He inspected the two men standing before him with healthy grins. They wore the Red Army uniform under half-buttoned flying suits. The strut that had got in his way belonged to a big, black helicopter; amidships was blazoned the crimson star of the Soviet Union.
"You're well and all that, I fawncy?" asked one of the flyers. "We spotted you and landed—bunged up your cheek a bit—Volanov heah would try to overshoot."
"I'm fine," said Colt, feeling his bandage. "Why'n hell can't you Russians learn to speak American?"
The two soldiers exchanged smiles and glances. They obviously considered Colt too quaint for words. "Pile in, old chap. We can take you as far as Bokhara—we fuel at Samarkand. I—ah—suppose you have papers?"
Colt leaned against the strut and wearily shoved over his credentials.
Everything would be all right. Chungking was in solid with the Reds at the moment. Everything would be all right.
"I fawncy," said Volanov, making conversation while his partner handled the helicopter vanes, "youah glad to see the lawst of all that."
Colt looked down, remembered, and wept.
"I find," I said as dryly as possible, "a certain familiarity—a nostalgic ring, as it were—toward the end of your tale." I was just drunk enough to get fancy with The Three-Cornered Scar.
"You do?" he asked. He leaned forward across the table. "You do?"
"I've read widely in such matters," I hastily assured him, pouring another glass of red wine.
He grinned glumly, sipping. "If I hadn't left half my spirit with Valeska that night I was dead," he remarked conversationally, "I'd smash your face in."
"That may be," I assented gracefully.
But I should say that he drank less like half a spirit than half a dozen.
THE ROCKET OF 1955
The scheme was all Fein's, but the trimmings that made it more than a pipe dream and its actual operation depended on me. How long the plan had been in incubation I do not know, but Fein, one spring day, broke it to me in crude form. I pointed out some errors, corrected and amplified on the thing in general, and told him that I'd have no part of it—and changed my mind when he threatened to reveal certain indiscretions committed by me some years ago.
It was necessary that I spend some months in Europe, conducting research work incidental to the scheme. I returned with recorded statements, old newspapers, and photostatic copies of certain documents. There was a brief, quiet interview with that old, bushy-haired Viennese worshipped incontinently by the mob; he was convinced by the evidence I had compiled that it would be wise to assist us.
You all know what happened next—it was the professor's historic radio broadcast. Fein had drafted the thing, I had rewritten it, and told the astronomer to assume a German accent while reading. Some of the phrases were beautifuclass="underline" "American dominion over the very planets! …
veil at last ripped aside …man defies gravity …travel through limitless space …plant the red-white-and-blue banner in the soil of Mars!"
The requested contributions poured in. Newspapers and magazines ostentatiously donated yard-long checks of a few thousand dollars; the government gave a welcome half-million; heavy sugar came from the
"Rocket Contribution Week" held in the nation's public schools; but independent contributions were the largest. We cleared seven million dollars, and then started to build the spaceship.
The virginium that took up most of the money was tin plate; the monoatomic fluorine that gave us our terrific speed was hydrogen. The takeoff was a party for the newsreels: the big, gleaming bullet extravagant with vanes and projections; speeches by the professor; Farley, who was to fly it to Mars, grinning into the cameras. He climbed an outside ladder to the nose of the thing, then dropped into the steering compartment. I screwed down the soundproof door, smiling as he hammered to be let out. To his surprise, there was no duplicate of the elaborate dummy controls he had been practicing on for the past few weeks.
I cautioned the pressmen to stand back under the shelter, and gave the professor the knife switch that would send the rocket on its way. He hesitated too long—Fein hissed into his ear: "Anna Pareloff of Cracow, Herr Professor …"
The triple blade clicked into the sockets. The vaned projectile roared a hundred yards into the air with a wobbling curve—then exploded.
A photographer, eager for an angle shot, was killed; so were some kids.
The steel roof protected the rest of us. Fein and I shook hands, while the pressmen screamed into the telephones which we had provided.
But the professor got drunk, and, disgusted with the part he had played in the affair, told all and poisoned himself. Fein and I left the cash behind , and hopped a freight. We were picked off it by a vigilance committee (headed by a man who had lost fifty cents in our rocket).
Fein was too frightened to talk or write so they hanged him first, and gave me a paper and pencil to tell the story as best I could.
Here they come, with an insulting thick rope.
The Mindworm
The handsome j. g. and the pretty nurse held out against it as long as they reasonably could, but blue Pacific water, languid tropical nights, the low atoll dreaming on the horizon—and the complete absence of any other nice young people for company on the small, uncomfortable parts boat-did their work. On June 30th they watched through dark glasses as the dazzling thing burst over the fleet and the atoll. Her manicured hand gripped his arm in excitement and terror. Unfelt radiation sleeted through their loins.
A storekeeper-third-class named Bielaski watched the young couple with more interest than he showed in Test Able. After all, he had twenty-five dollars riding on the nurse. That night he lost it to a chief bosun's mate who had backed the j. g.
In the course of time, the careless nurse was discharged under conditions other than honorable. The j. g., who didn't like to put things in writing, phoned her all the way from Manila to say it was a damned shame. When her gratitude gave way to specific inquiry, their overseas connection went bad and he had to hang up.
She had a child, a boy, turned it over to a foundling home, and vanished from his life into a series of good jobs and finally marriage.
The boy grew up stupid, puny and stubborn, greedy and miserable. To the home's hilarious young athletics director he suddenly said: "You hate me. You think I make the rest of the boys look bad."
The athletics director blustered and laughed, and later told the doctor over coffee: "I watch myself around the kids. They're sharp— they catch a look or a gesture and it's like a blow in the face to them, I know that, so I watch myself. So how did he know?"
The doctor told the boy: "Three pounds more this month isn't bad, but how about you pitch in and clean up your plate every day? Can't live on meat and water; those vegetables make you big and strong."
The boy said: "What's 'neurasthenic' mean?"
The doctor later said to the director: "It made my flesh creep. I was looking at his little spindling body and dishing out the old pep talk about growing big and strong, and inside my head I was thinking we'd call him neurasthenic in the old days and then out he popped with it.
What should we do? Should we do anything? Maybe it'll go away. I don't know anything about these things. I don't know whether anybody does."
"Reads minds, does he?" asked the director. Be damned if he's going to read my mind about Schultz Meat Market's ten percent. "Doctor, I think I'm going to take my vacation a little early this year. Has anybody shown any interest in adopting the child?"
"Not him. He wasn't a baby doll when we got him, and at present he's an exceptionally unattractive-looking kid. You know how people don't give a damn about anything but their looks."