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

Well, go on after him, pappy."

Farwell went into the bedroom. Greenbough was sitting on the bed dabbing at the bruise and muttering. "I told you I wanted our lawyer!"

he shouted at the branch manager. "I was attacked by a drunkard in that damned Mars Room of yours and by God booked by the police like a common criminal! I'm going to get satisfaction if I have to turn the city upside down! Get on that phone and get me Clancy or whatever his name is!"

"But I can't!" said Farwell desperately. "He won't answer his phone and in the second place he isn't that kind of lawyer. I can't ask Clarahan to fight a disorderly-conduct charge— he's a big man here. He only does contract law and that kind of thing. You posted bond, didn't you, Mr.

Greenbough?"

"Twenty dollars," said the senior partner bitterly, "and they only wanted ten from that drunken ape."

"Then why not just forget about it? Forfeit the bond and probably you'll never hear of it again, especially since you're an out-of-towner. I'll do what I can to smooth it over if they don't let it slide."

"Get out of here," said Greenbough, dabbing at the bruise again.

The blond was reading a TV magazine in the parlor; she ignored Farwell as he let himself out.

The branch manager drove to an all-night barber shop near one of the terminals and napped through "the works." A slow breakfast killed another hour and by then it wasn't too ridiculously early to appear at the office.

He dawdled over copy until 9 and phoned the Greybar. They told him Mr. Greenbough had checked out leaving no forwarding address. The morning papers came and he found nothing about a scuffle at the Mars Room or the booking of Greenbough. Maybe the senior partner had given a false name—Wilkins?—or maybe the stories had been killed because Greenbough and Brady did some institutional advertising.

Maybe there was some mysterious interlock between Greenbough and Brady and the papers high up on some misty alp that Farwell had never glimpsed.

Don't worry about it, he told himself savagely. You gave him good advice, the thing's going to blow over, Clarahan wouldn't have taken it anyway. He hoped Pete Messier in New York wouldn't hear about it and try to use it as a lever to pry him out of the spot he held, the spot Pete Messier coveted. Maybe there was some way he could get somebody in the New York office to keep an eye on Messier and let him know how he was doing, just to get something he could counterpunch with when Messier pulled something like that garbled message stunt.

The intercom buzzed and Grace said, "Angelo wants to see you. He says it's personal."

"Send him in."

The kid was beaming. He looked pretty good—not raw and jumpy; just happy.

"I want to say thanks and good-bye, Mr. Farwell," he told the branch manager. "Look!"

The plastic-laminated card said "WORK PERMIT" and "Brother Angelo Libonari" and "International Union of Spacemen, Spacedockworkers and Rocket Maintenance Men, Unaffiliated (ISU-IND)" and "Member in Good Standing" and other things.

"So that was the game," said Farwell slowly. "We take you and we train you at a loss hoping that some day you'll turn out decent copy for us and as soon as you have a thousand bucks saved up you quit like a shot and buy a work card to be a wiper on a rocket. Well, I hope you show a little more loyalty to your space line than you showed us."

Angelo's face drooped in miserable surprise. "I never thought—" he stuttered. "I didn't mean to run out, Mr. Farwell. I'll give two weeks notice if you want—a month? How about a month?"

"It doesn't matter," said Farwell. "I should have known. I thought I pounded some sense into your head, but I was wrong. You're forgiven, Angelo. I hope you have a good time. What are your plans?" He wasn't really interested, but why go out of his way to kick the kid in the teeth?

Obviously he'd meant it when he registered surprise—he didn't have the boss's viewpoint and his other jobs had been one-week stands in hash houses.

The boy carefully put his work card in his breast pocket and beamed again at what he was saying—partly to Farwell, it appeared, mostly to himself in wonder at its coming true at last. "I'll be a wiper at the start, all right," he said. "I don't care if I never get higher than that. I want to see it and feel it, all of it. That's the only way the real thing's ever going to get written. Higgins and Delare and Beeman and the rest of them—

passengers. You can feel it in your bones when you read their stuff.

One-trippers or two-trippers.

"They aren't soaked in it. The big passage in Delare's Planetfall, the takeoff from Mars: he's full of the wonder of it, sure. Who wouldn't be the first time? And he kept his eyes open, watching himself and the others. But I'm going to take off from Earth and Mars and Venus and Ganymede and the Moon twenty times before I dare to write about it.

I'm going to get it all—brains, bone, muscle, and belly—takeoff, landings, free flight, danger, monotony—all of it."

"Sonnets? Prose poems?" asked Farwell, just to be saying something.

Angelo flushed a little, but his eyes didn't have the old pleading look. He didn't have to plead; he had what he wanted. "They were good exercise," he said stoutly. "I suppose I was trying to write form because I didn't have content. I think it's going to be novels—if I feel like it. And they can publish them or not publish them, just as they please." He meant it, Farwell thought. He had what he wanted.

"I'll look forward to them," he said, and shook hands with the boy. He didn't notice him leave. Angelo Messier, he thought; Pete Libonari. "—

really creative synthesis of Pinero and Shaw—, pattered through his head, and the psychiatrist-thought followed naggingly after. He looked at his hands in amazement, suddenly realizing that they had been trembling all morning uncontrollably.

Harry twenty-third street suddenly burst into laughter. His friend and sometimes roper Farmer Brown looked inquisitive.

"I just thought of a new con," Harry Twenty-Third Street said, still chuckling.

Farmer Brown shook his head positively. "There's no such thing, my man," he said. "There are only new switches on old cons. What have you got—a store con? Shall you be needing a roper?" He tried not to look eager as a matter of principle, but everybody knew the Fanner needed a connection badly. His girl had two-timed him on a badger game, running off with the chump and marrying him after an expensive, month-long buildup.

Harry said, "Sorry, old boy. No details. It's too good to split up. I shall rip and tear the suckers with this con for many a year, I trust, before the details become available to the trade. Nobody, but nobody, is going to call copper after I take him. It's beautiful and it's mine. I will see you around, my friend."

Harry got up from the booth and left, nodding cheerfully to a safeblower here, a fixer there, on his way to the locked door of the hangout. Naturally he didn't nod to such small fry as pickpockets and dope peddlers. Harry had his pride.

The puzzled Farmer sipped his lemon squash and concluded that Harry had been kidding him. He noticed that Harry had left behind him in the booth a copy of a magazine with a space ship and a pretty girl in green bra and pants on the cover.

"A furnished …bungalow?" the man said hesitantly, as though he knew what he wanted but wasn't quite sure of the word.

"Certainly, Mr. Clurg," Walter Lacblan said. "I'm sure we can suit you.

Wife and family?"

"No," said Clurg. "They are …far away." He seemed to get some secret amusement from the thought. And then, to Walter's horror, he sat down calmly in empty air beside the desk and, of course, crashed to the floor looking ludicrous and astonished.