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

“Burckee, Burckee, Burckee ol’ turkey,” murmured the comedian in accents of wonder, “who the hell writes your stuff? Who writes your lousy, lousy stuff?”

Stock shot, Fafnir putting down tail-first on rocky plain, horizon washed out and black space brought down close. Rocks sharp-cornered, uneroded. Long shot, stabilizing jacks extending widest. Ladder out. Two suited figures ride it down, the other two climb down.

Closeup, all four at tail-base.

Horowitz: (filter mike) Check your radios. Read me?

All: Check. Read you fine.

Horowitz: Each take a fin. Walk straight out with the fin as a guide, and when you’ve passed our scorch area, get a rock scraping every five feet or so until you’re far enough away that the horizon’s a third of the way up the hull. Got that? No farther. (Beat) And I can almost tell you now, we aren’t going to find one blessed thing. No virus, no spore, no nothing. My God, it’s no more than twelve, thirteen degrees K in the shadows here. Anyway ... let’s go.

Burcke: (off) Scratch and hop, scratch and hop. In this gravity, you don’t move fast or push hard, or you’ll soar away and take minutes to come down again. Shuffle and scratch, scratch and sweep, scratch and hop. It took them hours.

Closeup, Kearsarge, looking down.

Kearsarge: Here’s something.

Closeups, each of the other three, looking up, turning head at the sound of Kearsarge’s voice.

Horowitz: What is it?

Kearsarge: Scorch. A regular mess of it. Hell, you know what? Swope toppled his ship. I can see where he came down, then where he took off, scraping along to the big edge there.

Flannel: Wonder he didn’t wreck her.

Kearsarge: He did. He couldn’t hurt the hull any in this gravity, but he sure as hell wiped off his antennae, because there they are: landing, range, transmission—every one, by God. No wonder he came barreling in the way he did. You can’t land a Fafnir on manual, but you can try, and he tried. Poor ol’ Swopie.

Horowitz: Everybody over there by Kearsarge. Maybe Swope picked up something where he scraped.

Long shot of the four working around long scorch and scrape marks.

Burcke: (off, narrating) They filled their specimen sacks and brought them aboard, and then for seventy-two hours they went through their dust and stones with every test Horowitz could devise. ... He had been quite right in his first guess. The moonlet Iapetus is as devoid of life as the inside of an autoclave.

Cut to foredeck set, but up-ended, the controls at highest point, the floor what was the after bulkhead. Iris moving around with slow shuffle; setting out magnetized plates on steel table, each one hitting loudly. In background, Flannel fusses with small electron mike, watching screen and moving objective screws. Lifeboat blister open, Kearsarge inside, working.

Airlock cycles, opens, and Horowitz comes in, suited, with sack. He is weary. Iris helps with helmet.

Horowitz: I’ve had it. Let’s get home. We can get just so duty-bound.

Iris: What’s this ‘home’? I don’t remember.

Horowitz: You for home, Kearsarge?

Kearsarge: Any time you’re through hoein’ this rock.

Horowitz: What are you doing in there?

Kearsarge: Just routine. Figured you might want to buzz around the other side with the boat.

Horowitz:No, sir. I came close enough on foot. I say we’re done here. A man could sit home with a pencil and paper and figure out the density of sub-microscopic growth this place would have to have to bring any back on the hull. We’d be hip deep in it. The iapetitis virus didn’t come from Iapetus, and that, friends, is for sure and official.

Kearsarge: (off) Oh, my holy mother. (He pops out, putty-colored.) George, get over here.

Iris: (curiously) What is it?

She goes over and disappears for a moment inside the boat, with Kearsarge and Horowitz. Off, she gasps. Then, one by one they climb out and stand looking at Flannel.

Flannel: What I got, blue horns or something?

Horowitz: Show him, Kearsarge.

Kearsarge beckons. There is a strange pucker of grim amusement on his craggy face.

Kearsarge: Come look, little feller. Then you can join our club.

Reluctantly, the big man goes over to the blister and follows Kearsarge into the lifeboat. Dolly after them, swing in to the instrument panel, under it and look up.

Lashed to the projecting lower end of the main thrust control is a silver can with a small cylinder at the near end.

Flannel: (pointing stupidly) Is that . . . that the same thing that—

Kearsarge:A little smaller, but then you don’t need as much cyanide for a boat.

Flannel: (angry) Who the hell put it there? You?

Kearsarge: Not me, feller. I just found it.

Horowitz: It’s been there all along, Flannel. Kearsarge is right: you belong to the club too. You sure it was Heri Gonza told you to take the boat?

Flannel: Sure it was. He couldn’t have nothing to do with this. (Suddenly it hits him) Jesus! I mighta—

Horowitz: We’ll have plenty of time to talk this over. Let’s pack up the testing stuff and haul out of here.

Flannel: (to no one) Jesus.

Heri Gonza lay back in the projection room and sipped his beer and watched the stock shot of a Fafnir taking off from a rock plain. “You really get all that glop out of that book, Burcke, m’boy?”

“Every bit of it,” said Burcke, watching the screen.

“You know how it is in space, a fellow’s got to do something with his time. Sometimes he writes, and sometimes it’s fairy tales, and sometimes you can get a pretty good show out of a fairy tale. But when you do that, you call it a fairy tale. Follow me?”

“Yup.”

“This was really what went out on the air tonight?”

“Sure is.”

Very, very softly, Heri Gonza said, “Poor Burcke. Poor, poor ol’ Burcke.”

Closeup, hands turning pages in rough logbook. Pull back to show Burcke with book. He looks up, and when he speaks his voice is solemn.

Burcke: Time to think, time to talk it over. Time to put all the pieces in the same place at the same time, and push them against each other to see what fits.

Fade to black; but it is not black after all: instead, starry space. Pan across to pick up ship, a silver fish with a scarlet tail. Zoom in fast, dissolve through hull, discovering fore-deck. The four lounge around, really relaxed, willing to think before speaking, and to speak carefully. Horowitz and Kearsarge sit at the table ignoring a chessboard. Iris is stretched on the deck with a rolled-up specimen sack under her head. Flannel kneels before a spread of Canfield solitaire. Horowitz is watching him.

Horowitz:I like to think about Flannel.

Flannel: Think what?

Horowitz: Oh ... the alternatives. The ‘ifs.’ What would Flannel do if this had been different, or that.

Flannel: There’s no sense in that kind of thinkin’—if this, if that. This happened, or that happened, and that’s all there is to it. You got anything special in mind?