The Space Merchants (23 page)

I began wishing for Kathy for a completely new reason.

When the lieutenant came back it was midnight. "All right," he said to me. "A cab's waiting for you outside. The runner knows where to go."

I climbed out and stretched. "Thanks," I said awkwardly.

The lieutenant spat neatly on the ground between my feet. The door slammed, and I scrambled out of the way of the take-off.

The cab-runner was Mexican. I tried him on a question; no English. I tried again in my Chlorella U. Spanish; he gaped at me. There were fifty good reasons why I didn't want to go along with him without a much better idea of what was up. But when I stopped to think of it, I had damnall choice. The lieutenant had followed his orders. Now the orders were complied with, and I could see his active little military mind framing the report that would tip someone off to where they could find the notorious Consie, Mitchell Courtenay.

I would be a sitting duck; it would depend on whether Taunton or the police got to me first. It was not a choice worth spending much time over.

I got in the cab.

You'd think the fact that the runner was a Mexican would have tipped me off. It didn't, though. It was not until I saw the glimmer of starlight on the massive projectile before me that I knew I was in Arizona, and knew what the President had done for me.

A mixed squad of Pinkertons and our own plant protection men closed in on me and hustled me past the sentry-boxes, across the cleared land, up to the rocket itself. The OIC showed me the crescent he could make with thumb and forefinger and said: "You're safe now, Mr. Courtenay."

"But I don't
want
to go to Venus!" I said.

He laughed out loud.

Hurry up and wait; hurry up and wait. The long, dreary flight had been a stasis; everything at both ends of it had been too frantic with motion over which I had no control to permit thought. They gave me no chance to think here, either; I felt someone grabbing the seat of my pants, and I was hoisted inside. There I was dragged more than led to an acceleration hammock, strapped in and left.

The hammock swung and jolted, and twelve titans brooded on my chest. Good-by, Kathy; good-by, Schocken Tower. Like it or not, I was on my way to Venus.

But it wasn't good-by to Kathy.

It was she herself who came to unstrap me when the first blast was over.

I got out of the hammock and tottered weightlessly, rubbing my back. I opened my mouth to make a casual greeting. What came out was a squeaky, "Kathy!"

It wasn't a brilliant speech, but I didn't have time for a brilliant speech. Kathy's lips and my lips were occupied.

When we stopped for breath I said, "What alkaloids do
you
put into the product?" but it was wasted. She wanted to be kissed again. I kissed her.

It was hard work, standing up. Every time she moved we lurched against the rail or drifted off the floor entirely; only a standby jet was operating and we were otherwise beyond any consideration.

We sat down.

After a while, we talked.

I stretched and looked around me. "Lovely place you have here," I said. "Now that that's taken care of, I have something else on my mind. Questions: two of them." I told her what the questions were.

I explained about Runstead's lousing up San Diego and Venus Project. And about Hester's murder.

"Oh, Mitch," she said. "Where do I begin? How'd you ever get to be star class?"

"Went to night school," I said. "I'm still listening."

"Well, you should be able to figure it out. Sure, we Consies wanted space travel. The human race needs Venus. It needs an unspoiled, unwrecked, unexploited, unlooted, un—"

"Oh," I said.

"—unpirated, undevastated—well, you see. Sure we wanted a ship to go to Venus. But we didn't want Fowler Schocken on Venus. Or Mitchell Courtenay, either. Not as long as Mitchell Courtenay was the kind of guy who would gut Venus for an extra megabuck's billing. There aren't too many planets around that the race can expand into, Mitch. We couldn't have Fowler Schocken's Venus Project succeed."

"Um," I said, digesting. "And Hester?"

Kathy shook her head. "You figure that one out," she said.

"You don't know the answer?"

"I do know the answer. It isn't hard."

I coaxed, but she wouldn't play. So I kissed her for a while again, until some interfering character with a ship's-officer rosette on his shoulder came grinning in. "Care to look at the stars, folks?" he asked, in a tourist-guide way that I detested. It didn't pay to pull rank on him, of course; ships' officers always act a cut above their class, and it would have been ungraceful, at least, to brace him for it. Besides—

Besides.

The thought stopped me for a moment: I was used to being star class by now. It wasn't going to be fun, being one of the boys. I gave my Consie theory a quick mental runthrough. No, there was nothingin it that indicated I would have a show-dog's chance of being sirred and catered to any more.

Hello, Kathy. Good-by, Schocken Tower.

Anyway, we went up to the forward observation port. All the faces were strange to me.

There isn't a window to be found on the Moon ships; radar-eyed, GCA-tentacled, they sacrifice the esthetic but useless spectacle of the stars for the greater strength of steel. I had never seen the stars in space before.

Outside the port was white night. Brilliant stars shining against a background of star particles scattered over a dust of stars. There wasn't a breadth of space the size of my thumbnail where there was blackness; it was all light, all fiery pastels. A rim of fire around the side of the port showed the direction of the sun.

We turned away from the port. "Where's Matt Runstead?" I asked.

Kathy giggled. "Back in Schocken Tower, living on wake-up pills, trying to untangle the mess.
Somebody
had to stay behind, Mitch. Fortunately, Matt can vote your proxies. We didn't have much time to talk in Washington; he's going to have a lot of questions to ask, and nobody around with the answers."

I stared. "What in the world was Runstead doing in Washington?"

"Getting you off the spot, Mitch! After poor little Jack O'Shea broke—"

"After
what?"

"Oh, good Lord. Look, let's take it in order. O'Shea broke. He got drunk one night too often, and he couldn't find a clear spot in his arm for the needle, and he picked out the wrong girl to break apart in front of. They had him sewed up tight. All about you, and all about me, and the rocket, and everything."

"Who did?"

"Your great and good friend, B. J. Taunton." Kathy struck a match for her cigarette viciously. I could read her mind a little, too. Little Jack O'Shea, sixty pounds of jellied porcelain and melted wax, thirty-five inches of twisted guts and blubber. There had been times in the past weeks when I had not liked Jack. I canceled them all, paid in full, when I thought of that destructible tiny man in the hands of Taunton's anthropoids. "Taunton got it all, Mitch," Kathy said. "All that mattered, anyhow. If Runstead hadn't had a tap on Taunton's interrogation room we would have been had, right then. But Matt had time to get down to Washington and warn me and the President —oh, he's no Consie, the President, but he's a good man. He can't help being born into office. And—here we are."

The captain interrupted us. "Five minutes till we correct," he said. "Better get started back to your hammocks. The correction blasts may not be much—but you never know."

Kathy nodded and led me away. I plucked the cigarette from her lips, took a puff—and gave it back. "Why, Mitch!" she said.

"I'm reformed," I told her. "Uh—Kathy. One more question. It isn't a nice question."

She sighed. "The same as between you and Hester," she said.

I asked, "What was between Jack—uh?"

"You heard me. What was between Jack and me was the same as between you and Hester. All one way. Jack was in love with me, maybe. Something like that. I—wasn't." And torrentially: "Because I was too damn crazy mad in love with you!"

"Uh," I said. It seemed like the moment to reach out and kiss her again, but it must not have been because she pushed me away. I cracked my head against the corridor wall. "Ouch," I said.

"That's what you're so stupid about, curse you!" she was saying. "Jack wanted me, but I didn't want anyone but you, not ever. And you never troubled to figure it out—never knew how much I cared about you any more than you knew how much Hester cared about you. Poor Hester—who knew she could never have you. Good lord, Mitch, how blind can you be?"

"Hester in love with me?"

"Yes, damn it! Why else would she have committed suicide?" Kathy actually stamped her foot, and rose an inch above the floor as a result.

I rubbed my head. "Well," I said dazedly.

The sixty-second beeper went off. "Hammocks," said Kathy, and the tears in her eyes flooded out. I put my arm around her.

"This is a stinking undignified business," she said. "I have exactly one minute to kiss and make up, let you get over your question-and-answer period, intimate that I have a private cabin and there's two hammocks in it, and get us both fastened in."

I straightened up fast. "A minute is a long time, dear," I told her.

It didn't take that long.

Frederik Pohl
has been about everything that it is possible to be in the field of science fiction, from consecrated fan and struggling poet to critic, literary agent, teacher, book and magazine editor and, above all, writer.

Called by Kingsley Amis (in Amis's critical study of science fiction, New Maps of Hell) "the most consistently able writer science fiction, in its modern form, has yet produced," Frederik Pohl is clearly in the very first rank of writers in the field. He has won most of the awards the science-fiction field has to offer, including the Edward E. Smith and Donald A. Wollheim memorial awards, the International John W. Campbell award (twice), the French Prix Apollo, the Yugoslavian Vizija, the Nebula (three times, including the "Grand Master" Nebula for lifetime contributions to the field) and the Hugo (six times, he is the only person ever to have won the Hugo both as writer and as editor), as well as such awards from sources outside the science-fiction community as the American Book Award, the annual award of the Popular Culture Association, and the United Nations Society of Writers Award. Other honors include election as a Fellow to both the British Interplanetary Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Apart from the field of science fiction, he is a noted lecturer and teacher in the area of future studies, and is the author of, among other non-fiction works, Practical Politics, a how-to-do-it manual of the American political process; Our Angry Earth, on the world's environmental problems, written in collaboration with the late Isaac Asimov, which Sir Arthur C. Clarke calls "perhaps the most important book either of its authors has produced"; and, most recently, Chasing Science, on the uses of science as a spectator sport. He is also the Encyclopedia Britannica's authority on the First Century A.D. Roman emperor, Tiberius.

Many of Frederik Pohl's works have been adapted for radio, television, or film, beginning with the two-part Columbia Workshop of the Air version of the classic The Space Merchants in 1953. In Europe, a number of his stories have been televised by the BBC and his famous novella, "The Midas Plague," became a three-hour special on German television. The 1981 NBC two-hour television film, The Clonemaster, was based on an original concept of his; his award-winning novel, Gateway, has been dramatized for live theatrical production; his novelette, "The Tunnel under the World," became a feature film in Italy; and his novels, Man Plus and Gateway, are currently in development in America as feature films. (Gateway was also made into a computer game under the title of "Frederik Pohl's Gateway" by Legend Entertainment; a second game, "Gateway II: The Home World," was released a year later.)

Among his most recent novels are The World at the End of Time, Outnumbering the Dead, Stopping at Slowyear, The Voices of Heaven, O Pioneer, and The Siege of Eternity.

He has traveled widely, sometimes to lecture on behalf of the United States State Department (in places as widely separated as Singapore, New Zealand and most of the countries of both Eastern and Western Europe) or to attend international conferences on science or science fiction in places like the Republic of South Korea, Canada, the People's Republic of China, Australia, Brazil, the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and most of Western Europe. He is a past president of both World SF and the Science Fiction Writers of America and is currently Midwest Area Representative to the Authors Guild, having served for nine years as a member of the Guild Council before moving to the midwest. He currently makes his home in Palatine, Illinois, with his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Hull, who is a past president of the Science Fiction Research Association and a noted scholar in the field.

Cyril M. Kornbluth
was born in New York City in 1923. Being an active part of the science-fiction fandom in the 30's he started professional writing age 15, a member of the Futurians. By the early 40's quite a number of  his stories had been publicised in several magazines under several aliases of whom S.D. Gottesman and Cecil Corman were the most frequent.

After spending some time for university studies in Chicago, he served with the Army in Europe during WW II.

In the post-war years, he went for university studies on the G.I. Bill to Chicago again, he worked with Trans Radio Press there up to the year of 1951, when he took to professional writing  for a living.

His best known novels resulted from the fruitful cooperation with Frederik Pohl. The most important were The Space Merchants (1953), Search the Sky (1954, and Wolfbane (1959, shortly after his untimely death). It was Space Merchants that took its place in SF's hall of fame as being one of the most biting satirical novels ever written in the genre. Important parts of the novel were written by Kornbluth and showed his ability of society-critical and satirical writing.

Besides of Frederik Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth teamed  up with Judith Merril. The novels Outpost Mars and Gunner Cade (1952) were released, the author being named as Cyril Judd.

But also the novels he did on his own, like Takeoff (1952), The Syndic (1953), and Not This August are highly remarkable.

Even more important were his short stories. Some of his best are The Marching Morons (Galaxy 4/'51), The Little Black Bag (Astounding Science Fiction 7/'50), The Altar at Midnight  (Galaxy 11/'52) and Ms. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 7/'57).

Kornbluth's novels and stories  showed a turn to the soft sciences (social and psychological) for the first time.

Even though he was suffering from 'malign hypertension' and died from a heart attack at age 35 in 1958, he led SF into the next decade and to new horizons.