Of the twenty, six had been historical costume pieces and those were in—particularly the shorter ones that he could re-write comparatively quickly. Another six he picked out as being fairly easy to translate into historical or fantastic settings.
A dozen stories, then, to start on, as soon as he could get hold of a typewriter—if he could sell one or two of them quickly, he’d be all right. If not—well, there were still the coins in his pocket. A quarter had brought him two thousand credits in Greeneville, But he’d got himself into a jam. He wasn’t going to take that risk again unless he had to—and then not without studying up on the subject and learning what the pitfalls were.
By midnight he was sleepy. But he hadn’t finished all he wanted to do yet. He picked up The Story of Dopelle by Paul Gallico and started to read.
Now to find out what the competition really was—
CHAPTER IX
The Dope on Dopelle
THE COMPETITION, HE learned within the next hour, was not only terrific. It was impossible.
Dopelle (he didn’t seem to have a first name at all) was simply unbelievable. He was Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Einstein and Edison and Philo Vance and Galahad all rolled into one. And he was only twenty-seven years old.
The sketch of the first seventeen years of his life was brief. He’d been brilliant in school, skipped a lot of grades and had been graduated by Harvard (magna cum laude) at the age of seventeen, president of his class and the most popular man of his class despite his comparative youth.
Prodigies aren’t usually popular, but Dopelle had been an exception. He hadn’t been a grind. His high standing in his classes was due to his ability to remember perfectly everything he read or heard, obviating the necessity for hard study.
Despite his heavy schedule of classes (he’d taken about everything Harvard had to offer) he’d had time to captain an undefeated and untied football team. He had worked his way through school (and become financially independent in the process) by writing, in his spare time, six adventure novels which had become best sellers at once and still rated as top classics in their field.
The wealth these books brought him enabled him to own his own private spacecruiser and his own laboratory where—during his last two years of college—he had already made several important improvements in the technique of space travel and space warfare.
That was Dopelle at the age of seventeen, just an ordinary young fellow. His career had started then.
He’d gone from Harvard to a Space Officers’ Training School, emerged a lieutenant and had jumped grades rapidly for a year or so. At twenty-one he was in charge of counter-espionage, and was the only man who had successfully been to the Arcturian system and lived among the Arcs. Most Earthly knowledge of the Arcturians had been obtained by him on that trip.
He was an incredibly good space-pilot and fighter. Time and again his squadron had turned back Arcturian attacks with Dopelle spearheading as well as directing the fighting. The brass had begged him not to fight personally because his scientific knowledge was invaluable—but he fought anyway (by this time he was apparently above authority) and seemed to bear a charmed life. His bright red space-ship, the Vengeance, was never hit.
At twenty-three he was general of all the Solar forces but command seemed to be the least important of his activities. Except during times of crises he delegated authority and spent his time having exciting adventures in espionage and counter-espionage or in working in his secret laboratory on the Moon. The list of his scientific accomplishments in that laboratory was almost unbelievable.
The greatest of them, perhaps, was the creation of a mechanical brain, Mekky. Into Mekky Dopelle had put powers of thought not possessed by human beings. Mekky wasn’t human but he (actually it, of course, Gallico pointed out, but nevertheless always referred to as he) was super-human.
Mekky could read minds—including Arcturian minds—and could perform thoughttransference. Also he could solve (as an electronic calculating machine can solve) any problem, however difficult, given all the factors.
Into Mekky also was built the ability to transfer himself instantaneously through space without the necessity of having a spaceship to ride in. This made him invaluable as an emissary, enabling Dopelle, wherever he was, to keep in touch with his space fleets and with the governments of Earth.
Briefly and touchingly near the end of the book Gallico told of the romance between Dopelle and Betty Hadley. They were, it seemed, engaged, but had decided to wait until the end of the war to marry.
Meanwhile Miss Hadley continued to keep her job as editor of the world’s most popular love story magazine, the job she had held when she and Dopelle had met while he was in New York incognito on an espionage job. They had fallen in love immediately and deeply. Now the whole world loved them and eagerly awaited the end of the war and the day of their marriage.
Keith Winton frowned as he put down the book. Could anything possibly be more hopeless than his loving Betty Hadley?
Somehow, it was the very hopelessness of things that gave him hope, a shred of hope. The cards just couldn’t possibly be stacked that badly against him. There might be a catch somewhere.
It was after one o’clock when he undressed for bed but he phoned the desk of the hotel and left a call for six. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day. It had to be if he were to keep on eating after a week.
And he went to sleep and dreamed—the poor goof—of Betty. Of Betty dressed (more or less) in one of the costumes worn by girls on the cover pictures of science-fiction magazines, being chased by a purple Bem.
Only he, Keith, was the purple Bem and he was thwarted when he almost caught Betty by a tall dashing romantic young man who had muscles of steel and who must be Dopelle, although he looked uncommonly like Errol Flynn.
Dopelle picked up the purple Bem that was Keith and said, «Back to Arcturus, spy!» and threw him out into space and he was spinning head over purple heels out among the planets and then among the stars. He was going so fast that there was a ringing sensation in his ears. The sound got louder and louder until he quit being a purple Bem and realized that the ringing was the telephone.
He answered it and a voice said, «Six o’clock, sir.»
He didn’t dare lie down again or he’d go to sleep, so he sat on the bed awhile, thinking, remembering the dream.
What did Dopelle look like? Like Errol Flynn, as he had dreamed? Why not?
If he ever saw Dopelle would it be any more improbable than anything else that Dopelle should look like Errol Flynn, or even be Errol Flynn? Wasn’t this, maybe, a fantastic movie or a story or a book he’d tangled himself in?
Why not? Dopelle, he thought, was almost too perfect, almost too fantastic a character to be true. Good Lord, he sounded like something out of a—no, not out of a pulp magazine. As editor, Keith would have rejected any story which had so improbable a character. Like something out of a comic book, maybe.
But wait—hadn’t the mechanical brain, Mekky, in brief contact with him, anticipated that very thought?
«… do not make one fatal mistake. This is real. It is not a figment of your imagination. Your danger here is real—»
Mekky—fantastic as Mekky himself was—was right. This universe and the spot it had put him in were real enough—as real as his hunger for breakfast right now.
He dressed and went out. At six-thirty in the morning the streets of New York were as busy as—in that other universe he’d been in—they would have been at ten or eleven o’clock. The short day necessitated by the mist-out demanded an early start.