“Why—” The psychologist considered. “Now I suggest that we discuss how I may be of further use to you. I rather think I will enjoy the Professor Moriarty bit. Is Taylor privy to—He is? Yes I see it now, never mind, he’s young, and lacks what I—But before that, my dear Anthony: shall we discuss that bonus, payable in negotiable bonds? In advance, of course: you are certain to attain kingly rank, perhaps even imperial, but—the hazards of the chase, you know—so: in advance.”
Toward the close of that year, at late of night, two men came down the steps of Mr. Melchior’s club. It was cold, and there was a noisy wind.
“Where is your car?” Dr. Colles asked, gazing up and down the empty street.
“I told him to be here at eleven-thirty,” said Mr. Melchior. “He ought to be here any minute now. You want to go back in—?” But Colles suggested a walk around the block.
As they rounded the corner and turned up their coat collars, two men turned to them, one of whom said, “Excuse me, Mac: This the way to the Terminal?”
“Oh, no,” said Dr. Colles, gesturing. “You go—” One of the men took a revolver from inside his brown suit and shot Dr. Colles in the head. He fell without further words.
“Has Taylor gone crazy?” hissed Melchior, aghast. “Not here, you fool! Not now!”
“Here and now,” the man said, stepping to one side as his companion moved forward.
“Do you know who I am?” Melchior cried.
“It don’t matter,” said the second man. The wind tore away the sound of the second shot and the noise Melchior made when he went down. The two walked a block and hailed a cab.
“What is this, about an eighty-cent fare?” the man in the brown suit asked his companion, who had a wart between his eyes, as he peered at the passing street signs.
“About eighty, yeah. What do you think, Joe? Taylor won’t check—we could make it, say, three dollars on the swindle sheet?” Joe said he thought they could get away with three.
“You going fishing Sundy?” his companion asked.
But Joe Clock shook his head. “Sattady might is the bowling turnamint,” he pointed out. “So that means I be out too late to get up early enough for fishing. You know what a late night can do if you don’t get your sleep: it takes all the strenth out of you.”
The other man nodded his agreement. “Well, so Sundy you can do some work on them power-tools you got in your cellar. A quiet weekend at home is a good thing in lotsa ways.”
And they gazed out of the windows of the cab with no great interest and they chewed their gum as if they tasted in it the mild, approaching flavor of the quiet weekend at home.
NO, NO, NOT ROGOV!
by Cordwainer Smith
from If
Cordwainer Smith is the pseudonym of a gentleman who is undoubtedly the farthest-out Professor of Sociology ever to hide his dignity behind a fantasy-barrel. I have yet to see two stories alike from “Mr. Smith”—or one that did not somehow fascinate me.
That golden shape on the golden steps shook and fluttered like a bird gone mad-like a bird imbued with an intellect and a soul, and, nevertheless, driven mad by ecstasies and terrors beyond human understanding. A thousand worlds watched.
Had the ancient calendar continued, this would have been A.D. 13,582. After defeat, after disappointment, after ruin and reconstruction, mankind had leaped among the stars.
Out of the shock of meeting inhuman art, of confronting nonhuman dances, mankind had made a superb aesthetic effort and had leaped upon the stage of all the worlds.
The golden steps reeled. Some eyes that watched had retinas. Some had crystalline cones. Yet all eyes were fixed upon the golden shape which interpreted “The Glory and Affirmation of Man” in the Inter-World Dance Festival of what might have been A.D. 13,582.
Once again mankind was winning the contest. Music and dance were hypnotic beyond the limits of systems, compelling, shocking to human and inhuman eyes. The dance was a triumph of shock-the shock of dynamic beauty.
The golden shape on the golden steps executed shimmering intricacies of meaning. The body was gold and still human. The body was a woman, but more than a woman. On the golden steps, in golden light, she trembled and fluttered like a bird gone mad.
The ministry of State Security had been positively shocked when they found that a Nazi agent, more heroic than prudent, had almost reached N. Rogov. Rogov was worth more to the Soviet armed forces than any two air armies, more than three motorized divisions.
His brain was a weapon, a weapon for the Soviet power.
Since the brain was a weapon, Rogov was a prisoner.
He didn’t mind.
Rogov was a pure Russian type, broad-faced, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, with whimsy in his smile and amusement in the wrinkles at the tops of his cheeks.
”Of course I’m a prisoner,” Rogov used to say. “I am a prisoner of State service to the Soviet peoples. But the workers and peasants are good to me. I am an academician of the All Union Academy of Sciences, a major general in the Red Air Force, a professor in the University of Kharkov, a deputy works manager of the Red Flag Combat Aircraft Production Trust. From each of these I draw a salary.”
Sometimes he would narrow his eyes at his Russian scientific colleagues and ask them in dead earnest, “Would I serve capitalists?”
The affrighted colleagues would try to stammer their way out of the embarrassment, protesting their common loyalty to Stalin or Beria, or Zhukov, or Molotov, or Bulganin, as the case may have been.
Rogov would look very Russian: calm, mocking, amused. He would let them stammer.
Then he’d laugh.
Solemnity transformed into hilarity, he would explode into bubbling, effervescent, good-humored laughter: “Of course I could not serve the capitalists. My little Anastasia would not let me.”
The colleagues would smile uncomfortably and would wish that Rogov did not talk so wildly, or so comically, or so freely.
Rogov was afraid of nothing. Most of his colleagues were afraid of each other, of the Soviet system, of the world, of life, and of death.
Perhaps Rogov had once been ordinary and mortal like other people, and full of fears.
But he had become the lover, the colleague, the husband of Anastasia Fyodorovna Cherpas.
Comrade Cherpas had been his rival, his antagonist, his competitor, in the struggle for scientific eminence in the frontiers of Russian science. Russian science could never overtake the inhuman perfection of German method, the rigid intellectual and moral discipline of German team-work, but the Russians could and did get ahead of the
Germans by giving vent to their bold, fantastic imaginations. Rogov had pioneered the first rocket launchers of 1939. Cherpas had finished the job by making the best of the rockets radio-directed.
Rogov in 1942 had developed a whole new system of photo-mapping. Comrade Cherpas had applied it to color film. Rogov, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, and smiling, had recorded his criticisms of Comrade Cherpas’s naivete and theoretical unsoundness at the top-secret meetings of Russian scientists during the black winter nights of 1943. Comrade Cherpas, her butter-yellow hair flowing ‘down like living water to her shoulders, her unpainted face gleaming with fanaticism, intelligence, and dedication, would snarl her own defiance at him, deriding his Communist theory, pinching at his pride, hitting his hypotheses where they were weakest.
By 1944 a Rogov-Cherpas quarrel had become something worth travelling to see.
In 1945 they were married.
Their courtship was secret, their wedding a surprise, then- partnership a miracle in the upper ranks of Russian science.