Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

“God!” Gar groaned again. And suddenly he was sick. He made a dash for the washroom, and after a while he felt better.

When he straightened up from the wash basin he looked at his reflection in the mirror for a long time, clinging to his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. He must have been out of his head for two or three days.

The first time. Awful! Somehow, he had never quite believed in space madness.

Suddenly he remembered Jerry. Poor Jerry!

Gar lurched from the washroom back into the control room. Jerry was awake. He looked up at Gar, forcing a smile to his lips. “Hello, Dr. Elton,” Jerry said.

Gar stopped as though shot.

“It’s happened, Dr. Elton, just as you said it would,” Jerry said, his smile widening.

“Forget that,” Gar growled. “I took a yellow pill I’m back to normal again.”

Jerry’s smile vanished abruptly. “I know what I did now,” he said. “It’s terrible. I killed six people. But I’m sane now. I’m willing to take what’s coming to me.”

“Forget that!” Gar snarled. “You don’t have to humor me now. Just a minute and I’ll untie you.”

“Thanks, Doctor,” Jerry said. “It will sure be a relief to get out of this strait jacket.”

Gar knelt beside Jerry and untied the knots in the ropes and unwound them from around Jerry’s chest and legs.

“You’ll be all right in a minute,” Gar said, massaging Jerry’s limp arms. The physical and nervous strain of sitting there immobilized had been rugged.

Slowly he worked circulation back into Jerry, then helped him to his feet.

“You don’t need to worry, Dr. Elton,” Jerry said. “I don’t know why I killed those people, but I know I would never do such a thing again. I must have been insane.”

“Can you stand now?” Gar said, letting go of Jerry.

Jerry took a few steps back and forth, unsteadily at first, then with better co-ordination. His resemblance to a robot decreased with exercise.

Gar was beginning to feel sick again. He fought it.

“You OK now, Jerry boy?” he asked worriedly.

“I’m fine now, Dr. Elton,” Jerry said. “And thanks for everything you’ve done for me.”

Abruptly Jerry turned and went over to the air-lock door and opened it.

“Good-by now, Dr. Elton,” he said.

“Wait!” Gar screamed, leaping toward Jerry.

But Jerry had stepped into the air lock and closed the door. Gar tried to open it, but already Jerry had turned on the pump that would evacuate the air from the lock.

Screaming Jerry’s name senselessly in horror, Gar watched through the small square of thick glass in the door as Jerry’s chest quickly expanded, then collapsed as a mixture of phlegm and blood dribbled from his nostrils and lips, and his eyes enlarged and glazed over, then one of them ripped open and collapsed, its fluid draining down his cheek.

He watched as Jerry glanced toward the side of the air lock and smiled, then spun the wheel that opened the air lock to the vacuum of space, and stepped out.

And when Gar finally stopped screaming and sank to the deck, sobbing, his knuckles were broken and bloody from pounding on bare metal.

For some reason, s-f has enjoyed a rather more reputable name in Great Britain than it has here—or at least a good many more “literary” British authors have written it. {Kipling, Wells, Dunsany, Doyle, Chesterton, Priestley, Collier, Coppard, to name a few.)

In this country, fantasy, beginning with Hawthorne, has a long record of respectability; but even the best science fiction (with the notable exception of a few offbeat efforts by “major” writers, such as Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon”) could be found ordinarily only in pulp magazines.

All this, of course, was B.B.—Before the Bomb. Then when s-f did achieve a measure of popular approval here, one of the first science-fiction stories printed in a top national magazine was by a British author. (Not the first. Heinlein beat Kersh to The Saturday Evening Post by about two months, early in 1947.)

Though Mr. Kersh lives in this country now, and is one of the more colorful lights in the New York literary firmament, much of his work retains the flavor of the traditionally English adventure story. This one is a tale told in a barroom, by that classic adventurer, the “younger son of a younger son.”

About the man called Pilgrim there was a certain air of something gone stale. “Seedy” is the word for it, as applied to a human being. It was difficult to regard him except as a careful housewife regards a pot of homemade jam upon the surface of which she observes a patch of mildew. Sweet but questionable, she says to herself, but it is a pity to waste it. Give it to the poor. So, as it seemed to me, it was with Pilgrim.

He was curiously appealing to me in what looked like a losing fight against Skid Row, and maintained a haughty reserve when the bartender, detaining him as he abstractedly started to stroll out of MacAroon’s Grill, said, “Dad-die be a dollar-ten, doc.”

Pilgrim slapped himself on the forehead, and beat himself about the pockets, and cried, “My wallet! I left it at home.”

“Oh-oh,” the bartender said, lifting the counter flap.

Then I said, “Here’s the dollar-ten, Mike. Let the man go.”

But Pilgrim would not go. He took me by the arm, and said in the old-fashioned drawling kind of Oxford accent, “No, but really, this is too kind! I’m afraid I can’t reciprocate. As a fellow limey you will understand. One’s position here becomes invidious. You see, I have only just now lost two fortunes, and am in the trough of the wave between the second and the third—which I assure you is not farther off than the middle of next month. I must get to Detroit. But allow me to introduce myself by the name by which I prefer to be known: John Pilgrim. Call me Jack. In honesty, I ought to tell you that this is not my real name. If some plague were to wipe out the male members of my family in a certain quarter of Middlesex, in England, I should be addressed very differently; and ride my horses, to boot. As matters stand, I am the younger son of a younger son, cast out with a few thousand pounds in my pocket, to make my fortune in Canada.”

I asked, “Was that your first fortune?”

“Heavens, no! Man on the boat had an infallible system shooting dice. I arrived in Canada, sir, with four dollars and eighteen cents—and my clothes. I roughed it, I assure you. Clerk in a hardware store, dismissed on unjust suspicion of peculation; errand boy at a consulate, kicked out for what they called ‘shaking down’ an applicant for a visa, which was a lie; representative of a wine merchant, wrongly accused of drinking the samples. I went through the mill, I do assure you. And now I am offered a lucrative post in Detroit.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

He said, “Checking things for a motor company.”

“What things?”

“A word to the wise is sufficient. This is strictly hush-hush. Less said the better, what? But I can put you in the way of a few million dollars if you have time and money to spare.”

“Pray do so,” I said.

“I will. But not being a complete fool I will not be exact in my geography. Do you know Brazil? I know where there is a massive fortune in virgin gold in one of the tributaries of the Amazon. . . . Oh, dear, it really is a bitter fact that men with money who want some more insist on having the more before they lay out the less! Yet I tell you without the least reserve that I got about ten thousand ounces of pure gold out of the people who live by that river”