The Year's Best Science Fiction 5 Read online

  The grand duke said, calmly, that he hoped so. “Believe me, Doc, it isn’t easy though. I got rivals. People with other territories would like to have mine. People who work for me would also like to have mine. But I figure I’ll be OK. I move with the times. My father rode a mule. I ride a Cadillac.” And he proceeded to explain.

  Melchior Enterprises (he said) might be compared to an iceberg of which the greater mass is submerged. There were many similar icebergs in the country, some smaller, some bigger. They generally avoided coming in collision with others, but ships were not always so fortunate. In the crime business, of course, disputes could not be settled by an industry-wide arbitrator. In which case …

  “I’m not the only one who has personnel trouble, Doc,” Melchior explained. “Lots of times the others get in touch with me: ‘Anthony, I need somebody. Send somebody good.’ Well, one hand washes the other, I like to help out. But it’s hard, you know, Doc, to get somebody really good.”

  Dr. Colles said he could appreciate that.

  It used to be, Melchior went on, that the syndicates got the tough boys from the slums. But they did not really suit the tempo of the times. They were not so dependable. They were conspicuous. They got into fights over matters which had nothing to do with business. Right after the war there had been a supply of combat veterans available, they had been generally satisfactory, but there weren’t many around anymore. The turnover was rather high.

  “You know what I want, Doc?” he said. “Or, better, what I don’t want? I don’t want guys who’re outstanding. Guys with criminal records. Guys who kill for the fun of it, or to pay off grudges or they have no control of their tempers, and another acrobat grabs their girl in the wrong place. Not them.

  “What I want are steady fellows. Dull types who live in tract houses and have small families. I don’t care what their religion is, but only small families. Shows what I call prudence. Or maybe they live with a mother, or with a brother or sister who has the family. Now, people like this are working for me right along, on the legitimate. Or applying for jobs with me. But how do you know who’s suitable? How? You can’t just ask a guy right out.”

  Colles said, “And so you came to me to help you find them. Exactly as you go to business school to find accountants. And I know just the type you mean.” He nodded, smiled faintly.

  “I pay a flat salary,” Melchior said. “Plus a bonus in negotiable bonds. That’s good for everybody, nothing shows on the books for taxes. But nothing spectacular. These men I want, they’re not for the spectacular and it isn’t for them.”

  “How right you are,” Doctor Colles said.

  The type Melchior wanted (Colles went on) was the distillation of the average man, except, of course, that he was killer-prone. Why will he kill? Why will he kill perfect strangers? “We were speaking, at our first meeting,” he said, “of ‘lack of communication.’ We might add, ‘lack of religion’—’lack of love’—of the capacity to really love. These men are the men who lack. There is something dead in them. They don’t kill because a fire burns in them, but because no fire burns in them. The potential was always there—men like your Grubacher, who shot his rival for the foreman’s place—but it took my test to discover it, to channel it.” He paused. “My test,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, I know the type. Men who will calmly and coolly kill to get another twenty dollars a week. Who’ll kill rather than cut down on their American Standard of Living, rather than change their way of life. Why, yes—I imagine that my twenty little discoveries were quite willing once it was shown how safe and profitable it was … Yes, I imagine they perform their missions with dispatch, with no more excitement and as much efficiency as they would in repossessing a car, reading a gas meter, or serving a summons—and then try to cheat a little on their expense account—but just a little.”

  “So what now, Doc?”

  “So what now? Melchior, when I’d calculated all this, and your role in it, I decided that you were by way of being one of those men-who-lack, yourself.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And then, do you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Then I came to the conclusion that I was by way of being one of them, too.”

  The grand duke raised not only his eyebrows, but his eyelids. He made a little noise resembling a giggle. And again he asked, “So now what, Doc?”

  “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 step
s 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.

  The emigre press had reported that the great scientist, Peter Kapitza, once remarked, “Rogov and Cherpas, there is a team. They’re Communists, good Communists; but they’re better than that! They’re Russian, Russian enough to beat the world. Look at them. That’s the future, our Russian future!” Perhaps the quotation was an exaggeration, but it did show the enormous respect in which both Rogov and Cherpas were held by their colleagues in Soviet science.

  Shortly after their marriage strange things happened to them.

  Rogov remained happy. Cherpas was radiant.

  Nevertheless, the two of them began to have haunted expressions, as though they had seen things which words could not express, as though they had stumbled upon secrets too important to be whispered even to the most secure agents of the Soviet State Police.

  In 1947 Rogov had an interview with Stalin. As he left Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, the great leader himself came to the door, his forehead wrinkled in thought, nodding, “Da, da, da.”

  Even his own personal staff did not know why Stalin was saying “Yes, yes, yes,” but they did see the orders that went forth marked ONLY BY SAFE HAND, and TO BE READ AND RETURNED, NOT RETAINED, and furthermore stamped FOR AUTHORIZED EYES ONLY AND UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES TO BE COPIED.

  Into the true and secret Soviet budget that year by the direct personal orders of a noncommittal Stalin, an item was added for “Project Telescope.” Stalin tolerated no inquiry, brooked no comment.

  A village which had had a name, became nameless.

  A forest which had been opened to the workers and peasants became military territory.

  Into the central post office in Kharkov there went a new box number for the village of Ya. Ch.

  Rogov and Cherpas, comrades and lovers, scientists both and Russians both, disappeared from the everyday lives of their colleagues. Their faces were no longer seen at scientific meetings. Only rarely did they emerge.

  On the few occasions they were seen, usually going to and from Moscow at the time the All Union budget was made up each year, they seemed smiling and happy. But they did not make jokes.

  What the outside world did not know was that Stalin in giving them their own project, granting them a paradise restricted to themselves, had seen to it that a snake went with them in the paradise. The snake this time was not one, but two personalities-Gausgofer and Gauck.

  Stalin died.

  Beria died too - less willingly.

  The world went on.

  Everything went into the forgotten village of Ya. Ch. and nothing came out.

  It was rumored that Khrushchev himself visited Rogov and Cherpas. It was even whispered that Khrushchev said as he went to the Kharkov airport to fly back to Moscow, “It’s big, big, big. There’ll be no cold war if they do it.

  There won’t be any war of any kind. We’ll finish capitalism before the capitalists can ever begin to fight. If they do it. If they do it.” Khrushchev was reported to have shaken his head slowly in perplexity and to have said nothing more but to have put his initials on the unmodified budget of Project Telescope when a trusted messenger next brought him an envelope from Rogov.

  Anastasia Cherpas became a mother. Their first boy looked like the father. He was followed by a little girl. Then another little boy. The children didn’t stop Cherpas’s work.

  The family had a large dacha and trained nursemaids took over the household.

  Every night the four of them dined together.

  Rogov, Russian, humorous, courageous, amused.

  Cherpas, older, more mature, more beautiful than ever, but just as biting, just as cheerful, just as sharp as she had ever been.

  But then the other two, two who sat with them across the years of all their days, the two colleagues who had been visited upon them by the all-powerful word of Stalin himself.

  Gausgofer was a female: bloodless, narrow-faced, with a voice like a horse’s whinny. She was a scientist and a policewoman, and
competent at both jobs. In 1920 she had reported her own mother’s whereabouts to the Bolshevik Terror Committee. In 1924 she had commanded her father’s execution. He was a Russian German of the old Baltic nobility and he had tried to adjust his mind to the new system, but he had failed. In 1930 she had let her lover trust her a little too much. He was a Rumanian Communist, very high in the Party, but he had a sneaking sympathy for Trotsky. When he whispered into her ear in the privacy of their bedroom, whispered with the tears pouring down his face, she had listened affectionately and quietly and had delivered his words to the police the next morning.

  With that she came to Stalin’s attention.

  Stalin had been tough. He addressed her brutally, “Comrade, you have some brains. I can see you know what Communism is all about. You understand loyalty. You’re going to get ahead and serve the Party and the working class, but is that all you want?” He had spat the question at her.

  She was so astonished that she gaped.

  The old man had changed his expression, favoring her with leering benevolence. He had put his forefinger on her chest, “Study science, Comrade. Study science. Communism plus science equals victory. You’re too clever to stay in police work.”

  Gausgofer fell hi love with Rogov the moment she saw him.

  Gausgofer fell in hate - and hate can be as spontaneous and miraculous as love-with Cherpas the moment she saw her.

  But Stalin had guessed that too.

  With the bloodless, fanatic Gausgofer he had sent a man named B. Gauck.

  Gauck was solid, impassive, blank-faced. In body he was about the same height as Rogov. Where Rogov was muscular, Gauck was flabby. Where Rogov’s skin was fair and shot through with the pink and health of exercise, Gauck’s skin was like stale lard, greasy, gray-green, sickly even on the best of days.

  Gauck’s eyes were black and small. His glance was as cold and sharp as death. Gauck had no friends, no enemies, no beliefs, no enthusiasms.