“You knew about me, then?”
“Of course I knew! As soon as that play opened and I read the reviews, I knew you were the one!”
They arranged a meeting for two the following afternoon, at the home of Walt Hollis in Riverdale. Hollis had once given Jenner a key, and somehow Jenner had kept it. And he knew Hollis would not be home until five that afternoon, which gave them three hours to talk.
That night, Jenner phoned the theater and let the stage manager know that he was indisposed. The stage manager pleaded, but Jenner stood on his contractual rights. That evening Lloyd Lane played the part of Jack Larrabee, to the dismay of the disgruntled and disappointed audience. Jenner spent the evening pacing through the five rooms of his suite, clenching his hands, glorying masochistically in the turmoil and hatred bubbling inside him. He counted the hours of the sleepless night. In the morning, he breakfasted late, read till noon, paced the floor till half past one, and took the Undertube to Hollis’ place.
He used the key to let himself in. There was no sign of Norton. Jenner seated himself in Hollis’ neat-as-a-pin living room and waited, thinking that it was utterly beyond toleration that another man should walk the earth privy to the inmost thoughts of Mark Jenner.
At two-fifteen, the doorbell rang. Jenner activated the scanner. The face in the lambent visual field was dark, strong chinned, square, powerful. Jenner opened the door and stood face to face with the only man in the universe who knew that the nine-year-old Mark Jenner had eaten a live angleworm on a dare. Clifford Norton stared levelly at the only man in the universe who knew what he had done to twelve-year-old Marian Simms in her father’s garage, twenty-nine years ago.
The two big men faced each other for a long moment in the vestibule of Hollis’ apartment. They maintained civil smiles. They both breathed deeply. In Jenner’s mind, thoughts whirled wildly, and he knew Norton well enough to be aware that Norton was planning strategy, too.
Then the stasis broke.
The animal growl of hatred burst from Jenner’s lips first, but a moment later Norton was roaring too, and the two men crashed heavily together in the middle of the floor. They clinched and one of Norton’s legs snaked between Jenner’s, tumbling him over; Norton dropped on top of him, but Jenner sidled out from under and slammed his elbow into the pit of Norton’s stomach.
Norton gasped. He lashed out with groping hands and caught Jenner’s throat. His hands tightened, while Jenner tugged and finally dragged Norton’s fingers from his throat. He sucked in breath. His knee rose, going for Norton’s groin. The two men writhed on the floor like raging lions, each trying to cripple and damage the other, each hoping to land a crushing blow, each trying ultimately to kill the other.
It lasted only a few moments. They separated with no spoken word and came separately to their feet. They stared at each other once again, now flushed and bruised, their neat suits rumpled, their shirttails out.
“We’re acting like fools,” Norton said. “Or like little boys.”
“We couldn’t help ourselves,” Jenner said. “It was a natural thing for us to fight. We leaped at each other like men trying to catch their own shadows.”
They sat down, Jenner in Hollis’ chair, Norton on the couch across the room. For more than a minute, the only sound was that of heavy breathing. Jenner’s heart pounded furiously. He hadn’t engaged in physical combat in twenty-five years.
“I didn’t think it would be this way, exactly,” Norton said. “There are times when I wake up and I think I’m you. Angling for a tryout, quarreling with your wife, hitting the bottle.”
“And times when I remember prosecuting an innocent man for murder and winning the case,” Jenner said.
Norton’s face darkened. “And I remember eating a live worm…”
“And I remember a scared twelve-year-old girl cornered in a garage…”
Again they fell silent, both of them slumped over, bearing the burden of each other’s pasts. Norton said, “We should never have done this. Come here, and met.”
“I had to see you.”
“And I had to see you.”
“We can’t ever see each other again,” said Jenner. “It’s either got to be murder or a truce between us. Those few minutes when we were fighting—I actually wanted to kill you, Norton. To see you go blue in the face and die.”
Norton nodded. “I had the same feeling. Neither of us can really bear the idea that someone else knows him inside and out, even though it’s done us so much good in so many ways. I’ll get the Senate, all right. And maybe the White House in another six years.”
“And I’m back on the stage. I’ll get my wife back, if I want her. Everything I lost. Yes,” Jenner said. “It’s worth sharing your mind. But we can’t ever meet again. We’re each a small part of each other, and the hatred’s too strong. I guess it’s self-hatred, really. But we might—we might lose control of ourselves, the way we did just now.”
The front door opened suddenly. Walt Hollis stood in the vestibule, a small pinched-faced man with narrow shoulders and a myopic squint. And, just now, a dazed expression on his face.
“You two—how did you get here—why…”
“I still had a key,” Jenner said. “I called Norton and invited him down to meet me here. We didn’t expect you back so early.”
Hollis’ mouth worked spasmodically for ten seconds before the words came. “You should never have met each other. The traumatic effects—possible dangers…”
“We’ve already had a good brawl,” Norton said. “But we won’t any more. We’ve declared a truce.”
He crossed the room and forced himself to smile at Jenner. Jenner summoned his craft and made his face show genial conviviality, though within all was loathing. They shook hands.
“We aren’t going to see each other ever again,” Jenner explained. “Norton’s going to be president, and I’m going to win undying fame in the theater. And each of us will owe our accomplishments to the other.”
“And to you, Hollis,” Norton added.
“Maybe Norton and I will keep in touch by mail,” Jenner said. “Drop each other little notes, suggestions. An actor can help a politician. A politician can help an actor. Call it long-range symbiosis, Holly. The two of us ought to go places, thanks to you.”
Jenner glanced at Norton, and this time the smile that was exchanged was a sincere one. There was no need for words between them. They walked past the numb Hollis and into the small laboratory room and methodically smashed the equipment. If Hollis were to put someone else through this treatment, Jenner thought, the competition might be a problem. He and Norton wanted no further competition in their chosen fields.
They returned to the living room and gravely said goodbye to Hollis. Jenner was calm inside, now, at last. He and Norton departed, going their separate ways once they reached the street. Jenner knew he would never see Norton again. It was just as well; he would have to live with Norton’s memories for the rest of his life.
Hollis surveyed the wreckage of his lab with a stony heart. He felt cold and apprehensive. This was the reward of his labors, this was what he got for trying to help. But he should have realized it. After all, he had edited the tapes for both of them. He knew what they were. He carried the burden of both souls in his own small heart. He knew what they had done, and he knew what they were capable of doing, now that the errors of one sanctioned the errors of the other.
Tiredly, Hollis closed the laboratory door, cutting off the sight of the wreckage. He thought of Jenner and Norton and wondered when they would realize that he knew all their secrets.
He wondered how long Jenner and Norton would let him live.
DELIVERY GUARANTEED
However high-minded my thoughts about writing science fiction might have been getting in 1957 and 1958, I was still not yet above writing stories around cover paintings at editorial request, which I saw (and still see) as a harmless virtuoso exercise rather than as any kind of display of venality. The cover artists who were i
nvolved in such projects liked to set cunning traps for the writers by handing them truly perplexing images, and it was always an interesting challenge to come up with a story idea that managed to be worthwhile in its own right while still fulfilling the mandate laid down by the depicted scene. Some very fine writers (Isaac Asimov, Algis Budrys, and Clifford D. Simak among them) had written some excellent stories via this back-to-front method, and one of the masterpieces of the science-fiction short story, James Blish’s “Common Time,” had resulted from just such an assignment. So it was with great delight that I wrote a dozen or more cover stories for Bob Lowndes’ two magazines, Future and Science Fiction Stories, and I hesitated not at all when Lowndes handed me a photostat of an Ed Emshwiller painting showing a man and a woman in spacesuits aboard a log raft that was zipping along through the asteroid belt propelled by a small rocket engine. I wrote the story the next day—it was August, 1958—and Lowndes featured it in the February, 1959 Science Fiction Stories. This would, in fact, be the last cover story I would do for him, because with their next issues both his magazines dropped cover paintings entirely, for reasons of economy, and soon after that they would cease to exist at all. At some point in 1958 the American News Company, the main distributor (and financial backer) for nearly all of the science-fiction magazines for which I wrote, went abruptly out of business, and all of those magazines instantly vanished. With their disappearance, the thing that I had set out to do in 1955, and which I had actually succeeded at for the past three years—to earn my living as a full-time science-fiction writer—was no longer possible to achieve. Perhaps Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, who stood at the very summit of the field, might be able still to manage it, Heinlein by writing lucrative novels for young readers, Bradbury by publishing stories in the high-paying slick magazines. But the rest of us, competing for the few available slots on the contents pages of the handful of surviving science-fiction magazines, were left high and dry. The juvenile-oriented hack markets were gone, and so were most of markets for science fiction of a more adult kind. Certainly neither the Heinlein option nor the Bradbury one was open to me, at my current level of skill. I remember taking a long, anguished walk through the streets of Manhattan on a summer evening in 1958, pondering my future as a writer. On the one hand, I still was wrestling with that unfocused yearning to enhance my standing in the science-fiction world, preferably by writing ambitious novels for the top book publishers, who at that time were Doubleday (in hardcover) and Ballantine (in paperback). But on the other, I had never written a major novel, only young-adult titles and short adventure tales for Don Wollheim’s Ace Books, and I had little confidence that I would be able to shoulder my way into either of those two important publishing houses, which then could pick and choose from the novels of the best writers in the field: Heinlein, Asimov, Blish, Sturgeon, Clarke, Anderson, Simak, Pohl, Wyndham, and so on and on. And I still had an expensive life-style to support: that apartment on West End Avenue, those trips to the West Indies and Europe. It might be a better idea, I thought, to abandon science fiction entirely, or almost so, and earn the bulk of my living from the multitude of high-paying men’s magazines and other general-interest publications that still existed and were in constant need of material. But I came home from that walk determined to give science fiction one last try, and began to sketch out a novel that I hoped would greatly exceed in power and scope anything I had written up till then, with the hope that it would land me a place on Doubleday’s elite list. I finished it in October, 1958; it was called The Seed of Earth; my agent took it to Doubleday, and Doubleday quickly turned it down. They didn’t think it was a particularly awful book—or a particularly great one—but in any case they were publishing just one book a month of science fiction, and, as I had anticipated, were too busy doing Heinlein and Asimov and Simak to have room on the list for me. The next stop was Ballantine, and, instead of relying on my agent, I took the manuscript to Betty Ballantine, the company’s co-owner and editor, myself. I had a long and friendly chat with her, told her all about my ambitions and yearnings, and went away thinking that she might very well want to publish me. Indeed she did—eight years later—but The Seed of Earth wasn’t her sort of thing. Eventually, three years later, I sold it to my regular paperback company, Ace Books, and so much for all that high literary ambition.
The year 1958, when most of the science-fiction magazines collapsed and I found myself stranded between my incompatible desires to write first-rate science fiction and yet somehow to earn a first-rate living from my writing, marked the end of a remarkable four-year period for me during which, starting from amateur status, I had sold vast numbers of short stories and novels and established myself as a dependable craftsman upon whom editors could rely for a steady flow of work written to order. Now, though, I would have to find other fields in which to work, since the sort of science-fiction-market that could support full-time writers had disappeared virtually in the twinkling of an eye. 1958 was my last year of prolific science-fiction production for a long time. I hoped to keep my hand in by doing the occasional story for Astounding or Galaxy, but no longer would I think of myself as writing the stuff full time. From dozens of stories a year I scaled back to eight or ten, to three or four, and, by 1961, to none at all. Went elsewhere, wrote other things. And so I entered into the first of the various departures from science fiction that have marked my long career.
——————
There aren’t many free-lance space-ferry operators who can claim that they carried a log cabin half way from Mars to Ganymede, and then had the log cabin carry them the rest of the way. I can, though you can bet your last tarnished megabuck that I didn’t do it willingly. It was quite a trip. I left Mars not only with a log cabin on board, but a genuine muzzle-loading antique cannon, a goodly supply of cannonballs therefrom, and various other miscellaneous antiques—as well as the Curator of Historical Collections from the Ganymede Museum. There was also a stowaway on board, much to his surprise and mine—he wasn’t listed in the cargo vouchers.
Let me make one thing clear: I wasn’t keen on carrying any such cargo. But my free-lance ferry operator’s charter is quite explicit that way, unfortunately. A ferry operator is required to hire his ship to any person of law-abiding character who will meet the (government-fixed) rates, and whose cargo to be transported neither exceeds the ship’s weight allowance nor is considered contraband by any System law.
In short, I’m available to just about all comers. By the terms of my charter I’ve been compelled to ferry five hundred marmosets to Pluto, forced to haul ten tons of Venusian guano to Callisto, constrained to deliver fifty crates of fertilized frogs’ eggs from Earth to a research station orbiting Neptune. In the latter case I made the trip twice for the same fee, thanks to the Delivery Guaranteed clause in the contract; the first time out, my radiation shields slipped up for a few seconds, not causing me any particular genetic hardships but playing merry hell with those frog’s eggs. When a bunch of four-headed tadpoles began to hatch, my clients served notice on me that they were not accepting delivery and would pay no fee—and, what’s more, would sue if I didn’t bring another load of potential frogs up from Earth, and be damned well careful about the shielding this time.
So I hauled another fifty crates of frogs’ eggs, this time without mishap, and collected my fee. But I’ve never been happy about carrying livestock again.
This new offer wasn’t livestock. I got the call while I was laying over on Mars after a trip up from Luna with a few colonists and their gear. I had submitted my name to the Transport Registry, informing them that I was on call and waiting for employment—but I was in no hurry. I still had a couple of hundred megabucks left from the last job, and I didn’t mind a vacation.
The call came on the third day of my Martian layover. “Collect call for Mr. Sam Diamond, from the Transport Registry. Do you accept?”
“Yes,” I muttered, and $30,000 more was chalked to my phone bill. A dollar doesn’t last hardly any time at
all in these days of system-wide hyperinflation.
“Sam?” a deep voice said. It was Mike Cooper of the Transport people.
“Who else would it be at this end of your collect call?” I growled. “And why can’t you people pay for a phone call once in a while?”
Cooper said cheerfully, “You know the law, Sam. I’ve got a job for you.”
“That’s nice. Another load of marmosets?”
“Nothing live this time, Sam, except your passenger. She’s Miss Vanderweghe of the Ganymede Museum. Curator of Historical Collections. She wants someone to ferry her back to Ganymede with some historical relics she’s picked up along the way.”
“The Washington Monument?” I asked. “The Great Pyramid of Khufu? We could tow it alongside the ship, lashed down with twine…”
“Knock it off,” Cooper said, unamused. “What she’s got are souvenirs of the Venusian Insurrection. The log cabin that served as Tangay’s headquarters, the cannon used to drive back the Bluecoats, and a few smaller knickknacks along those lines.”
“Hold it,” I said. “You can’t fit a log cabin into my ship. And if it’s going to be a tow job, I want the ‘Delivery Guaranteed’ clause stricken out of the contract. And how much does the damn cannon weigh? I’ve got a weight ceiling, you know.”
“I know. Her entire cargo is less than eight tons, cannon and all. It’s well within your tonnage restrictions. And as for the log cabin, it doesn’t need to be towed. She’s agreed to take it apart for shipping, and re-assemble it when it gets to Ganymede.”
The layover had been nice while it lasted. I said, “I was looking for some rest, Mike. Isn’t there some angle I can use to wiggle out of this cargo?”
“None.”
“But…”
“There isn’t another free ferry in town tonight. She wants to leave tonight. So you’re the boy, Sam. The job is yours.”