The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

“No, I can’t. And if you don’t mind, Ricardo—”

Morris Burlap said he’d like another brandy. I ordered it. He came as close to smiling as Morris Burlap ever does and leaned toward me confidentially. “Ricardo’s got it, Bernie. Put yourself in this guy Eksar’s position. He wraps up his spaceship on a dirty little planet which it’s against the law to be near in the first place. He can make some half-assed repairs with merchandise that’s available here—but he has to buy the stuff. Any noise, any uproar, and he’ll be grabbed for a Federal rap in outer space. Say you’re Eksar, what do you do?”

I could see it now. “I’d peddle and I’d parlay. Copper bracelets, strings of beads, dollars—whatever I had to lay my hands on to buy the native merchandise, I’d peddle and I’d parlay in deal after deal. Maybe I’d start with a piece of equipment from the ship, then I’d find some novelty item that the natives would go for. But all this is Earth business know-how, human business know-how.”

“Bernie,” Ricardo told me, “Indians once traded pretty little shells for beaver pelts at the exact spot where the stock exchange now stands. Some kind of business goes on in Eksar’s world, I assure you, but its simplest form would make one of our corporate mergers look like a game of potsy on the sidewalk.”

Well, I’d wanted to figure it out. “So I was marked as his fish all the way. I was screwed and blued and tattooed,” I mumbled, “by a hustler superman.”

Ricardo nodded. “By a businessman’s Mephistopheles fleeing the thunderbolts of heaven. He needed to double his money one more time and he’d have enough to repair his ship. He had at his disposal a fantastic sophistication in all the ways of commerce.”

“What Ricardo’s saying,” came an almost soft voice from Morris Burlap, “is the guy who beat you up was a whole lot bigger than you.”

My shoulders felt loose, like they were sliding down off my arms. “What the hell,” I said. “You get stepped on by a horse or you get stepped on by an elephant. You’re still stepped on.”

I paid the check, got myself together and went away.

Then I began to wonder if maybe this was really the story after all. They both enjoyed seeing me up there as an interplanetary jerk. Ricardo’s a brilliant guy, Morris Burlap’s sharp as hell, but so what? Ideas, yes. Facts, no.

So here’s a fact.

My bank statement came at the end of the month with that canceled check I’d given Eksar. It had been endorsed by a big store in the Cortlandt Street area. I know that store. I’ve dealt with them. I went down and asked them about it.

They handle mostly marked-down, surplus electronic equipment. That’s what they said Eksar had bought. A walloping big order of transistors and transformers, resistors and printed circuits, electronic tubes, wiring, tools, gimmicks like that. All mixed up, they said, a lot of components that just didn’t go together. He’d given the clerk the impression that he had an emergency job to do—and he’d take as close as he could get to the things he actually needed. He’d paid a lot of money for freight charges: delivery was to some backwoods town in northern Canada.

That’s a fact, now, I have to admit it. But here’s another one.

I’ve dealt with that store, like I said. Their prices are the lowest in the neighborhood. And why is it, do you think, they can sell so cheap? There’s only one answer: because they buy so cheap. They buy at the lowest prices; they don’t give a damn about quality: all they want to know is, how much markup? I’ve personally sold them job lots of electronic junk that I couldn’t unload anywhere else, condemned stuff, badly wired stuff, stuff that was almost dangerous—it’s a place to sell to when you’ve given up on making a profit because you yourself have been stuck with inferior merchandise in the first place.

You get the picture? It makes me feel rosy all over.

There is Eksar out in space, the way I see it. He’s fixed up his ship, good enough to travel, and he’s on his way to his next big deal. The motors are humming, the ship is running, and he’s sitting there with a big smile on his dirty face: he’s thinking how he took me, how easy it was.

He’s laughing his head off.

All of a sudden, there’s a screech and a smell of burning. That circuit that’s running the front motor, a wire just got touched through the thin insulation, the circuit tearing the hell out of itself. He gets scared. He turns on the auxiliaries. The auxiliaries don’t go on—you know why?

The vacuum tubes he’s using have come to the end of their rope, they didn’t have much juice to start with. Blooie! That’s the rear motor developing a short circuit. Ka-pow! That’s a defective transformer melting away in the middle of the ship.

And there he is, millions of miles from nowhere, empty space all around him, no more spare parts, tools that practically break in his hands—and not a single, living soul he can hustle.

And here am I, in my office, thinking about it, and I’m laughing my head off. Because it’s just possible, it just could happen, that what goes wrong with his ship is one of the half-dozen or so job lots of really bad electronic equipment that I personally, me, Bernie the Faust, that I sold to that surplus store at one time or another.

That’s all I’d ask. Just to have it happen that way.

Faust. He’d have Faust from me then. Right in the face. Faust. On the head, splitting it open, Faust. Faust I’d give him!

The only trouble is I’ll never know. All I know for sure is that I’m the only guy in history who sold the whole goddamn planet.

And bought it back.

“What do you consider the raison d’être, the chief value, of science fiction?” The question was asked in a survey of s-f writers and editors in the fan magazine Double Bill last year.

Fred Saberhagen’s reply: “Ideally, science fiction gives a chance to impose different coordinate systems upon the human condition, and to try to see what will change and what will remain the same “

“Coordinate system” is engineerese for “background” or “measurement” or occasionally “viewpoint.” The different coordinate system, in a science-fiction story, may be an alien planet, an alien body, an alien culture (past, future, or sidewise-in-time).

In this case, the set of coordinate systems is a set of coordinate systems—which is neither a Steinism, nor a typographical error, but a description of a checker game.

The machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that lived. It and many others like it were the inheritance of Earth from some war fought between unknown interstellar empires, in some time that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar.

One such machine could hang over a planet colonized by men and in two days pound the surface into a lifeless cloud of dust and steam, a hundred miles deep. This particular machine had already done just that.

It used no predictable tactics in its dedicated, unconscious war against life. The ancient, unknown gamesmen had built it as a random factor, to be loosed in the enemy’s territory to do what damage it might. Men thought its plan of battle was chosen by the random disintegrations of atoms in a block of some long-lived isotope buried deep inside it, and so was not even in theory predictable by opposing brains, human or electronic.

Men called it a berserker.

Del Murray, sometime computer specialist, had called it other names than that; but right now he was too busy to waste breath, as he moved in staggering lunges around the little cabin of his one-man fighter, plugging in replacement units for equipment damaged by the last near-miss of a berserker missile. An animal resembling a large dog with an ape’s forelegs moved around the cabin too, carrying in its nearly human hands a supply of emergency sealing patches. The cabin air was full of haze. Wherever movement of the haze showed a leak to an unpressurized part of the hull, the dog-ape moved to apply a patch.