A Matter of Matter (Stories from the Golden Age) Page 4

  It ended the breath of the audience and the show.

  But although the publishers of the book were delighted with these things, the scientific world was not. Fitz Mallory had stepped too far when he had billed Carnegie Hall as he did. He was thrown bodily out of the Geophysical Society. The Explorers Club was far too tolerant to take action but it became cool.

  The Society for the Exploitation of Space, very old now and staid, struck Mallory from its list and recommended that the government take some action. The government did take action, but not of the expected kind.

  For a year Fitz Mallory had been spending money. And he had made no income tax return. Conroy, romping through further adventures in a second book, had obviously brought in more money than the publishers reported having paid Mallory.

  Two investigators, working quietly, found that Mallory had spent, one way or another, something more than a million dollars during the year. They had the facts and, shortly, they had Fitz Mallory.

  They interviewed him politely in the Collector’s Office—politely as befitted a man who must owe them a million and probably more.

  It was the third of May of that memorable year. There had been murders and robberies and a senator slain in a love nest but the headlines all talked about Fitz Mallory and the government.

  “WORLD’S GREATEST LIAR BAFFLING GOVERNMENT” is a sample of these scareheads. If war had been declared, no greater stir would have been made. Everybody waited to hear about this one. The papers repeated past exploits, including the latest, a fiasco wherein Fitz had been exhibiting the largest dwarf ever caught on Flub-Mub of the Sambo System, a person some eight feet tall, known to anyone who had ever seen a jungle motion picture as Sam Casper of Sioux Falls.

  “Mr. Mallory,” said the collector, “you must have some accounts of your transactions and some explanation of your income.”

  Fitz sat back and counted thoughtfully on his fingers. He made some secret figures on a piece of paper and destroyed it. He pulled out a slide rule and slaved over it. Then he drew out a pocket adding machine and worked with it for ten breathless minutes.

  Finally he said, “Nope.”

  The collector was stern. “Mr. Mallory, I must warn you that unless you divulge your sources and explain yourself satisfactorily, we are prepared to send you to prison.”

  “On what evidence?”

  “We have received secret information from an anonymous but identifiable source to the effect that your income during the past year was more than a million dollars. All but twenty-nine thousand of that is, of course, tax.”

  “A secret informer?”

  “Yes, that is the case. I have the affidavit here.”

  Mallory seemed to deflate. He looked very sad. “I shall have to get my books. It will take me almost a week. You won’t send me to prison, will you?”

  “Unless you pay, frankly I have no choice.”

  Fitz went out and found the street jammed. Cameras flashed, people cheered. Reporters tried to learn something. Mallory pulled out a tin cup and a pair of dark glasses and sat down on the steps, putting up a sign, “I got to pay a tax. Please help the needy. Conroy is out of town.”

  During the week Fitz made several volunteer lectures on the fauna and flora of the Treasury Department. He offered land for sale on the Planet Slumgo of the Blue Sky System—a billion acres of it at ten dollars an acre. He had an atmosphere ship paint a huge sign over New York, “S O S Conroy. All is forgiven. Come home. Mallory. P.S. I need a million dollars.” This was in reverse as it would be addressed to some star.

  Meantime the press kept asking, “WILL MALLORY GO TO JAIL?”

  And the Collector of Internal Revenue kept replying, “Yes. Unless . . .”

  The week was finally at end. Fitz Mallory delivered himself up.

  Solemnly he placed a dozen ledgers on the desk of the collector and sank wearily down. Reporters had been admitted at Mallory’s request.

  “This is no sideshow,” warned the collector. “I am sick of this buffoonery. I do not care a straw about popular opinion. I am doing my job as I have been ordered to do it and I have no other choice.” This, delivered to the reporters, was properly noted.

  The collector approached the ledgers. He opened the first one. The top entry was, “Full price for the Planet Slumgo, $100,000.” The next read, “Loan repaid to Moolamaun, King of the Tarkabs, $10, in beads.” The following was, “Ransom of Miss Geeber, cut price, to her friends on Kaledon—price cut for certain considerations, $1,000,000. In diamonds.”

  The collector slammed the ledger to the floor. “I have been used long enough for publicity to sell books! These are no accounts. You have no sense of decency! Mr. Mallory, I cannot permit this to continue. Produce your sources of revenue—”

  There was a slight commotion at the door and a man walked in. He was clad in a tattered spaceman’s coat and belted about with a scratched stomach protector. He was unshaven and he was tired.

  The collector glared at him for the intrusion. “And who the devil might you be?”

  “I am Sven Durlinger, lately chief of the Recheck Expedition. This is my friend, Fitz Mallory. I understand that there is some trouble here about income.”

  “Trouble enough!” said the collector. “And enough that you needn’t add more.”

  “Sir,” said Sven quietly, “I can testify that Fitz Mallory’s income from his books was bequeathed to various charities. I have seen the records and I know the charities.”

  “Who are you to testify that?” demanded the collector.

  A small man in the rear of the room, an attorney for the publisher, came forth with an imposing book. On inspection it disclosed that not one penny of the sales of the “Conroy Diary,” volumes one and two, had been given to Fitz Mallory.

  This was curious enough. What followed was worse.

  “Fitz Mallory,” said Sven Durlinger, “is a firm believer in the future of man in space. He should be. He made enough money there.” Sven turned to the reporters, “Gentlemen, Fitz Mallory is a fraud.”

  This was not news.

  “He is a fraud,” said Sven Durlinger, “because he has written the truth.” He unrolled a long series of photographs and beckoned up a young space officer who had a pile of documents. They were strange photographs. They were stranger documents.

  As the collector made his inspection, Sven continued. “Gentlemen, for the past year I have been retracking. I have visited twenty-three planets in various systems, all of them habitable, seventeen of them inhabited by humans or humanoids of which you already know something.

  “You will not lightly disregard my word, gentlemen, nor my evidence. I have a twelve-man crew to back me in everything I say.

  “Fitz Mallory is a fraud. He has visited every one of those planets. He gave some of them outrageous names and he treated them all to outrageous adventures. He is considered a god on a round dozen of those worlds and a mention of his name was enough to bring kings kneeling at my feet. He is a fraud, gentlemen, because he is masquerading. There before you, and look at him well, is Conroy!”

  The stillness of the room attested that nobody was breathing. Not one eye-blink fanned the air. They gaped at Sven Durlinger.

  “For ten years, in the old Liberty III, which was given him by the great Krinsky on that man’s death, Fitz Mallory cruised space, plotting the way, mapping routes, inventing means. The ‘Conroy Diary’ is truth told with a flare. What man would have believed it as fact? Who believed in space travel? From ample evidence received on the ground, I am prepared to attest that the majority of adventures which befell the mythical Conroy actually happened to Fitz Mallory.

  “It rocks your wits, I know, to understand that this man is no clown. He carried forward a complete plan to credit space travel to everyone. He returned here from his last voyage, resolved to counter the usual rebuff. He countered it with the diary. You have all read it I am sure. It is true, gentlemen. True as sunlight! And the ledger I see open there on the floor must be a
true ledger. The third item I know for a fact. I am afraid, Mr. Collector, that you have the wrong man.”

  The collector was sputtering now. He finally managed: “But this is no rebuttal of my charges! What do I care—”

  “Indeed, I am afraid it is,” said Fitz Mallory with a big grin. “That money was made out in the stars. All of it. It is exterior income for I am no resident, being an international citizen. Excuse me, Sir,” he said rising, “but when I sent out Sven, I had a mission to perform. I have used you harshly, I fear.”

  “But the affidavit!” cried the collector. “The affidavit!”

  “I wrote it,” said Sven. “And Fitz mailed it to you as a report on himself. We are only interested in one thing—space travel.”

  “There’s a charge for that,” said the collector. And then, suddenly looking at Fitz, “Say, wait—you mean those Conroy tales are all true? You mean a man can have adventures like that out in space?”

  “I am afraid so,” said Fitz. “It’s a rough life but a merry one. I am leaving soon on my next voyage. I could use a man like you.”

  “Could you?” said the collector, pleased. “I’ll go!”

  The papers ran it as it was played. There was a raging hurricane of argument throughout the world in the next few days. Fitz Mallory was discussed in half a hundred languages.

  The world was laughing at itself. And it was laughing with Fitz Mallory, the god of a dozen habitable worlds, the owner of stars, the Crown Prince of Space.

  He never wrote another book. He did not have to. He went away soon after to plot more routes.

  They brought back his body some thirty-two years later. He had landed on one too many planets as all spacemen did sooner or later. They built him a big tomb and a famous sculptor made a statue of him with the most imperishable materials at hand.

  Fitz Mallory still stands in gray obsidian, surrounded by flowers and offerings even today. His head is thrown back in a huge laugh and the legend on the base states:

  Fitz Mallory. God of a Hundred Worlds.

  He opened the Universe to Mankind.

  The Planet Makers

  The Planet Makers

  DOYLE shook an outraged finger under the engineer’s nose. “McGee, do I have to remind you that this entire job is to be finished in the next thirty days and you have barely started in four months?”

  “Sleepy” McGee sat where he was, heels cocked up on an explosives box, his soles toward the construction hut stove. He had a visograph planted on another box with a cleared space before it, and in his hands he held a pack of cards. Sleepy McGee, of Planetary Engineering Construction Co., Inc., almost never got excited. He did not get excited now.

  “My contract,” cried Doyle, “calls for a bonus of a million dollars to your company for every day short of the promised time! But let me remind you that a penalty of one million dollars is to be paid to me for every day this job exceeds the specified time. Unless you quit this . . . this idle, supine—”

  Doyle was fat. He was easily excited. His color was red and his cheeks were bellowing in and out.

  “Mr. Doyle,” said Sleepy, “have a drink.”

  Doyle’s blood pressure would have broken a gauge. He turned and slammed into the air lock and was gone out into the methane-ammonia atmosphere of Alpha Jetabo’s Planet Six.

  Sleepy dealt the cards. He dealt them in such a way that they were visible to the visograph, all except his hole card, for this was stud poker. There is nothing peculiar in the playing of stud poker, but this game was with Mart Lonegan who happened to be on an engineering job of his own ninety-three light-years away. They had not seen each other for five years, face to face, but Mart owed Sleepy McGee nineteen-thousand-odd dollars to date.

  Mart grinned on the visograph. “Was that Colonial Enterprises?”

  “Yep,” said Sleepy. “What you bet?”

  “One white. Hold up my hole card again and don’t look at it, you pirate, or I’ll— Make that two whites.”

  Sleepy called and dealt the next cards.

  “You’re no closer than he says?” said Mart.

  “Nope.”

  “Wheeew! That’s a big planet, too.”

  “Ten thousand kilometers diameter,” said Sleepy. “Your queen bets.”

  Barteber, the huge black cook, stirred stew over the camp range and stole an occasional peek when Sleepy raised his hole card. Barteber had been with Sleepy for nine years, one planet or another.

  Mart Lonegan never found out that Barteber’s silent whistles of surprise or glum looks—which Mart could see beyond Sleepy—meant absolutely nothing and were in reality a solid part of Sleepy’s poker. Barteber would have given his right arm before he would have cost Sleepy a pot by betrayal, but Mart, being a trusting soul, did not know that.

  Sleepy yawned. He was about six feet six and he had little weight to go with it, no matter his huge appetite. He drew fifty thousand dollars a year as a field engineer for Planetary Engineering Construction Co., Inc., and he dressed something worse than any one of his cat men. It was said of him in certain unsavory places in the universe that he could drink more liquor, play better poker, shoot with less compunction and yawn wider than any spaceman alive. That was exaggeration. He had met a man on Pilos who could play poker just as good.

  The air lock whistled and slammed shut and Tommer Kaltenborn came into the construction shack, tugging off his helmet. Tommer was excited. He was a very young engineer, Tommer. He had come up as junior assistant to Planet Six as a replacement for a man who had carelessly tried to smoke inside his helmet, and Tommer recognized that he was having his chance and recognized, too, that he had ample opportunity to make it good.

  No single school practice which Tommer had been taught was being followed on Planet Six. This was upsetting. It made his black hair stand up bristly straight and made his spectacle-rimmed eyes squint with disdain. If Sleepy McGee was an example of Planetary men, Tommer knew that one Kaltenborn would go far, very far.

  “Number Eighteen cat’s been sabotaged,” said Tommer. “That’s the fifth example of tampering since we got here. You’ve got to come out. The link pins are gone on the right tread. That leaves us just five cats. How we’re to smooth down whole mountain ranges with five cats—”

  Sleepy didn’t have to look up. He knew what Tommer looked like. He knew what the construction hut looked like. He said, “Hello, Tommer. Glad you came in. This visograph reception is bad. Very bad.” He yawned. “We got any spiderwork steel left?”

  “Sir, that cat—”

  “How much we got?”

  “About ninety kilos.”

  Sleepy squinted unseeing at his cards. “Hmmm. Well, run me up a twenty-thousand-foot tower outside here and put an aerial on it. And while you’re about it, you might as well put one up on the opposite side of this chunk of mud. Put in a relay.”

  “Sir, Number Eighteen cat—”

  “Run it in a hole and shovel dirt on it,” said Sleepy. “Tell Maloney I want the towers done by daylight. When Mart deals, I can’t tell a spade from a club.”

  Tommer glared. Resolutely, he put on his helmet, looked his contempt for a moment, and turned back into the air lock.

  Barteber sniggered and Sleepy called the poker hand. Mart was found to be trying to make two jacks look like three.

  Reception was really bad now and Sleepy knocked off the game. He got up, poured himself a neat slug of Old Space Ranger, handed the bottle to Barteber who, truth told, liked vanilla extract better, and got himself into a suit.

  “That Mister Tommer, he want your job purty bad,” said Barteber.

  “He can have it,” said Sleepy.

  “And that Mister Doyle, he just plain froths. I never hear such a bloodthirsty man. You look out, Mister Sleepy.”

  “They aren’t so dangerous.”

  “Well, just the same, I got a couple voodoo charms and a wax figger,” said Barteber, and made a vicious attack on the stew.

  Sleepy went out into the twilight of A
lpha Jetabo’s Planet Six. The place would be named New Eden when Colonial Enterprises took it over. They had it on lease from the Tronmane Confederacy. Sleepy looked at the distant mountain range, all rock and corners, and sighed. Certainly it was true that they had not made much progress in the four months they had been here. The one valley was about completed, which left a few billion square kilometers untended. It also left water and soil and air.

  The planet was smaller than Earth but had a similar gravity. It would be a mono-season job, with an equatorial temperature of about ninety average. Its year was about one and a half Earth’s, and outside of the blue character of Jetabo’s Planet Six would not look too bad when it was finished.

  They were burying the cat as ordered and an inertia ship was taking off with a cargo of spider steel to erect the opposite pole tower. Tommer was standing on a pile of new rock looking at a blueprint.

  It was a pretty blueprint, being a Mercator with seas and rivers designated by flamboyant names. It was the prospectus blueprint of the Colonial Enterprises advertising division, and while it sold plenty of property it was not a very good guide for engineering.

  However, that was nothing to Tommer. The job was contracted to be this way, and this way it would be. A contractor’s first duty was to his builder.

  Sleepy looked at the blueprint. “Honeymoon Bay,” he said, pointing. This amused him. “Bide-a-wee Valley. They always get dopey ideas like this, kid. Don’t take it so much to heart.”

  Tommer glared through lenses and helmet, and said, “We haven’t even begun to construct these things. If we had been more on the job we would have found the saboteur and we would still have what equipment we need. A thousand kilos of powder blown up, twenty million feet of cable ruined, and now most of our cats out of commission. We’ll never finish. This will bankrupt the company!”