In the Beginning (26 page)

Suddenly I went stiff all over. The puzzle came clear now. Laura had seen the killing, had seen the android murdered too. Perhaps it had happened in our house, our backyard. No wonder Armistead had her put away for safe keeping—it was a miracle he hadn’t just killed her. That also explained why
I
was being hunted—to get me out of the way, to keep me from reaching her and exposing the truth.

“Now you see?” the android asked.

“I see,” I said. “If we can get Laura out, it’ll clear your brother’s name. It’ll—”

“Stop talking,” he said. “It’s time for action.”

We were practically at the back of the sprawling supermarket building now. We stood at the first-floor window for a second, and I looked back at Huntley.

“Well?”

“Smash the window and go in,” Huntley said. “I’ll take care of the alarm. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How—”

“Go on!”

I grabbed a stone and smashed in the window. The bells began to ring. And then I saw how the android George Huntley had been planning to take care of the alarm.

***

He gave me a shove that knocked me halfway through the window. I turned and saw him starting to run. For a second I felt betrayed—then horrified.

He was running toward the front of the building, straight toward the crowd of android killers standing out there. And he was shouting, “Come get me! Catch me if you can!”

He had deliberately sacrificed himself. I heard them yelling, heard the sound of footsteps as they started to pursue him, ignoring the alarm.

I had no further time to waste. I leaped over the sill, found the alarm switch, threw it. The supermarket became still.

I began to pick my way through the darkened storeroom, through the heaps of baskets and crates, toward Armistead’s office. I was confident that I would find Armistead there.

I did.

He was sitting with his back to the door, talking on the phone.

“What’s that? Crazy android ran right past the store and they’re all chasing him? I was wondering about that. The alarm bell just went off here, and it must have been the same guy. Musta broke a window in back first.”

He kept on talking. I stopped listening. I was looking at Laura.

She sat tied up in one corner of the room, her eyes wide with astonishment at the sight of me. She seemed to be in pretty good shape. Her blouse was torn, her skirt was slashed to the thigh, and I could see bruises and scratches that made me wince. But they hadn’t hurt her. That was all that mattered. Home, books, furniture—as long as they hadn’t hurt Laura, what did the other things matter?

“Hello, Armistead,” I said. I stepped inside and slammed the door. “I came to pay you a little visit.”

He whirled, threw down the phone, and came toward me all in the same motion. He was a thick-bodied, ugly man, and there was strength in his arms and legs. He charged. I waited for him, and hit him in the face. Blood trickled out over his split lip, making him look even uglier.

“Goddamn android,” he muttered.

I laughed. “You’re starting to believe your own lies, Armistead. And that’s bad.” I hit him again. His eyes blazed, and he struck out at me wildly. He was strong, but he wasn’t used to fighting. He was a talker. He let other people do his fighting for him.

For a minute I felt that I really
was
an android—or, at least, that I was fighting for all the synthetic men who had died since the first one had left the laboratory three centuries ago. My fists ploughed into Armistead’s belly, and he rocked on his feet. His eyes started to look glassy.

He got in one more punch, a solid one that closed my already-battered eye. And then I moved in on him.

“That’s for Centaurus,” I said, and hit him. “That’s for Rigel. That’s for Procyon.” I went on, naming all the places where there had been anti-android rioting. By the time I was finished, Armistead lay in a huddled, sobbing heap on the floor.

I untied Laura, kissed her, and trussed Armistead up against the chair.

“It’s good to see you, honey,” I told her.

“I thought you’d never come back,” she said.

I turned to Armistead and snapped on the portable tape-recorder on his desk. “Okay, Armistead. I want a full confession of the way you provoked this riot. Begin with the way you had Mary Cartwright killed, and keep moving from there.” I hit him again, just by way of loosening his tongue.

From somewhere in the front of the supermarket, I heard someone yell, “Hey, Armistead! We got another!”

The “other” must have been Huntley. I clamped my lips together. Armistead was beginning to speak, slowly, unwillingly. The whole dirty story was going down on tape.

Any minute, the townspeople would be in here to report the happy news to Armistead. But I was going to have a full confession by that time, and I was going to make them listen to every bit of it. I was going to make sure that George Huntley’s sacrifice hadn’t been in vain.

The Hunters of Cutwold

(1957)

Harlan Ellison, who had been living next door to me in the summer of 1955 as my writing career suddenly and spectacularly took off, had a somewhat slower start himself, but by the middle of 1956 he, too, was selling stories about as fast as he could write them. Just as I had been, he was an avid science-fiction reader who longed to have his own stories published in the magazines he had read in his teens, and very quickly he joined Howard Browne’s team of staffers at
Amazing
and placed material with three or four other titles.

But he had a knack for writing crime stories too—tales of juvenile-delinquent kid-gangs were a specialty of his—and in the summer of 1956 he struck up a relationship with two new magazines that published that sort of thing,
Trapped
and
Guilty.
They paid an extravagant two cents a word, twice as much as what most of the science-fiction magazines we were selling to then would pay, and their editor, one W. W. Scott, seemed willing to buy as many stories as Harlan could bring them. Harlan was good enough to let me in on this bonanza, and, busy as I was meeting my monthly quota at
Amazing
and
Imagination,
I started doing crime stories too. My records show the sale of “Get Out and Stay Out” to
Guilty
in June, 1956, and “Clinging Vine” to
Trapped
a couple of weeks later.

And then W. W. Scott announced that he had been asked to edit a science-fiction magazine too,
Super-Science Fiction,
and Harlan and I suddenly had the inside track on a lucrative new market.

Scott—“Scottie,” everybody called him, except a few who called him “Bill”—was a short, cheerfully cantankerous old guy who would have fit right into a 1930s Hollywood movie about newspapermen, which was what I think he had been before he drifted into magazine editing. His office was tiny and crammed with weary-looking manuscripts that such agents as Scott Meredith, delighted to find a possible new market for ancient stuff that had been rejected everywhere, sent over by the ton. His voice was a high-pitched cackle; he had a full set of top and bottom dentures, which he didn’t always bother to wear; and I never saw him without his green eyeshade, which evidently he regarded as an essential part of the editorial costume. To us—and we both were barely past 21—he looked to be seventy or eighty years old, but probably he was 55 or thereabouts. He freely admitted to us that he knew next to nothing about science fiction and cared even less, and invited us to bring him as much material as we could manage.

We certainly did. Getting an open invitation like that from a two-cents-a-word market was like being handed the key to Fort Knox. In late June I wrote “Collecting Team” for him, which he published as “Catch ’em All Alive” in the first issue—December, 1956 of
Super-Science.
(Under its original title it has been reprinted dozens of times in school readers.) I also did a batch of science fillers for Scottie to use in rounding off blank pages—little essays on space exploration, computer research, and an interesting new drug called LSD. Harlan had a story in that first issue, too, and two in the second one. (I was too busy to do anything but science fillers for that issue.) The third issue had one Ellison and one Silverberg story; the fourth, two of mine, one of his. And so it went, month after month. As I got into the swing of it, I began doing longer pieces for the magazine. A 12,000-word story—and I was writing at least one for almost every issue from the fifth number on—paid $240, more than the monthly rent on my West End Avenue apartment, and I could turn one out in two working days.

By 1957, Harlan had moved along to an army base, having been careless enough to let himself get drafted, and the job of filling the pages of
Super-Science Fiction,
Trapped,
and
Guilty
devolved almost entirely on me. Just as well, too, because I didn’t have good personal chemistry with Paul Fairman of
Amazing
and
Fantastic
and he had begun to cut back on buying stories from me. Around the same time, Bill Hamling found that the sales figures of
Imagination
and
Imaginative Tales
were trending sharply downward, leading him to buy fewer stories from his staff and soon afterward to kill both magazines. My writing partnership with Randall Garrett had ended, too, at the urging of my wife, Barbara, who disliked Garrett intensely and didn’t want him coming around to see me. Faced with the loss of my two most reliable markets and the separation from my collaborator, I needed to be fast on my feet if I wanted to go on earning a decent living as a writer, and so I made myself very useful to W. W. Scott indeed. For
Trapped
and
Guilty
I wrote bushels of crime stories (“Mobster on the Make,” “Russian Roulette,” “Murder for Money,” etc., etc., etc.) and for
Super-Science Fiction
I did two or three stories an issue under a wide assortment of pseudonyms. At two cents a word for lots and lots of words I could support myself very nicely from that one market.

“The Hunters of Cutwold,” which I wrote in April, 1957 for the December, 1957
Super-Science Fiction
under the pseudonym of Calvin M. Knox, is typical of the many novelets I did for Scottie: stories set on alien planets with vivid scenery, involving hard-bitten characters who sometimes arrived at bleak ends. I suspect I derived the manner and some of the content from the South Sea stories of Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham, both favorite writers of mine. Scholars who have been writing theses on such Conrad-influenced novels of mine as
Downward to the Earth
and
Hot Sky at Midnight,
published at much later stages of my career, please take note.

It was morning on Cutwold, fifth planet in the Caveer system. And there would be betrayal by nightfall, Brannon knew. He knew it the way he knew the golden-green sun would rise, or the twin, blank-faced moons. He knew it ahead of time, half-sensing it with the shadowy precognitory sense that made him so terribly valuable as a guide in the deadly forests of Cutwold.

He crouched in the sandy loam outside his cabin, staring down the yet-unpaved street, a lean tanned figure with thin sharp-curving lips and deepset sepia eyes that had seen too much of the galaxy and of men. He was waiting for the betrayal to begin.

He did not have to wait long.

The morning had started like all the others: at dawn Caveer broke through the haze, showering its eight worlds with golden-green brightness, and moments later on Cutwold the dawnbirds set up their keening icy shriek as if in antiphonal response. Brannon always rose when the dawnbirds’ cry was heard; his day began and ended early.

It was eleven years since he had drifted to Cutwold when the money ran out. For eleven years he had led hunting parties through the vine-tangled Cutwold forests, keeping them from death by his strange foresight. He had made some friends in his eleven years on Cutwold, few of them human.

It was eleven days since he had last had any money. This was the off season for hunting. The tourists stayed away, amusing themselves on the pleasure-worlds of Winter V or losing themselves in dream-fantasy on the cloud-veiled planets in Procyon’s system. And on Cutwold the guides grew thin, and lived off jungle vines and small animals if they had not saved any money.

Brannon had not saved. But when the dawnbirds woke him that morning, something in their shrill sound told him that before noon he would be offered work, if he wanted it…and if his conscience could let him accept.

He waited.

At quarter past ten, when hunger started to grab Brannon’s vitals in a cold grasp, Murdoch came down the road. He paused for a moment where Brannon crouched, looking down at him, shading his eyes from the brightness of the sun.

“You’re Kly Brannon, aren’t you?”

“I am. Hello, Murdoch.”

The other stared. He was tall, taller even than Brannon, with shadows shading his craggy face. Strange suns had turned Murdoch’s face a leathery brown, and his eyebrows were a solid thick worm above his dark eyes, meeting. He said, “How did you know my name?”

“I guessed,” Brannon said. He came slowly to his feet and met Murdoch’s eyes, an inch or two above his own. He moistened his lips. “I don’t want the job, Murdoch.”

Somewhere in the thick jungle a scornful giant toad wheezed mockingly. Murdoch said, “I haven’t said anything about any jobs yet.”

“You will. I’m not interested.”

Calmly, Murdoch drew a cigarette-pack from his waistpouch. He tapped the side of the pack; the magnetic field sent a cigarette popping three-quarters of the way out of the little jeweled-metal box. “Have one?”

Brannon shook his head. “Thanks. No.”

Murdoch took the extended cigarette himself, flicked the igniting capsule on its tip, and made an elaborate ceremony out of placing it in his mouth. He puffed. After a long moment he said, “There’s ten thousand units cold cash in it for you, Brannon. That’s the standard guide fee multiplied by ten. Let’s go inside your shack and talk about it, shall we?”

Brannon led the way. The shack was dark and musty; it hadn’t been cleaned in more than a week. Brannon’s few possessions lay scattered about carelessly. He had left Dezjon VI in a hurry, eleven years before, leaving behind everything he owned save the clothes on his back. He hadn’t bothered to accumulate any property since then; it was nothing but a weight around a man’s neck.