Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One (18 page)

Mycroft nodded. “I can see how that’s possible.”

Jean said, “I have the money. I’ve always wanted it, now I have it. And now—” she held out her hands, raised her eyebrows. “It’s just a number in a bank book…Tomorrow morning I’ll get up and say to myself, ‘What shall I do today? Shall I buy a house? Shall I order a thousand dollars worth of clothes? Shall I start out on a two year tour of Argo Navis?’ And the answer will come out, ‘No, the hell with it all.’”

“What you need,” said Mycroft, “are some friends, nice girls your own age.”

Jean’s mouth moved in rather a sickly smile. “I’m afraid we wouldn’t have much in common…It’s probably a good idea, but—it wouldn’t work out.” She sat passively in the chair, her wide mouth drooping.

Mycroft noticed that in repose it was a sweet generous mouth.

She said in a low voice, “I can’t get out of my head the idea that somewhere in the universe I must have a mother and a father…”

Mycroft rubbed his chin. “People who’d abandon a baby in a saloon aren’t worth thinking about, Jean.”

“I know,” she said in a dismal voice. “Oh Mr. Mycroft, I’m so damn lonely…” Jean was crying, her head buried in her arms.

Mycroft irresolutely put his hand on her shoulder, patted awkwardly.

After a moment she said, “You’ll think I’m an awful fool.”

“No,” said Mycroft gruffly. “I think nothing of the kind. I wish that I…” He could not put it into words.

She pulled herself together, rose to her feet. “Enough of this…” She turned his head up, kissed his chin. “You’re really very nice, Mr. Mycroft…But I don’t want sympathy. I hate it. I’m used to looking out for myself.”

Mycroft returned to his seat, loaded his pipe to keep his fingers busy. Jean picked up her little hand-bag. “Right now I’ve got a date with a couturier named André. He’s going to dress me to an inch of my life. And then I’m going to—” She broke off. “I’d better not tell you. You’d be alarmed and shocked.”

He cleared his throat. “I expect I would.”

She nodded brightly. “So long.” Then left his office.

He said, “I feel like going out and getting drunk…”

Ten minutes passed. His door opened. Jean looked in.

“Hello, Mr. Mycroft.”

“Hello, Jean.”

“I changed my mind. I thought it would be nicer if I took you out to dinner, and then maybe we could go to a show…Would you like that?”

“Very much,” said Mycroft.

Afterword to “Abercrombie Station”

During these years [from 1937 at the University of California at Berkeley], when I found the time, I wrote science fiction. In my freshman year I wrote a long novelette, which I never submitted for publication, but which I later cannibalized.

During my sophomore year, since I was still an English major, I took a course in creative writing. The professor was George Hand: a tall, saturnine gentleman, stern and doctrinaire. Each week we were required to submit some item of creative writing, which he would comment upon and sometimes criticize. A fellow student in the class…submitted a pastiche concerning a prize fight. I, on the other hand, turned in a short science fiction story which I thought I would submit somewhere for publication, but which in the meantime I thought would serve as my weekly exercise in creative writing.

The class convened. George Hand entered the room, marched up to the podium and looked around the class. He gathered his energy, and spoke with almost painful deliberation. “This has been a remarkable week,” he said, “and I have been impressed by the breadth and scope of the submissions. I should note that they range up and down the gamut of excellence. On the one hand, we have a pungent account by Mr. Fabun, which takes us to the front seats of a prize fight. His sentences are terse and alive. We can smell the sweat; we can feel the thud of the blows; we know the thrill of victory and the pathos of defeat. It is a memorable piece of work. On the other hand,”—and here Professor Hand rapped the top of the podium with his knuckles—”we have an almost incomprehensible example of what I believe is known as ‘science fiction’.”

The professor here allowed himself to show a small smile. “This sort of thing, perhaps unkindly, has been termed a semi-psychotic fugue from reality. I, of course, am not confident to make such a judgment.” After class, I threw away the story, which I did not like very much anyway.

—Jack Vance

Three-Legged Joe

It might be well to make, in passing, a reference to old-time prospectors. Their
experience has been
gained through vast hardship and peril; no
cause for wonder, then, that
as a group they are secretive and solitary. It is hard to win their friendship; they are understandably contemptuous of academic training. Much of their lore will
die with them and this is a pity, since locked in their minds is knowledge that might well save a thousand lives.

—Excerpt from Appendix II, Hade’s Manual of Practical Space Exploration and Mineral Survey.

John Milke and Oliver Paskell
sauntered along Bang-out Row in Merlinville. Recent graduates of Highland Technical Institute, they walked with an assured and casual stride in order
to convey an impression of hard-boiled competence. Old-timers on porches along the way stared, then turned and muttered briefly
to each other.

John Milke was rubicund, energetic, positive; when he walked
his cheeks and tidy little paunch jiggled. Oliver Paskell, who was dark, spare and slight, affected old-style spectacles and an underslung pipe. Paskell was noticeably less brisk than Milke. Where Milke swaggered, Paskell slouched; where Milke inspected the quiet gray men on the porches with a lordly air, Paskell watched from the corner of his eye.

Milke pointed. “Number 432, right there.” He opened the gate and approached the porch with Paskell two steps behind.

A tall bony man sat watching them with eyes pale and hard as marbles.

Milke asked, “You’re Abel Cooley?”

“That’s me.”

“I understand that you’re one of the best outside men on the planet. We’re going out on a prospect trip; we need a good all-around hand, and we’d like to hire you. You’d have to take care of chow, service space-suits, load samples, things like that.”

Abel Cooley studied Milke
briefly, then turned his pale eyes upon Paskell. Paskell looked away, out over the swells of naked granite that rolled six hundred miles west and south of Merlinville.

Cooley said in a mild voice, “Where you lads thinking to prospect?”

Milke blinked and frowned. It was his understanding that such questions were more or less taboo, though of course a man had a right to know where his job would take him. “In strict confidence,” said Milke, “we’re
going out to Odfars.”

“Odfars, eh?” Cooley’s expression changed not at all. “What do you expect to find out there?”

“Well—Pillson’s Almanac indicates a very high density. Which, as you may know, means heavy metal. Then the Deed Office shows neither claims nor workings on Odfars, so we thought we’d survey the territory before someone beat
us to it.”

Cooley nodded slowly. “So you’re going out to Odfars…well, I tell you what to do. Get Three-legged Joe to wait on you. He’ll make you a good hand.”

“Three-legged Joe?” asked Milke in puzzlement. “Where do we find him?”

“He’s out on Odfars now.”

Paskell came closer. “How do we locate him on Odfars?”

Cooley smiled crookedly. “Don’t worry about that. Leave it to Joe. He’ll find you.”

From the house came a dark-skinned man five feet tall and four feet wide. Cooley said, “James, these boys are going prospecting out on Odfars; they’re looking for a flunky. Maybe you’re interested?”

“Not just now, Abel.”

“Maybe Three-legged Joe is the man to see.”

“Can’t beat Three-legged Joe.”

Paskell drew Milke out to the street. “They’re joking.”

Milke said darkly, “No use trying to get work out of those old bums. They get by on their pensions; they don’t want an honest job.”

Paskell said thoughtfully, “Perhaps it’s as well to go out by ourselves; it might be less trouble in the long run.
These old-timers don’t understand modern methods. Even if we found a man that satisfied us, we’d have to break him in on the Pinsley generator and the Hurd; he’d have the aerators out of adjustment before we’d been out twice
.”

Milke nodded. “There’ll be more work for us, but I think you’re right.”

Paskell pointed. “There’s the other place—Tom Hand’s Chandlery.”

Milke consulted a list. “I hope this doesn’t turn out to be another wild goose chase; we need those extra filters.”

Tom Hand’s Chandlery occupied a large dirty building raised off the ground on four-foot stilts. Milke and Paskell climbed up on the loading platform. A scrawny near-bald man approached from out of the shadows. “What’s the trouble, boys?”

Milke frowned at his list while Paskell stood aside puffing owlishly on his pipe. “If you’ll take us to your technical superintendent,” said Milke, “I think I can explain what we need.”

The old man reached out two dirty fingers. “Lemme see what you want.”

Milke fastidiously moved the list out of reach. “I think I’d better see someone in the technical department.”

The old man said impatiently, “Son, out here we don’t have departments, technical or otherwise. Lemme see what you want. If we got it, I’ll know; if we don’t, I’ll know.”

Milke handed over the list. The old man hissed through his teeth. “You want an ungodly amount of them filters.”

“They keep burning out on us,” said Milke. “I’ve diagnosed the trouble—an extra load on the circuit.”

“Mmph, those things never burn out. You’ve probably been plugging them in backwise
. This side here fits against the black thing-a-ma-jig; this side connects to your circuits. Is that how you had ’em?”

Milke cleared his throat. “Well—”

Paskell took the pipe out of his mouth. “No, as a matter of fact we had them in the other way.”

The old man nodded. “I’ll give you three. That’s all you’ll use in a lifetime. Now for this other stuff, we got to go around to the front.”

He led them down a dark aisle, past racks crammed with nameless oddments, into a room split by a scarred wooden counter.

At a table near the door three men sat playing cards; nearby stood the dark thick man called James.

James called in a jocular baritone, “Give ’em a jug of acid for Three-legged Joe, Tom. These boys is going out to prospect Odfars.”

“Odfars, eh?” Tom scrutinized Milke and Paskell with impersonal interest. “Don’t know as I’d try it, boys. Three-legged Joe—”

Milke asked brusquely, “What do we owe you?”

Tom Hand scribbled out a bill, took Milke’s money.

Paskell asked tentatively, “Who is this Three-legged Joe?…A joke? Or is there actually someone out there?”

Tom Hand bent over his cash box. The men at the table snapped cards along the green felt. James had his back turned.

Paskell put the pipe back in his mouth, sucked noisily.

On the way back, Milke said bitterly, “It’s always been the same way; whenever
these old-timers have a laugh on a stranger, they play it for all it’s worth…”

“But who or what is Three-legged Joe?”

“Well,” said Milke, “sooner or later, I suppose we’ll find out.”

Odfars ranked fourteenth in a scatter of dead worlds around Sigma Sculptoris, drifting in an orbit so wide that the sun showed like a medium-distant street lamp.

Paskell gingerly handled the controls, while Milke scanned the face of the planet with radar peaked to highest sensitivity. Milke pointed to a mirror-smooth surface winding like a fjord between axe-headed crags. “Look there, an ideal landing site—perfect!”

Paskell said doubtfully, “It looks like a chain of lakes.”

“That’s what it is—lakes of quicksilver.” Milke turned Paskell a chiding glance. “It’s absolute zero down there; it can’t help but be solid, if that’s what’s on your mind.”

“True,” said Paskell. “But it has a peculiar soft look to it.”

“If it’s liquid,” scoffed Milke, “I’ll eat your
hat.”

“If it’s liquid,” said Paskell, “neither one of us will eat—ever again. Well—here goes.”

The impact of landing substantiated Milke’s position. He ran to the port, looked out. “Hmmph, can’t see anything in this dark without booster goggles
. In any event, we’ll have a good level floor for our assay
tent.”

Paskell saw in his mind’s eye a page from Hade’s Manual:
“The assay tent is customarily a balloon of plastic film maintained by air pressure. Its use eliminates noxious, acrid or poisonous fumes inside the ship, formerly a source of great annoyance. Certain authorities advise a field survey before bringing out the tent; others maintain that erecting the tent first will facilitate examination of samples taken on the survey, and I generally favor the latter practice.”

Milke said off-handedly, “Some of the boys like to wait before they put up their bubble; others set it out first thing to give them a place to drop off their samples. I generally like to get it up and out of the way.”