«Cut it out, dog-gone you,» yelled Gramp, but they only pounded him on the back and yelled at him and left him standing there, all alone beside the chairman’s table.
Before him the convention hall rocketed and weaved in uproar. Bands played and their music did no more than form a background for the boisterous cheering. Newsmen popped up and down, taking pictures. The man beside the microphone crooked a finger at the old man and Gramp, hardly knowing why he did it, stumbled forward, to stand before the mike.
He couldn’t see the crowd so well. There was something the matter with his eyes. Sort of misted up. Funny way for them to act. And his heart was pounding. Too much excitement. Bad for the heart.
«Speech!» roared the ten thousand down below. «Speech! Speech!»
They wanted him to make a speech! They wanted old Gramp Parker to talk into the mike so they could hear what he had to say. He’d never made a speech before in all his life. He didn’t know how to make a speech and he was scared.
Gramp wondered, dimly, what Celia would think of all these goings-on.
Hoppin’ mad, probably. And little Harry. But Harry would think his grandpa was a hero. And the bunch down at Grocer White’s store.
«Speech,» thundered the convention hall.
Out of the mist of faces Gramp picked one face—one he could see as plain as day. Jurg Tec, smiling at him, smiling that crooked way the Martians smile. Jurg Tec, his friend. A dog-gone Marshy. A Marshy who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him out on the surface. A Marshy who had stood with him against the metal beasts. A Marshy who had slogged those bitter miles beside him.
There was a word for it. Gramp knew there was a word. He groped madly in his brain for the single word that would tell the story.
And then he had it. It was a funny word. Gramp whispered it. It didn’t sound right. Not the kind of word he’d say. Not what anyone would expect old Gramp Parker to say. A word that would fit better in the mouth of Senator Sherman Brown.
Maybe they’d laugh at him for saying it. Maybe they’d think he was just a damn old fool.
He moved closer to the mike and the uproar quieted, waiting.
«Comrades—» Gramp began and then he stopped.
That was the word. They were comrades now. Marshies and Earthies.
They’d fought in bitter hatred, each for what he thought was right. Maybe they had to fight. Maybe that war was something that was needed. But it was forty years ago and all its violence was a whisper in the wind—a dim, old memory blowing from a battlefield where hatred and violence had burned itself out in one lurid blast of strength.
But they were waiting. And they hadn’t laughed.
Galactic Chest
Perhaps providing us with a satirical portrait of the workings of a big-city newspaper of six decades ago, this story was rejected by editors H. F. Gold, John W. Campbell Jr., Anthony Boucher, and Leo Margulies before finally being purchased by Robert A. W. Lowndes more than a year later after it was first submitted in January 1955. It then saw its first publication in the September 1956 issue of Science Fiction Stories.
It’s a lightweight story, no doubt, but there is value to be found in it, not least in its evocation of Cold War–era America (something Cliff viewed with regret, even alarm, in a number of stories written during that period).
But I always chuckle a little as Cliff—as he did in several earlier stories—reprises a journalistic tradition of giving the nickname «Lightning» to the paper’s copy boy.
—dww
I had just finished writing the daily Community Chest story, and each day I wrote that story I was sore about it; there were plenty of punks in the office who could have ground out that kind of copy. Even the copy boys could have written it and no one would have known the difference; no one ever read it—except maybe some of the drive chairmen, and I’m not even sure about them reading it.
I had protested to Barnacle Bill about my handling the Community Chest for another year. I had protested loud. I had said: «Now, you know, Barnacle, I been writing that thing for three or four years. I write it with my eyes shut. You ought to get some new blood into it. Give one of the cubs a chance; they can breathe some life into it. Me, I’m all written out on it.»
But it didn’t do a bit of good. The Barnacle had me down on the assignment book for the Community Chest, and he never changed a thing once he put it in the book.
I wish I knew the real reason for that name of his. I’ve heard a lot of stories about how it was hung on him, but I don’t think there’s any truth in them. I think he got it simply from the way he can hang on to a bar.
I had just finished writing the Community Chest story and was sitting there, killing time and hating myself, when along came Jo Ann. Jo Ann was the sob sister on the paper; she got some lousy yarns to write, and that’s a somber fact. I guess it was because I am of a sympathetic nature, and took pity on her, and let her cry upon my shoulder that we got to know each other so well. By now, of course, we figure we’re in love; off and on we talk about getting married, as soon as I snag that foreign correspondent job I’ve been angling for.
«Hi, kid,» I said.
And she says, «Do you know, Mark, what the Barnacle has me down for today?»
«He’s finally ferreted out a one-armed paperhanger,» I guessed, «and he wants you to do a feature…»
«It’s worse than that,» she moans. «It’s an old lady who is celebrating her one hundredth birthday.»
«Maybe,» I said, «she will give you a piece of her birthday cake.»
«I don’t see how even you can joke about a thing like this,» Jo Ann told me. «It’s positively ghastly.»
Just then the Barnacle let out a bellow for me. So I picked up the Community Chest story and went over to the city desk.
Barnacle Bill is up to his elbows in copy; the phone is ringing and he’s ignoring it, and for this early in the morning he has worked himself into more than a customary lather. «You remember old Mrs. Clayborne?»
«Sure, she’s dead. I wrote the obit on her ten days or so ago.»
«Well, I want you to go over to the house and snoop around a bit.»
«What for?» I asked. «She hasn’t come back, has she?»
«No, but there’s some funny business over there. I got a tip that someone might have hurried her a little.»
«This time,» I told him, «you’ve outdone yourself. You’ve been watching too many television thrillers.»
«I got it on good authority,» he said and turned back to his work.
So I went and got my hat and told myself it was no skin off my nose how I spent the day; I’d get paid just the same!
But I was getting a little fed up with some of the wild-goose chases to which the Barnacle was assigning not only me, but the rest of the staff as well. Sometimes they paid off; usually, they didn’t. And when they didn’t, Barnacle had the nasty habit of making it appear that the man he had sent out, not he himself, had dreamed up the chase. His «good authority» probably was no more than some casual chatter of someone next to him at the latest bar he’d honored with his cash.
Old Mrs. Clayborne had been one of the last of the faded gentility which at one time had graced Douglas Avenue. The family had petered out, and she was the last of them; she had died in a big and lonely house with only a few servants, and a nurse in attendance on her, and no kin close enough to wait out her final hours in person.
It was unlikely, I told myself, that anyone could have profited by giving her an overdose of drugs, or otherwise hurrying her death. And even if it was true, there’d be little chance that it could be proved; and that was the kind of story you didn’t run unless you had it down in black and white.