’s.

“All right,” Harskin said wearily. “Call it a stalemate. Suppose we
both
go to Fafnir now, and have them choose between us.”

There was silence at the other end for a while. Then the Rigelian said, “This is acceptable. The rights of the neutral parties must be respected, of course.”

“Of course. Until this system is settled, we’re
all
neutrals, remember?”

“Naturally,” said the Rigelian.

* * * *

It was not, thought Harskin, a totally satisfactory arrangement. Still, it could hardly be helped.

By the very strict rules with which the Terran-Rigelian “war” was being fought, a system was considered neutral until a majority of its intelligently inhabited worlds had declared a preference for one power or the other.

In the Antares system, a majority vote would have to be a unanimous one. Of the eleven highly variegated worlds that circled the giant red star, only Fafnir bore life. The gnorphs were an intelligent race of biped humanoids—the classic shape of intelligent life. The Terrans were simianoid; the Rigelians, ursinoid. But the gnorphs owed their appearance neither to apes nor bears; they were reptilians, erect and tailless. Fafnir was not hospitable to mammalian life.

Harskin stared broodingly out the viewing bay as the blood-red seas of Fafnir grew larger. The Rigelian ship could not be seen, but he knew it was on its way. He made a mental note to inform Terran Intelligence that the secrecy of the high command’s secret orders was open to some question.

It was a strange war—a war fought with documents rather than energy cannons. The shooting stage of the war between the galaxy’s two leading races had long since ended in sheer futility; the development of the Martineau Negascreen, which happily drank up every megawatt of a bombardment and fired it back at triple intensity, had quickly put an end to active hostility.

Now, the war was carried on at a subtler level—the economic one. Rigel and Terra strove to outdo each other in extracting exclusive trading rights from systems, hoping to choke each other’s lifelines. The universe was infinite, or close enough to infinite to keep both systems busy for quite a few millennia to come.

Harskin shrugged. Terran scouts had visited Fafnir and had reported little anxiety on the part of the gnorphs to take part in the Galactic stream of things. Presumably, Rigel IV had not yet visited the world; it was simpler to pirate the Terran scout reports.

Well, this would really be a test.

“Preparing to land, sir,” said Navigator Dominic. “Any instructions?”

“Yes,” Harskin said. “Bring us down where it’s dry.”

The landing was a good one, on the centermost of the island group that made up Fafnir’s main land mass. Harskin and his twelve men—he had left five behind in the dome on Fasolt to hedge his bet—left the ship.

It would not be necessary to erect a dome here; Fafnir’s air was breathable, more or less. It was 11 percent oxygen, 86 percent nitrogen, and a whopping 3 percent of inerts, but a decent filter system easily strained the excess nitro and argon out and pumped in oxygen.

Wearing breathing-masks and converters, the thirteen Terrans advanced inland. At their backs was the ocean, red and glimmering in Antares’ light.

“Here come the Rigelians,” Observer Snollgren cried.

“As usual, they’re hanging back and waiting to see what we do.” Harskin frowned. “This time, we won’t wait for them. Let’s take advantage of our head start.”

The gnorph village was five miles inland, but the party had not gone more than two miles when they were greeted by a group of aliens.

There were about a hundred of them, advancing in a wedge-shaped phalanx. They were moving slowly, without any overt belligerent ideas, but Harskin felt uneasy. A hundred aroused savages could make quick work of thirteen Terrans armed with handguns.

He glanced at Mawley, Contact Technician First Class. “Go ahead. Get up there and tell ’em we’re friends.”

Mawley was a tall redhead with knobby cheekbones and, at the moment, an expression of grave self-concern. He nodded, checked his lingual converter to make sure it was operating, and stepped forward, one hand upraised.

“Greetings,” he said loudly. “We come in peace.”

The gnorphs spread out into a loose formation and stared stolidly ahead. Harskin, waiting tensely for Mawley to achieve his rapport with the aliens, peered curiously at them.

They were short—five-six or so—and correspondingly broad-beamed. Their chocolate-brown skin was glossy and scaled; it hung loosely, in corrugated folds. Thick antennae twined upward from either side of their bald heads, and equally thick fleshy processes dangled comb-like from their jaws. As for their eyes, Harskin was unable to see them; they were hidden in deep shadow, set back two inches in their skull and protected by projecting, brooding rims of bone that circled completely around each eye.

Three of the gnorphs stepped out of the ranks, and the middle alien stepped forward, flanked slightly to the rear by his companions. He spoke in a harsh, guttural voice.

The converter rendered it as “What do you want here?”

Mawley was prepared for the question. “Friendship. Peace. Mutual happiness of our worlds.”

“Where are you from?”

Mawley gestured to the sky. “Far away, beyond the sky. Beyond the stars. Much distance.”

The gnorph looked skeptical. “How many days’ sailing from here?”

“Many days. Many,
many
days.”

“Then why come to us?”

“To establish friendship,” said Mawley. “To build a bond between your world and ours.”

At that, the alien did an abrupt about-face and conferred with his two companions. Harskin kept an eye on the spears twitching in the alien hands.

The conference seemed to be prolonging itself indefinitely. Mawley glanced back at Harskin as if to ask what he should do next, but the shipmaster merely smiled in approval and encouragement.

Finally the aliens broke up their huddle and the lead man turned back to the Terrans. “We think you should leave us,” he grunted. “Go. At once.”

There was nothing in Mawley’s instructions to cover this. The contact technician opened and closed his mouth a few times without speaking. Gravely, the aliens turned and marched away, leaving the Terrans alone.

First Contact had been achieved.

“This has to be done in a very careful way,” Harskin said. “Any news from the Rigelians?”

“They’re situated about eight miles from here,” Snollgren said.

“Hmmm. That means they’re as far from the village as we are.” Harskin put his hands to his head. “The gnorphs are certainly not leaping all over the place to sign a treaty with us, that’s for sure. We’ll have to handle them gently or we may make them angry enough to sign up with the Rigelians.”

“I doubt that,” offered Sociologist Yang. “They probably won’t be any more anxious to deal with the Rigelians than they are with us. They’re neutrals, and they want to stay that way.”

Harskin leaned back. “This is a problem we haven’t hit before. None of the worlds in either sphere of influence ever had any isolationist ideas. What do we do? Just pull up and leave?”

The blue sun was setting. Antares still hovered on the horizon, a shapeless blob of pale red eating up half the sky. “We’ll have to send a man to spy on the Rigelians. Archer, you’re elected.”

The man in question rose. “Yes, sir.”

“Keep an eye on them, watch their dealings with the gnorphs, and above all don’t let the Rigelians see you.” Another idea occurred to the shipmaster. “Lloyd?”

“Yes, sir?”

“In all probability the Rigelians have slapped a spy on
us.
You’re our counterespionage man, effective now. Scout around and see if you can turn up their spy.”

Archer and Lloyd departed. Harskin turned to the sociologist. “Yang, there has to be some way of pushing these gnorphs to one side or the other.”

“Agreed. I’ll have to see more of a pattern, though, before I can help you.