And that was it, he thought excitedly. That was exactly it! He might very well have seen Hudson first if Miss Crane had not been insistent that he should.
And standing there, he thought of all the years that Miss Crane must have worked at it—conditioning him to the point where he’d be sure to do exactly opposite to what she urged he do.
“Mr. Spencer,” said Miss Crane, “I have the letter finished. And there is something else. I almost forgot about it.”
She reached down into a drawer and took out something and laid it on the desk.
It was the portfolio that belonged to Hudson.
“The police,” said Miss Crane, “apparently overlooked it. It was very careless of them. I thought that you might like it.”
Spencer stood staring blankly at it.
“It would go so nicely,” said Miss Crane, “with the other stuff you have.”
There was a muted thumping on the floor and Spencer spun around. A white rabbit with long and droopy ears hopped across the carpet, looking for a carrot.
“Oh, how cute!” cried Miss Crane, very much unlike herself. “Is it the one that Mr. Nickerson sent back?”
“It’s the one,” said Spencer. “I had forgotten it.”
“Might I have it?”
“Miss Crane, I wonder …”
“Yes, Mr. Spencer?”
And what was he to say?
Could he blurt out that now he knew she was one of them?
It would take so much explanation and it could be so involved. And, besides, Miss Crane was not the sort of person that you blurted things out to.
He gulped. “I was wondering, Miss Crane, if you’d come and work for me. I’ll need a secretary.”
Miss Crane shook her head. “No, I’m getting old. I’m thinking of retiring. I think, now that you are leaving, I shall just disappear.”
“But, Miss Crane, I’ll need you desperately.”
“One of these days soon,” said Miss Crane, “when you need a secretary, there’ll be an applicant. She’ll wear a bright green dress and she’ll be wearing these new glasses and be carrying a snow-white rabbit with a bow around its neck. She may strike you as something of a hussy, but you hire her. Be sure you hire her.”
“I’ll remember,” Spencer said. “I’ll be looking for her. I’ll hire no one else.”
“She will not,” warned Miss Crane, “be a bit like me. She’ll be much nicer.”
“Thank you, Miss Crane,” said Spencer, just a bit inanely.
“And don’t forget this,” said Miss Crane, holding out the portfolio.
He took it and headed for the door.
At the door he stopped and turned back to her.
“I’ll be seeing you,” he said.
For the first time in fifteen years, Miss Crane smiled at him.
Madness from Mars
Clifford D. Simak once listed this story as one of two “truly horrible examples of an author’s fumbling agony in the process of finding himself.” Cliff was speaking of the journey he made from being someone whose career was in journalism to being a creator of good fiction—which has to have been a long, painful exercise in self-education. And yet, when I read those words, I am puzzled—for to me, this story in particular is a deeply emotional, deeply affecting portrait of an unpreventable tragedy.
The Hello Mars IV was coming home, back from the outward reaches of space, the first ship ever to reach the Red Planet and return. Telescopes located in the Crater of Copernicus Observatory on the Moon had picked it up and flashed the word to Earth, giving its position. Hours later, Earth telescopes had found the tiny mote that flashed in the outer void.
Two years before, those same telescopes had watched the ship’s outward voyage, far out until its silvery hull had dwindled into nothingness. From that day onward there had been no word or sign of Hello Mars IV—nothing until the lunar telescopes, picking up again that minute speck in space, advised Earth of its homecoming.
Communication with the ship by Earth had been impossible. On the Moon, powerful radio stations were capable of hurling ultra-short wave messages across the quarter million miles to Earth. But man as yet had found no means of communicating over fifty million miles of space. So Hello Mars IV had arrowed out into the silence, leaving the Moon and the Earth to speculate and wonder over its fate.
Now, with Mars once again swinging into conjunction, the ship was coming back—a tiny gnat of steel pushing itself along with twinkling blasts of flaming rocket-fuel. Heading Earthward out of that region of silent mystery, spurning space-miles beneath its steel-shod heels. Triumphant, with the red dust of Mars still clinging to its plates—a mote of light in the telescopic lenses.
Aboard it were five brave men—Thomas Delvaney, the expedition’s leader; Jerry Cooper, the red-thatched navigator; Andy Smith, the world’s ace cameraman, and two space-hands, Jimmy Watson and Elmer Paine, grim old veterans of the Earth-Moon run.
There had been three other Hello Mars ships—three other ships that had never come back—three other flights that had ended in disaster. The first had collided with a meteor a million miles out from the Moon. The second had flared briefly, deep in space, a red splash of flame in the telescopes through which the flight was watched—the fuel tanks had exploded. The third had simply disappeared. On and on it had gone, boring outward until lost from sight. That had been six years ago, but men still wondered what had happened.
Four years later—two years ago—the Hello Mars IV had taken off. Today it was returning, a gleaming thing far out in space, a shining symbol of man’s conquest of the planets. It had reached Mars—and it was coming back. There would be others, now—and still others. Some would flare against the black and be lost forever. But others would win through, and man, blindly groping, always outward, to break his earthly bonds, at last would be on the pathway to the stars.
Jack Woods, Express reporter, lit a cigarette and asked: “What do you figure they found out there, Doc?”
Dr. Stephen Gilmer, director of the Interplanetary Communications Research Commission, puffed clouds of smoke from his black cigar and answered irritably:
“How in blue hell would I know what they found? I hope they found something. This trip cost us a million bucks.”
“But can’t you give me some idea of what they might have found?” persisted Woods. “Some idea of what Mars is like. Any new ideas.”
Dr. Gilmer wrangled the cigar viciously.
“And have you spread it all over the front page,” he said. “Spin something out of my own head just because you chaps are too impatient to wait for the actual data. Not by a damn sight. You reporters get my goat sometimes.”
“Ah, Doc, give us something,” pleaded Gary Henderson, staff man for the Star.
“Sure,” said Don Buckley, of the Spaceways. “What do you care? You can always say we misquoted you. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Gilmer gestured toward the official welcoming committee that stood a short distance away.
“Why don’t you get the mayor to say something, boys?” he suggested. “The mayor is always ready to say something.”
“Sure,” said Gary, “but it never adds up to anything. We’ve had the mayor’s face on the front page so much lately that he thinks he owns the paper.”
“Have you any idea why they haven’t radioed us?” asked Woods. “They’ve been in sending distance for several hours now.”