C Kornbluth - His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

"A worrud that means the wur-r-l-l-d too-oo mee-ee-ee!"

Through the fading pinwheels I saw a long and horrid face, a Sirian face, peering at me with kindly interest under the table. It was Wenjtkpli.

"Good morning, little Earth chum," he said. "You feel not so tired now?"

"Morning?" I yelled, sitting up again and cracking my head again and lying down again to wait for the pinwheels to fade again.

"You sleep," I heard him say, "fourteen hours—so happy, so peaceful!"

"I gotta get out of here," I mumbled, scrambling about on the imported sawdust for my hat. I found I was wearing it, and climbed out, stood up, and leaned against the table, swaying and spitting out the last of the spruce and cedar.

"You like another stinger?" asked Wenjtkpli brightly. I retched feebly.

"Fourteen hours," I mumbled. "That makes it 0900 Mars now, or exactly ten hours past the time I was supposed to report for the nightside at the bureau."

"But last night you talk different," the Sirian told me in surprise. "You say many times how bureau chief McGillicuddy can take lousy job and jam—"

"That was last night," I moaned. "This is this morning."

"Relax, little Earth chum. I sing again song you taught me: X is for the ecstasy she ga-a-ave me; E is for—"

My throbbing head still objected. I flapped good-by at him and set a course for the door of Blogri's joint. The quaint period mottoes:

"QUAFFE YE NUT-BROWN AYLE" "DROPPE DEAD TWYCE" and so on—

didn't look so quaint by the cold light of the Martian dawn.

An unpleasant little character, Venusian or something, I'd seen around the place oozed up to me. "Head hurt plenty,

“Huh?" he simpered.

"This is no time for sympathy," I said. "Now one side or a flipper off—I gotta go to work."

"No sympathy," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He fumbled oddly in his belt, then showed me a little white capsule. "Clear your head, huh? Work like lightning, you bet!"

I was interested. "How much?"

"For you, friend, nothing. Because I hate seeing fellows suffer with big head."

"Beat it," I told him, and shoved past through the door.

That pitch of his with a free sample meant he was pushing J-K-B. I was in enough trouble without adding an unbreakable addiction to the stuff. If I'd taken his free sample, I would have been back to see him in 12 hours, sweating blood for more. And that time he would have named his own price.

I fell into an eastbound chair and fumbled a quarter into the slot The thin, cold air of the pressure dome was clearing my head already. I was sorry for all the times I’d cussed a skinflint dome administration for not supplying a richer air mix or heating the outdoors more lavishly. I felt food enough to shave, and luckily had my razor in my wallet. By the time the chair was gliding past the building, where Interstellar News had a floor, I had the whiskers off my jaw and most of the sawdust out of my hair.

The floater took me up to our floor while I tried not to think of what McGillicuddy would have to say.

The newsroom was full of noise as usual. McGillicuddy vu in the copydesk slot chewing his way through a pile of dpatches due to be filed on the pressure dome split for A.M. newscasts in four minutes by the big wall clock. He fed his copy, without looking, to an operator battering the keys of fte old-fashioned radioteletype that was good enough to serve for local clients.

"Two minutes short!" he yelled at one of the men on the "Gimme a brightener! Gimme a god-damned brightener!" The rim man raced to the receiving ethertypes from rCammadion, Betelgeuse, and the other Interstellar bureaus. He yanked an item from one of the clicking machines and •caJed it at McGillicuddy, who slashed at it with his pencil and passed it to the operator. The tape the operator was cooing started through the transmitter-distributor, and on all local clients'

radioteletypes appeared:

"FIFTEEN-MINUTE INTERSTELLAR NEWSCAST AM MARS PRESSURE

DOMES."

Everybody leaned back and lit up. McGillicuddy's eye fell on me, and I cleared my throat

"Got a cold?" he asked genially.

"Nope. No cold."

"Touch of indigestion? Flu, maybe? You're tardy today."

"I know it."

"Bright boy," He was smiling. That was bad.

"Spencer," he told me. "I thought long and hard about you. I thought about you when you failed to show up for the nightside. I thought about you intermittently through the night as I took your shift. Along about 0300 I decided what to do with you. It was as though Providence had taken a hand. It was as though I prayed 'Lord, what shall I do with a drunken, no-good son of a spacecook who ranks in my opinion with the boils of Job as an affliction to man?* Here's i the answer, Spencer."

He tossed me a piece-of ethertype paper, torn from one of our interstellar-circuit machines. On it was the following dialogue: ANYBODY TTHURE I MEAN THERE

THIS MARSBUO ISN GA PLS

WOT TTHUT I MEAN WOT THAT MEAN PLEASE

THIS IS THE MARS BUREAU OF INTERSTELLAR NEWS. WHO ARE YOU

AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING HORSING AROUND ON OUR KRUEGER

60-B CIRCUIT TELETYPE QUESTIONMARK. WHERE IS REGULAR

STAFFER. GO AHEAD

THATK WOT I AM CALLING YOU ABBOUUT. KENNEDY DIED THIS

MORNING PNEUMONIA. I AM WEEMS EDITOR PHOENIX. U SENDING

REPLLACEMENT KENNEDY PLEAS

THIS MCGILLICUDDY, MARSBUO ISN CHIEF. SENDING

REPLACEMENT KENNEDY SOONEST. HAVE IDEAL MAN FOR JOB.

END.

That was all. It was enough.

"Chief," I said to McGillicuddy. "Chief, you can't. You wouldn't—would you?"

"Better get packed," he told me, busily marking up copy, "Better take plenty of nice, warm clothing. I understand Krueger 60-B is about one thousand times dimmer than the sun. That's absolute magnitude, of course—Frostbite's in quite close. A primitive community, I'm told.

Kennedy didn't like it. But of course the poor old duffer wasn't good enough to handle anything swifter than a one-man bureau on a one-planet split. Better take lots of warm clothing."

"I quit," I said.

"Sam," said somebody, in a voice that always makes me turn to custard inside.

"Hello, Ellie," I said. "I was just telling Mr. McGillicuddy that he isn't going to shoot me off to Frostbite to rot."

"Freeze," corrected McGillicuddy with relish. "Freeze. Good morning, Miss Masters. Did you want to say a few parting words to your friend?"

"I do," she told him, and drew me aside to no man's land where the ladies of the press prepared strange copy for the (coder sex. "Don't quit, Sam," she said in that voice. "I could never love a quitter. What if it is a minor assignment?"

"Minor," I said. ''What a gem of understatement that is!"

"It'll be good for you," she insisted. "You can show him that you've got on the ball. You'll be on your own except for the regular dispatches to the main circuit and your local unit. You could dig up all sorts of cute feature stories that'd get your name known." And so on. It was partly her logic, partly that voice and partly her promise to kiss me good-by at the port.

I’M GOING TO take it," I told McGillicuddy. He looked up with a pleased smile and murmured: "The power of prayer …"

The good-by kiss from Ellie was the only thing about the jonmey that wasn't nightmarish. ISN's expense account stuck me on a rusty bucket that I shared with glamorous freight like yak kids and tenpenny nails.

The little yaks blatted whenever we went into overdrive to break through the speed of light. The Greenhough Effect—known to readers of the science features as "supertime"—scared hell out of them. On ordinary rocket drive, they just groaned and whimpered to each other the yak equivalent of "Thibet was never like this!"

The Frostbite spaceport wasn't like the South Pole, but it'd be like Greenland, There was a bunch of farmers waiting for their yaks, beating their mittened hands together and exhaling long plumes of vapor. The collector of customs, a rat-faced city boy, didn't have the decency to hand them over and let the hayseeds get back to the administration building. I watched through a porthole and saw him stalling and dawdling over a sheaf of papers for each of the farmers. Oddly enough, the stalling and dawdling stopped as soon as the farmers caught on and passed over a few dollars. Nobody even bothered to slip it shamefacedly from one hand to another. They just handed it over, not caring who saw—Rat-Face sneering, the farmers dumbly accepting the racket.