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

Again the handkerchief—"scarf" in the language of the pike—fell, and again the steel clashed.

For many minutes they battled through twelve figures; Leigh had again parried Cole's blade, and they turned to Alice. But she was in no condition to continue, having fainted when the pirate's blade had swooped past Jerry's cheek a moment ago.

"Since the referee is incapacitated," said the pirate, after a moment of thought, "shall we continue fighting—free?"

"Challenger agrees," said Jerry. "On guard!" And again the vicious pikes glistened in the light, swinging madly. Jerry abandoned the formal line of combat and cut fiercely at Cole's head, who grinned and swung at his enemy's chest with a practiced flick of his wrists. Jerry sprang back, blood pouring from his side and shortened his grip by three feet of the haft, leaped through an opening, and stretched his body into one terrible blow that sent his blade through the belly of the pirate and out the other side.

The salvage man fell to the floor, and the transfixed body of Cole remained erect, propped on the pole of the weapon.

Jerry's own eyes closed quietly; his hands sought his side, and were wet with blood.

Jerry awoke in a very soft bed with those eyes swimming before his face and a sense of pressure on his lips. "What happened?" he asked, dizzily.

"I kissed you," said the eyes.

He considered. "What did you want to do a thing like that for?" he said.

"Just a hunch. It worked on the Sleeping Beauty, you know."

"Yeah, I guess so. Thanks. Where am I?"

"Marsport County Hospital," said the eyes. "Officially you are Gerald DePugh Leigh, master of the salvage scow Leigh Salvage, Incorporated, if there's anything else you want to know. That DePugh nearly changed my mind about you, but I decided that you could bury it as a crossroad with a stake through its heart and maybe it wouldn't bother us."

"This us business," he said reflectively. "Just what does it mean?"

"Why, Jerry!' said the eyes, deeply pained. "Don't you remember?"

"No," he said, "but whatever it was it seems to have been a good idea.

Did I propose to you?"

"Yes," she said, crossing her fingers. "And I accepted in good faith and here I find myself jilted practically at the—"

"Oh, all right," said Jerry irritably. "Will you marry me?"

"Yes," said the eyes.

There was a pause. "I wonder if you would know how I got here," he sleepily asked.

"I flew the ship back after you ran that Mother Goose murderer through and got your own appendix clipped. You'll be out of here soon—"

"Who flew the ship?"

"I did."

"A woman can't fly a—"

"This one did.

"Well …I suppose so—I feel myself getting drowsy. Do you think the Sleeping Beauty technique will work twice?"

"I'll try—" Jerry heard footsteps, and the eyes retreated. A thin, grey voice spoke up, "Ah, Leigh, I thought I'd call. As you no doubt remember I was telling you of my space-battle with the Mercurian Menace. We were jockeying for position when—"

"Alice, darling," said Jerry.

"Yes, dear?"

"Will you kick that man very hard, please?" He closed his eyes, heard a yelp of pain, and the slam of a door. He smiled sweetly in his sleep.

Gallacher was no doctor of Philosophy or Science, no more than a humble "mister," and as such could not hope to rise beyond the modest university readership which he had held for some score of years. He was in the Department of Physics, and his job was little more than the especially dirty one of correcting examinations and reading the hardy perennial themes submitted by generation after generation of students.

He was also the man who punched calculating machines late into the afternoon, tabulating work of men higher up and preparing their further ground.

He left the university grounds as the sun was setting over the Hudson, jammed a dark green, crumpled felt hat on his head and walked briskly home to the five-room bungalow where he had lived since his marriage.

Entering through the kitchen door, he was greeted by no more than a curt nod from his wife and his buoyant gait reduced to a hesitant shuffle. For Mrs. Gallacher, with her bitter tongue, endless ills and higgling economy, was the terror of her husband.

Dinner was, as always, a grim affair punctuated by little bitter queries from the distaff side—money, always. Why didn't he stand up to Professor Van Bergen for a raise? Then he'd be able to get a little car and not have to walk two miles from home and back on the highway like a common tramp. And why didn't he see her cousin, the Realtor, about another place near here but where those terrible Palisades wouldn't arouse her acrophobia. Gallacher had shuddered when his wife, seven years ago, first proudly told him that she "had" acrophobia.

He knew then that it would not be the last said on the subject.

Vaguely he wiped his mouth with a napkin and said: "'M going down for a little tinkering …"

"Tinkering!" spat Mrs. Gallacher poisonously. "You in that cellar where I can't keep my washing machine because it's cluttered up with—"

He heard her out, smiling deprecatingly, and without answering went into the tiny foyer and opened the cellar door with two keys. His wife did not have copies of either.

Down the steps he snapped a switch, and the plot-sized basement sprang into sharp being under the glareless brilliance of the most modern refractory glow-tube installation. He smiled proudly on the place and its furnishings. This, he thought, is my real life, and I can deny it nothing.

From the shelf of black-bound, imperishable notebooks, through great racks of reagents, turning lathe, forge, reference library, glassware and balances to the electronics and radioactivity outfits, nothing was lacking to make up an almost complete experimental set-up for advanced work in physics, chemistry or practical mechanics.

Gallacher, sitting there among his tools, had a spark of something in his eyes that would have baffled his wife. He opened a notebook and stared almost feverishly down at the half-written page. The last words had been: "—to dry set in 12 hrs. This cmpnd to be xmnd tomorrow."

Swallowing gingerly, he turned the book face down and lifted a tray from a drying rack cunningly placed in the cool draft of a window high up in the wall. Removing a tiny speck of the marble-sized, flinty mass that rested on the glass surface he inserted it into a spectroscope's field chamber, then snapped on the current that sent his electric bills soaring higher month by month. The speck glowed a vivid white; he squinted through a series of colored filters at the incandescent particle.

Then, sighing inaudibly, he lit the projector's bulb. On the calibrated ground-glass screen appeared the banded spectrum of the compound.

Gallacher ticked off the bands with a pencil. Thoughtfully he turned up his notebook and wrote: "Spctrscpe confirms 100%."

Mrs. Gallacher was in bed, a magazine flung irritably on the floor beside her. As she heard the steps of her husband coming slowly up the cellar stairs she settled her hair and scowled.

He came through the door and blinked dazedly. "Still up?" he asked. "I had some special work to do—finishing my tinkering …" He smiled feebly.

"Tinkering!" She crowded into his own word all the vitriolic indignation of which her small, mean soul was capable. Then, seeing his face, she paused, frightened and almost terrified. For it was white and giddy with triumph. "Andrew," she said sharply, "what have you done?"

"My series of experiments," he said mildly. "Tonight I closed my notebooks. My work is finished—and successful." Then, astonishingly, he blazed forth: "Edith! What I have done, no man has done before me—in this house I have synthesized the perfect rocket fuel." He smiled as he saw her face pale. "The fumbling adventurers who tried three times to reach the Moon and finally blew themselves up—their mistake was not to wait for me. Their fuel was not only dangerous but too weak for the job; any adding machine could have told them that. I have been working with explosive propellants for seventeen years, and have you ever heard one of my thousands of tests? No, for I worked calmly and with small quantities. And yet through me the universe has been opened to man! Venus, Luna, Mars—"