The phone chirped and he picked it up.
“This is Sutton at Extrasolar Research,” said an angry voice.
“Yes, Dr. Sutton,” said the senator. “It’s nice of you to call.”
“I’m calling in regard to the invitation that we sent you last week,” said Sutton. “In view of your statement last night, which we feel very keenly is an unjust criticism, we are withdrawing it.”
“Invitation,” said the senator. “Why, I didn’t—”
“What I can’t understand,” said Sutton, “is why, with the invitation in your pocket, you should have acted as you did.”
“But,” said the senator, “but, doctor—”
“Good-by, senator,” said Sutton.
Slowly the senator hung up. With a fumbling hand, he reached out and picked up the stack of letters.
It was the third one down. The return address was Extrasolar Research and it had been registered and sent special delivery and it was marked both PERSONAL and IMPORTANT.
The letter slipped out of the senator’s trembling fingers and fluttered to the floor. He did not pick it up.
It was too late now, he knew, to do anything about it.
Immigrant
The story “Immigrant” was entitled “Emigrant” when Cliff sent it to John W. Campbell Jr. in May of 1953. Campbell returned it for revision; but whatever revision was required, Cliff got it back to the editor in less than a week, and received, in just a few weeks, $700 (it’s a long one). The story then appeared as the cover story in the March 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction (except that someone listed the story, on the issue’s cover, as “Immigration”).
The cover painting was by Kelly Freas, who, Cliff told me, had originally presented Campbell with a surrealistic silver-gray painting to be that cover. Campbell handed it back and told Kelly that it needed grass. Kelly went home furious, Cliff said, telling his wife that if John wanted grass, he’d get grass—he was angry, but needed the money, so he spent the evening laying down, blade by tiny blade, an image of a large lawn. But later he got up in the middle of the night, looked at what he’d done, and said ‘By God, it did need grass!’
It got grass, lots of grass filling the expanse of a great lawn that stretched to a distant starship, standing under a vast black sky—with a variety of children’s toys abandoned on the lawn.
The painting grabbed Cliff when he saw it, and he wrote Kelly, explaining he didn’t have much money but would like the painting. Kelly wrote back to say he had a rule never to give away his work—but he would sell it for a dollar and an autographed copy of City. Cliff went out and got the newest silver dollar he could find, then had his bank get him the oldest one it could find (which turned out to be from the 1880s); and he sent Kelly the book and, under separate cover, the dollars, explaining that a dollar was no good unless you had a second one to clink it against … By the time Cliff told me the story, he was able to say, with a certain pride, that the City volume was probably pretty valuable, and the dollars, too—so he had given Kelly value, after all.
He was the only passenger for Kimon and those aboard the ship lionized him because he was going there.
To land him at his destination the ship went two light-years out of its way, an inconvenience for which his passage money, much as it had seemed to him when he’d paid it back on Earth, did not compensate by half.
But the captain did not grumble. It was, he told Selden Bishop, an honor to carry a passenger for Kimon.
The businessmen aboard sought him out and bought him drinks and lunches and talked expansively of the markets opening up in the new-found solar systems.
But despite their expansive talk, they looked at Bishop with half-veiled envy in their eyes and they said to him: “The man who cracks this Kimon situation is the one who’ll have it big.”
One by one, they contrived to corner him for private conversations, and the talk, after the first drink, always turned to billions if he ever needed backing.
Billions—while he sat there with less than twenty credits in his pocket, living in terror against the day when he might have to buy a round of drinks. For he wasn’t certain that his twenty credits would stretch to a round of drinks.
The dowagers towed him off and tried to mother him; the young things lured him off and did not try to mother him. And everywhere he went, he heard the whisper behind the half-raised hand:
“To Kimon!” said the whispers. “My dear, you know what it takes to go to Kimon! An I.Q. rating that’s positively fabulous and years and years of study and an examination that not one in a thousand passes.”
It was like that all the way to Kimon.
Kimon was a galactic El Dorado, a never-never land, the country at the rainbow’s foot. There were few who did not dream of going there, and there were many who aspired, but those who were chosen were a very small percentage of those who tried to make the grade and failed.
Kimon had been reached—either discovered or contacted would be the wrong word to use—more than a hundred years before by a crippled spaceship out of Earth which landed on the planet, lost and unable to go farther.
To this day no one knew for sure exactly what had happened, but it is known that in the end the crew destroyed the ship and settled down on Kimon, and wrote letters home saying they were staying.
Perhaps the delivery of those letters, more than anything else, convinced the authorities of Earth that Kimon was the kind of place the letters said it was—although later on there was other evidence which weighed as heavily in the balance.
There was, quite naturally, no mail service between Kimon and Earth, but the letters were delivered, and in a most fantastic, although when you think about it, a most logical way. They were rolled into a bundle and placed in a sort of tube, like the pneumatic tubes that are used in industry for interdepartmental communication, and the tube was delivered, quite neatly, on the desk of the World Postal chief in London. Not on the desk of a subordinate, mind you, but on the desk of the chief himself. The tube had not been there when he went to lunch; it was there when he came back, and so far as could be determined, despite a quite elaborate investigation, no one had been seen to place it there.
In time, still convinced that there had been some sort of hoax played, the postal service delivered the letters to the addresses by special messengers who in their more regular employment were operatives of the World Investigation Bureau.
The addressees were unanimous in their belief the letters were genuine, for in most cases the handwriting was recognized and in every letter there were certain matters in the context which seemed to prove that they were bona fide.
So each of the addressees wrote a letter in reply and these were inserted in the tube in which the original letters had arrived and the tube was placed meticulously in the exact spot where it had been found on the desk of the postal chief.
Then everyone watched and nothing happened for quite some time, but suddenly the tube was gone and no one had seen it go—it had been there one moment and not there the next.
There remained one question and that one soon was answered. In the matter of a week or two the tube reappeared again, just before the end of office hours. The postal chief had been working away, not paying much attention to what was going on, and suddenly he saw that the tube had come back again.