In the Beginning: Tales From the Pulp Era Page 5

  He moved inch-by-inch over the stream’s shallow bed, searching fruitlessly. He refused to give up. The cool waters of the stream washed the feverish sweat from him and left him chilled and shivering.

  When the aliens came for him the next morning, he was a hundred yards upstream, blindly rooting up handfuls of mud, still confident he was going to find the rescue beam. It wasn’t till the priest held him poised above the sparkling blue waters of the bottomless lake and started to release him, as a glad cry went up from the watchers—it wasn’t until then that he came to the final realization that there were no angles left for him to play.

  But he was still expecting a last-minute miracle as he hit the water. This time there wasn’t any.

  GUARDIAN OF THE CRYSTAL GATE

  (1956)

  Amazing Stories and its companion magazine, Fantastic Adventures, were big, shaggy pulps published by Ziff-Davis of Chicago. They featured fast-paced adventure stories aimed at adolescent boys, a group to which I belonged when I started reading them in 1948. I loved nearly everything I read, had fantasies of writing for them some day, and had no idea that the two books were staff-written by a dozen or so regular contributors whose work was bought without prior editorial reading and who worked mainly under pseudonyms that the editor, Ray Palmer, would stick on their material at random. (About fifteen different writers were responsible over the years for the stories bylined “Alexander Blade,” who was one of my special favorites when I was about 14.)

  While I was still an Alexander Blade fan Ziff-Davis moved its operations to New York. Editor Palmer preferred to stay behind in Chicago. The new editor was a big, burly, good-natured man named Howard Browne, who had been one of Palmer’s stable of regulars, producing undistinguished stories for him in the mode of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs under an assortment of names. Indeed, Browne thought that science fiction and fantasy was pretty silly stuff. What he preferred was detective stories. His own favorite writer was Raymond Chandler and he had written a number of creditable mysteries in the Chandler vein. Gossip had it that he had taken over Palmer’s job mainly in the hope, never realized, of talking Ziff-Davis into letting him edit a mystery magazine as well.

  By the time Browne had been on the job a couple of years my own tastes in reading had grown more mature, and I was no longer very enamored of the work of Alexander Blade and his pseudonymous colleagues. Truth to tell, I had come to think of Amazing and Fantastic Adventures as pretty awful magazines, and, with the high-minded fastidiousness common to young men in their mid-teens, said so very bluntly in a 1952 article that I wrote for an amateur magazine of s-f commentary named Fantastic Worlds. They were, I said, “the two poorest professional magazines of the field,” magazines of “drab degeneracy” that were devoted to “a formula of adventure and ‘cops and robbers on the moon.’” I said a lot of other things too, some of them fairly foolish. Fantastic Worlds allowed Browne to reply to my diatribe, and he did so quite graciously, under the circumstances, defending himself by pointing out that “magazines, like bean soup and bicycles, are put out to make money.” He offered reasoned and reasonable arguments for his editorial policies and in general resisted matching my intemperate tone. He did call my piece “unrealistic and irresponsible” but added that “it is axiomatic that only the very young and very old know everything,” and obviously I belonged to one of those two categories.

  We now jump three years. It is the summer of 1955, and, thanks to Randall Garrett, I have unexpectedly become part of Howard Browne’s stable of writers myself, turning in a monthly quota of formula fiction. I would deliver a story on Tuesday or Wednesday, Howard would let the accounting department know, and the following Monday my payment would go out. He rarely bothered to read them. Now and then he would check to see that I was maintaining the minimal level of competence that the magazines required, but he understood that I was, by and large, capable of consistently giving him the right stuff. In fact, after I had been part of his staff for six months or so, he paid me the considerable compliment of asking me to write a story around a cover painting that Ed Valigursky, one of his best artists, had just brought in.

  The painting showed two attractive young ladies in short tunics fiercely wrestling atop a huge diamond. I produced a 10,000-word story called “Guardian of the Crystal Gate,” which Howard published in the August, 1956 issue of Fantastic, the successor to the old Fantastic Adventures. My name was prominently featured on the front cover and an autobiographical sketch of me, along with a lovely drawing of me as the beardless young man I still was, went on the second page of the issue.

  During one of my visits to the Ziff-Davis office about this time, Howard Browne greeted me with a sly grin and pulled a small white magazine from his desk drawer. “Does this look familiar?” he said, or words to that effect. It was that 1952 issue of Fantastic Worlds, with my blistering attack on the magazines he edited. He had known all along that the bright young man he had hired for his staff in 1955 was the author of that overheated polemic of three years before, and finally he could no longer resist letting me in on that. He had, of course, calculated how old I must have been when I wrote that piece, and had gallantly chosen not to hold my youthful indiscretion against me.

  That August 1956 Fantastic was pretty much an all-Silverberg issue, by the way. I had broken my personal record of the month before, because I was the author or co-author of four of the six stories it contained. Besides “Guardian of the Crystal Gate,” there was a collaborative novelet called “The Slow and the Dead,” under the “Robert Randall” byline, and I appeared as “Ralph Burke” with a short entitled “Revolt of the Synthetics.” The fourth story, “O Captain My Captain,” was one that I had written while still an unknown freelancer back in 1954; unable to sell it the normal way, I had eventually fobbed it off on Browne as part of my regular quota. The interesting thing here is that Browne published it under the byline of “Ivar Jorgensen”—a writer who had been one of my early favorites in the days before I knew that the Ziff-Davis magazines were entirely written by staff insiders using pseudonyms. “Jorgensen” had originally been the pen name of Paul W. Fairman, Browne’s associate editor, but now the name was being spread around to the other contributors. So after having been an Ivar Jorgensen fan in my mid-teens, I had, four or five years later, been transformed into Jorgensen myself! It would not be long before I could lay claim to “Alexander Blade” as well.

  ——————

  It started very simply, with the routine note on my desk, saying that the Chief had a job for me. Since there’s generally some trouble for me to shoot ten or a dozen times a year, I wasn’t surprised. The surprises came later, when I found that this particular job was going to draw me a hundred trillion miles across space, on a fantastic quest on a distant planet. But that came later.

  It began quietly. I walked in, sat down, and the Chief, in a quick motion, dropped a diamond in front of me on his desk.

  I stared blankly at the jewel. It was healthy-sized, emerald-cut, blue-white. I looked up at him.

  “So?”

  “Take a close look at it, Les.” He shoved it across the desk at me with his stubby fingers. I reached out, picked up the diamond—it felt terribly cool to touch—and examined it.

  Right in the heart of the gem was a thin brown area of clouding, marring the otherwise flawless diamond. I nodded. “It looks—like a burnt-out fuse,” I said, puzzled.

  The Chief nodded solemnly. “Exactly.” He opened a desk drawer and reached in, and grasped what looked like a whole handful of other diamonds, “Here,” he said, “Enjoy yourself.” He sent them sprawling out on the desk; they rolled across the shiny marbled desktop. Some went skittering to the floor, others dropped into my lap, others spread out in a gleaming array in front of me. There must have been forty of them.

  The Chief’s eye met mine. “Each one of those diamonds,” he said, “represents one dead man.”

  I coughed. I’ve had some funny cases since joining the Bureau, b
ut this was the fanciest hook the Chief had used yet. I started scooping up the diamonds that had fallen to the floor. They were of all sizes, all cuts—a million dollars’ worth, maybe. More, maybe.

  “Don’t bother,” the Chief said. “I’ll have the charwoman pick them up when I leave. They’re not worth anything, you know.”

  “Not worth anything?” I looked at the ones I had in my hand. Each was marred by the same strange brown imperfection, that fuse blowout. I closed my hand, feeling them grind together.

  “Not a cent. For one thing, they’re all flawed, as you can easily see. For another, they’re all synthetics. Paste, every one of them. Remarkably convincing paste, but paste all the same.”

  I leaned back in my chair, put my hands together, and said, “Okay. I’m hooked. Put the job on the line for me, will you?” I was thinking, This is the screwiest one yet. And I’ve had some corkers.

  “Here’s the pitch, Les.” He drew out a long sheet of crisp onionskin paper, and handed it to me. Neatly typed on it was a list of names and addresses. I ran down the list quickly without hitting any familiar ones.

  “Well? Who are they?”

  “They’re missing persons, Les. They’ve all disappeared in this city between—ah—” He took the list back—“27 November, 2261, and 11 February of this year. The list totals sixty-six names. And those are just the ones we know about.”

  “And the diamonds?”

  “That’s where this Bureau comes in,” he said. “They only send us the screwy ones, as you’ve no doubt discovered by now. In each disappearance case listed on this sheet, one of those burnt-out diamonds was found in the room the missing man was last seen in. In every case.”

  I frowned and scratched an ear reflectively. “You say there’s a tie-in with the diamonds, Chief?”

  He nodded. “One burnt-out diamond in exchange for one man. It’s a recurrent pattern of correlation. Those men are going some-where, and those diamonds have something to do with it. We don’t know what.”

  “And you want me to find out, eh?” I asked.

  “That’s only part of it.” He moistened his lips. “Suppose I tell you where you fit into the picture, and let you decide what you want to do yourself. I can’t force you, you know.”

  “I haven’t turned down a case since I’ve been with the Bureau,” I reminded him.

  “Good.” He stood up. “Let’s see you keep that record intact, then. Because we’ve just found one of these diamonds that isn’t burnt out!”

  The vault swung open, and the Chief led the way in. He was a short, blocky little man, hardly impressive-looking at all. But he knew his job perfectly—and his job was to maneuver muscleheaded underlings like myself into positions where they were just about committed to risk life and limb for the good old Bureau without knowing quite what they were going into.

  I was in that uncomfortable position now. It wasn’t going to be easy explaining this gambit to Peg, either, I thought.

  He crossed the shadowy floor to an inner safe, deftly dialed the combination, and let the door come creaking open. He drew out a little lead box.

  “Here it is,” he said.

  I reached for it, in my usual melon-headed manner, but he drew it back quickly out of my grasp. “Easy,” he said. “This thing is dangerous.” Slowly, terribly slowly; he lifted the top of the box just a crack.

  A pure, silvery beam of brightness shot out and lit up the whole room.

  “It must be a beauty,” I said.

  “It is. Diamonds like these have lured sixty-six men to what we assume is their death, in the last three months. This particular one hasn’t had a chance to go into action yet.”

  I took the box from him. It was hard to resist the temptation of lifting the top and staring at that wonderful diamond again, but I managed. I wanted to find out all the angles of the job before I got involved.

  “One of our cleaning-women found the stone yesterday, right after I left. She called me at home. At first I thought it was one of the ones I was working with—one of the burnt-out ones. But from the way she described it, I knew it was something special. I had her box it up this way at once. No one’s seen it yet, except in little peeks like the one I just gave you.”

  He tapped the box. “I’ll tell you my theory,” he said, “and you can take it from there.” His voice ricocheted around unpleasantly in the silent vault. “This diamond is bait, in some way. The things have been appearing, and men have been doing something with them; I don’t know what. But the diamonds are directly connected with this wave of disappearance.”

  I started to object, but he checked me.

  “Okay, Les. I know it sounds crazy. How would you like to prove otherwise?”

  “You’re a sneaky one,” I told him, grinning. Then the grin vanished as I stared at the little lead box. “I’ll do it,” I said. “But make sure that Peg gets the pension, will you?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, matching my grin. “She’ll get every penny she deserves—after I get through grabbing, of course.” He started to lead the way out of the vault. I followed, and he closed the door be-hind me.

  “You take that diamond along with you,” he said, indicating the box. “Play with it. Do anything you like. But come back with a solution to this vanishing business. Here,” he said. “Take a few of these burnt-out ones too.”

  “Yeah. Peg might like them,” I said. “They’ll look swell with black.”

  I turned to go. As I reached the door, something occurred to me, and I paused.

  “Say—I think I’ve found a hole in your theory. How come that charwoman didn’t disappear when she found the diamond?”

  He smiled. “Take another look at the list I gave you, Les. All the names on it are men’s names. Whatever this is, it doesn’t affect women at all.”

  “Hmm. Thought I had you there, for a minute.”

  “You ought to know better than that, Les.”

  Peg didn’t like the idea one little bit.

  I called her right after I left the Bureau office, and told her the chief had a new project for me. I didn’t tell her what it was, but from the tone of my voice she must have guessed it was something risky.

  I saw her face in the screen go tight, with the mouth pulled up in the little frown she’s so fond of making every time I get stuck into another of the Bureau’s weirdies.

  “Les, what is it this time?”

  “Can’t tell you over the phone,” I said, in mock accents of melodrama. “But it’s a doozie, that’s for sure.” I fingered the leaden box in my pocket nervously.

  “I’ll come over after work,” she said. “Les, don’t let that man get you doing impossible things again.”

  “Don’t worry, baby. This new business won’t take any time at all,” I lied. “And the Bureau pays its help well. See you later, doll.”

  “Right,” I broke the connection and watched her anxious face dissolve into a swirl of rainbow colors and trickle off the viewer, leaving the screen looking a dirty grey. I stared at the dead screen for a couple of minutes, and then got up.

  I was worried too. The Bureau—that’s its only name, just plain The Bureau—was formed a while back, specifically to handle screwball things like this one. In a world as overpopulated and complex as ours is, you need a force like the Bureau—silent, anonymous, out of the limelight. We take care of the oddball things, the things we’d prefer the populace didn’t get to hear shout.

  Like this one. Like this business of people fooshing off into thin air, leaving burnt-out diamonds behind. The only people on Earth who could have even a remote chance of worming some sanity out of that one were—us. More precisely, me.

  I stopped at a corner tavern and had a little fortification before going home. The barkeep was an inquisitive type, and I rambled on and on about some fictitious business problems of mine, inventing a whole sad story about a lumber warehouse and my shady partner. I didn’t dare talk about my real business, of course, but it felt good to be able to unload some ki
nd of trouble, even phony trouble.

  Then I caught a quick copter and headed for home. I got out at the depot and walked, feeling the leaden box tapping ominously against my thigh every step of the way. Peg was there when I came in.

  “You made it pretty quick,” I said, surprised. “Seems to me you don’t get out of work till four, and it’s only three-thirty now.”

  “We got let off early today, Les. Holiday.” She looked up at me, with strain and worry evident on her face, and ran thin, nervous fingers through her close-cut red hair. “I came right over.”

  I went to the cabinet and poured two stiff ones, one for each of us.

  “Here’s to the Chief,” I said. “And to the Bureau.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t make jokes, Les. Drink to anyone else, but not to the Bureau. Why don’t you drink to us?”

  “What’s wrong, Peg? The Bureau is what’s going to keep us going, doll. The salary I get from them—”

  “—will be just adequate to get you the finest tombstone available, as soon as he gives you a job you can’t handle.” She stared up at me. Her eyes were cold and sharp from anger, but I could also see the beginnings of two tears in them. I kissed them away, and felt her relax. I sat down and pulled out the handful of burnt-out diamonds.

  “Here,” I said. “You can make earrings out of them.”

  “Les! Where did these—”

  I told her the whole story, starting at the beginning and finishing at the end. I always tell Peg exactly what each mission of mine is about. Doing that violates security regulations, I know, but I’m sure of Peg. Absolutely sure. When I tell her something, it’s like telling myself; it doesn’t get any further. Which is why I was able to keep company with her, with the eventual idea of marrying her. In the Bureau, you don’t think of getting married unless you can find a woman who could keep her mouth shut. Peg could.