C M Kornbluth - A Mile Beyond the Moon

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A MILE BEYOND THE MOQN

C. M. Kornbluth

v3.0 fixed garbled text, broken paragraphs, formatting; by paragwinn

MANOR BOOKS INC.

A MANOR BOOK

First printing ....... January, 1962

Second printing ........ May, 1966

Third printing .... December, 1972

Manor Books Inc.

329 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10016

arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.

Contents

MAKE MINE MARS

THE EVENTS LEADING DOWN TO THE TRAGEDY

THE LITTLE BLACK BAG

EVERYBODY KNOWS JOE

TIME BUM

VIRGINIA

KAZAM COLLECTS

THE LAST MAN LEFT IN THE BAR

THE ADVENTURER

THE WORDS OF GURU

SHARK SHIP

Make Mine Mars

"X is for the ecstasy she ga-a-ave me; E is for her eyes—one, two, and three-ee; T is

for the teeth with which she'd sha-a-ave me; S is for her scales of i-vo-ree-ee-ee ..."

Somebody was singing, and my throbbing head objected. I teemed to have a mouthful of

sawdust

T is for her tentacles ah-round me;

J is for her jowls—were none soo-oo fair;

H is for the happy day she found me; 'Fe is for the iron in her hair..,"

I ran my tongue around inside my mouth. It was full of sawdust—spruce and cedar,

rocketed in from Earth.

"Put them all to-gether, they spell Xetstjhfe . . ."

My eyes snapped open, and I sat up, cracking my head on the underside of the table

beneath which I was lying. I lay down waited for the pinwheels to stop spinning. I tried to it

out. Spruce and cedar . . .Honest Blogri's Olde Earthe Saloon . . . eleven stingers with a

Sirian named Wenjtkpli...

"A worrud that means the wur-r-l-l-d too-oo mee-ee-ee!"

Through the fading pinwheels I saw a long and horrid face, a Sirian face, peering at me

with kindly interest under the table. It was Wenjtkpli.

"Good morning, little Earth chum," he said. "You feel not so tired now?"

"Morning?" I yelled, sitting up again and cracking my head again and lying down again to

wait for the pinwheels to fade again.

"You sleep," I heard him say, "fourteen hours—so happy, so peaceful!"

"I gotta get out of here," I mumbled, scrambling about on the imported sawdust for my

hat. I found I was wearing it, and climbed out, stood up, and leaned against the table,

swaying and spitting out the last of the spruce and cedar.

"You like another stinger?" asked Wenjtkpli brightly. I retched feebly.

"Fourteen hours," I mumbled. "That makes it 0900 Mars now, or exactly ten hours past

the time I was supposed to report for the nightside at the bureau."

"But last night you talk different," the Sirian told me in surprise. "You say many times how

bureau chief McGillicuddy can take lousy job and jam—"

"That was last night," I moaned. "This is this morning."

"Relax, little Earth chum. I sing again song you taught me:

X is for the ecstasy she ga-a-ave me; E is for—"

My throbbing head still objected. I flapped good-by at him and set a course for the door

of Blogri's joint. The quaint period mottoes: "QUAFFE YE NUT-BROWN AYLE" "DROPPE

DEAD TWYCE" and so on—didn't look so quaint by the cold light of the Martian dawn.

An unpleasant little character, Venusian or something, I'd seen around the place oozed

up to me. "Head hurt plenty,

“Huh?" he simpered.

"This is no time for sympathy," I said. "Now one side or a flipper off—I gotta go to work."

"No sympathy," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He fumbled oddly in his belt,

then showed me a little white capsule. "Clear your head, huh? Work like lightning, you bet!"

I was interested. "How much?"

"For you, friend, nothing. Because I hate seeing fellows suffer with big head."

"Beat it," I told him, and shoved past through the door.

That pitch of his with a free sample meant he was pushing

J-K-B. I was in enough trouble without adding an unbreakable addiction to the stuff. If I'd

taken his free sample, I would have been back to see him in 12 hours, sweating blood for

more. And that time he would have named his own price.

I fell into an eastbound chair and fumbled a quarter into the slot The thin, cold air of the

pressure dome was clearing my head already. I was sorry for all the times I’d cussed a

skinflint dome administration for not supplying a richer air mix or heating the outdoors more

lavishly. I felt

food enough to shave, and luckily had my razor in my wallet. By the time the chair was

gliding past the building, where Interstellar News had a floor, I had the whiskers off my jaw

and most of the sawdust out of my hair.

The floater took me up to our floor while I tried not to think of what McGillicuddy would

have to say.

The newsroom was full of noise as usual. McGillicuddy vu in the copydesk slot chewing

his way through a pile of dpatches due to be filed on the pressure dome split for A.M.

newscasts in four minutes by the big wall clock. He fed his copy, without looking, to an

operator battering the keys of fte old-fashioned radioteletype that was good enough to serve

for local clients.

"Two minutes short!" he yelled at one of the men on the "Gimme a brightener! Gimme a

god-damned brightener!" The rim man raced to the receiving ethertypes from rCammadion,

Betelgeuse, and the other Interstellar bureaus. He yanked an item from one of the clicking

machines and •caJed it at McGillicuddy, who slashed at it with his pencil and passed it to

the operator. The tape the operator was cooing started through the transmitter-distributor,

and on all local clients' radioteletypes appeared:

"FIFTEEN-MINUTE INTERSTELLAR NEWSCAST AM MARS PRESSURE DOMES."

Everybody leaned back and lit up. McGillicuddy's eye fell on me, and I cleared my throat

"Got a cold?" he asked genially.

"Nope. No cold."

"Touch of indigestion? Flu, maybe? You're tardy today."

"I know it."

"Bright boy," He was smiling. That was bad.

"Spencer," he told me. "I thought long and hard about you. I thought about you when you

failed to show up for the nightside. I thought about you intermittently through the night as I

took your shift. Along about 0300 I decided what to do with you. It was as though Providence

had taken a hand. It was as though I prayed 'Lord, what shall I do with a drunken, no-good

son of a spacecook who ranks in my opinion with the boils of Job as an affliction to man?*

Here's i the answer, Spencer."

He tossed me a piece-of ethertype paper, torn from one of our interstellar-circuit

machines. On it was the following dialogue:

ANYBODY TTHURE I MEAN THERE

THIS MARSBUO ISN GA PLS

WOT TTHUT I MEAN WOT THAT MEAN PLEASE

THIS IS THE MARS BUREAU OF INTERSTELLAR NEWS. WHO ARE YOU AND

WHAT ARE YOU DOING HORSING AROUND ON OUR KRUEGER 60-B CIRCUIT

TELETYPE QUESTIONMARK. WHERE IS REGULAR STAFFER. GO AHEAD

THATK WOT I AM CALLING YOU ABBOUUT. KENNEDY DIED THIS MORNING

PNEUMONIA. I AM WEEMS EDITOR PHOENIX. U SENDING REPLLACEMENT

KENNEDY PLEAS

THIS MCGILLICUDDY, MARSBUO ISN CHIEF. SENDING REPLACEMENT

KENNEDY SOONEST. HAVE IDEAL MAN FOR JOB. END.

That was all. It was enough.

"Chief," I said to McGillicuddy. "Chief, you can't. You wouldn't—would you?"

"Better get packed," he told me, busily marking up copy, "Better take plenty of nice,

warm clothing. I understand Krueger 60-B is about one thousand times dimmer than the sun.

That's absolute magnitude, of course—Frostbite's in quite close. A primitive community, I'm

told. Kennedy didn't like it. But of course the poor old duffer wasn't good enough to handle

anything swifter than a one-man bureau on a one-planet split. Better take lots of warm

clothing."

"I quit," I said.

"Sam," said somebody, in a voice that always makes me turn to custard inside.

"Hello, Ellie," I said. "I was just telling Mr. McGillicuddy that he isn't going to shoot me off

to Frostbite to rot."

"Freeze," corrected McGillicuddy with relish. "Freeze. Good morning, Miss Masters. Did

you want to say a few parting words to your friend?"

"I do," she told him, and drew me aside to no man's land where the ladies of the press

prepared strange copy for the (coder sex. "Don't quit, Sam," she said in that voice. "I could

never love a quitter. What if it is a minor assignment?"

"Minor," I said. ''What a gem of understatement that is!"

"It'll be good for you," she insisted. "You can show him that you've got on the ball. You'll

be on your own except for the regular dispatches to the main circuit and your local unit. You

could dig up all sorts of cute feature stories that'd get your name known." And so on. It was

partly her logic, partly that voice and partly her promise to kiss me good-by at the port.

I’M GOING TO take it," I told McGillicuddy. He looked up with a pleased smile and

murmured: "The power of prayer . . ."

The good-by kiss from Ellie was the only thing about the jonmey that wasn't nightmarish.

ISN's expense account stuck me on a rusty bucket that I shared with glamorous freight like

yak kids and tenpenny nails. The little yaks blatted whenever we went into overdrive to break

through the speed of light. The Greenhough Effect—known to readers of the science

features as "supertime"—scared hell out of them. On ordinary rocket drive, they just groaned

and whimpered to each other the yak equivalent of "Thibet was never like this!"

The Frostbite spaceport wasn't like the South Pole, but it'd be like Greenland, There was

a bunch of farmers waiting for their yaks, beating their mittened hands together and exhaling

long plumes of vapor. The collector of customs, a rat-faced city boy, didn't have the decency

to hand them over and let the hayseeds get back to the administration building. I watched

through a porthole and saw him stalling and dawdling over a sheaf of papers for each of the

farmers. Oddly enough, the stalling and dawdling stopped as soon as the farmers caught on

and passed over a few dollars. Nobody even bothered to slip it shamefacedly from one

hand to another. They just handed it over, not caring who saw—Rat-Face sneering, the

farmers dumbly accepting the racket.

My turn came. Rat-Face came aboard and we were introduced by the chief engineer.

"Harya," he said. "Twenny bucks."

"What for?"

"Landing permit. Later at the administration you can pay your visitor's permit. That's

twenny, bucks too."

"I'm not a visitor. I'm coming here to work."

"Work, schmurk. So you'll need a work permit—twenny bucks." His eyes wandered.

"Whaddaya got there?"

"Ethertype parts. May need them for replacements."

He was on his knees hi front of the box, crooning, "Triple ad valorem plus twenny dollars

security bond for each part plus twenny dollars inspection fee plus twenny dollars for

decontamination plus twenny dollars for failure to declare plus—"

"Break it up, Joe," said a new arrival—a grey-mustached little man, lost in his parka.

"He's a friend of mine. Extend the courtesies of the port."

Rat-Face—Joe—didn't like it, but he took it. He muttered about doing his duty and gave

me a card.

"Twenny bucks?" I asked, studying it.

"Nah," he said angrily. "You're free-loading." He got out

"Looks as if you saved ISN some money," I said to the little man. He threw back the hood

of his parka in the relative warmth of the ship.

"Why not? We'll be working together. I'm Chenery from the Phoenix."

"Oh, yeah—the client"

"That's right," he agreed, grinning. "The client. What exactly did you do to get banished

to Frostbite?"

Since there was probably a spacemail aboard from Mc-Gillicuddy telling him exactly

what I did, I told him. "Chief thought I was generally shiftless."

"You'll do here," he said. "It's a shiftless, easy-going kind of place. I have the key to your

bureau. Want me to lead the way?"

"What about my baggage?"

"Your stuff's safe. Port officers won't loot it when they know you're a friend of the

Phoenix."

That wasn't exactly what I'd meant; I'd always taken it for granted that port officers didn't

loot anybody's baggage, no matter whose friends they were or weren't. As Chenery had

said, it seemed to be a shiftless, easy-going place. I let him lead the way; he had a jeep

watting to take us to the administration building, a musty, too-tight hodgepodge of desks. A

tot of them were vacant, and the dowdy women and fattish men at the others, didn't seem to

be very busy. The women were doing then- nails or reading; the men mostly were playing

blotto with pocket-size dials for small change. A couple were sleeping.

From the administration building a jet job took us the 20 kilos to-town. Frostbite, the

capital of Frostbite, housed maybe 40,000 people. No pressure dome. Just the glorious

outdoors, complete with dust, weather, bisects, and a steady, icy wind. Hick towns seem to

be the same the universe over. There was a main street called Main Street with clothing

ibops and restaurants, gambling houses, and more or less fancy saloons, a couple of

vaudeville theaters, and dance bafls. At the unfashionable end of Main Street were some

Cum implement shops, places to buy surveying instruments and geologic detectors and the

building that housed the Inter-MeQar News Service Frostbite Bureau. It was a couple of front

rooms on the second floor, with a mechanical dentist. Wow, an osteopath above, and a

"ride-up-and-save" parka emporium to the rear.

Chenery let me in, and it was easy to see at once why Kennedy had died of pneumonia.

Bottles. The air conditioning must have carried away every last sniff of liquor, but it seemed

to me that I could smell the rancid, homebrew stuff he'd been drinking. They were

everywhere, the relics of a shameless, hopeless alcoholic who'd been good for nothing

better than Frostbite. Sticky glasses and bottles everywhere told the story.

I slid open the hatch of the incinerator and started tossing down bottles and glasses from

the copy desk, the morgue, the ethertype. Chenery helped, and decently kept his mouth shut.

When we'd got the place kind of cleaned up I wanted to know what the daily routine was like.

Chenery shrugged. "Anything you make it, I guess. I used to push Kennedy to get more

low-temperature agriculture stories for us. And those yaks that landed with you started as a

civic-betterment stunt the Phoenix ran. It was all tractors until our farm editor had a

brainstorm and brought in a pair. It's a hell of a good idea—you can't get milk, butter and

meat out of a tractor. Kennedy helped us get advice from some Earthside agronomy station

to set it up and helped get clearance for the first pair too. I don't have much idea of what

copy he filed back to ISN. Frankly, we used him mostly as a contact man."

I asked miserably: "What the hell kind of copy can you file from a hole like this?" He

laughed and cheerfully agreed that things were pretty slow.

"Here's today's Phoenix," he said, as the faxer began to hum. A neat, 16-page tabloid,

stapled, pushed its way out in a couple of seconds. I flipped through it and asked: "No color

at all?"

Chenery gave me a wink. "What the subscribers and advertisers don't know won't hurt

them. Sometimes we break down and give them a page-one color pic."

I studied the Phoenix. Very conservative layout—naturally. It's competition that leads to

circus makeup, and the Phoenix was the only sheet on the planet. The number-one story

under a modest two-column head was an ISN farm piece on fertilizers for high-altitude

agriculture, virtually unedited. The number-two story was an ISN piece on the current United

Planets assembly.

"Is Frostbite in the UP, by the way?" I asked. "No. It's the big political question here. The

Phoenix is against applying. We figure the planet can't afford the assessment in die first

place, and if it could there wouldn't be anything to gain by joining."

"Um." I studied the ISN piece closer and saw that the Phoenix was very much opposed

indeed. The paper had doctored our story plenty. I hadn't seen the original, but ISN is—in

fact and according to its charter—as impartial as it's humanly possible to be. But our story,

as it emerged in the Phoenix, consisted of: a paragraph about an undignified, wrangling

debate over the Mars-excavation question; a fist-fight between a Titanian and an Earth

delegate in a corridor; a Sirian's red-hot denunciation of the UP as a power-politics

instrument of the old planets; and a report of UP administrative expenses—without a

corresponding report of achievements.

"I suppose," I supposed, "that the majority of the planet is stringing along with the

Phoenix?"

"Eight to one, the last time a plebiscite was run off," said Chenery proudly.

"You amaze me." I went on through the paper. It was about 70 percent ads, most of them

from the Main Street stores we'd passed. The editorial page had an anti-UP cartoon

showing the secretary-general of the UP as the greasy, affable conductor of a jetbus

jammed to the roof with passengers. A sign on the bus said* "Fare, $15,000,000 and up per

year." A road sign pointing in the direction the bus was heading said, "To Nowhere." The

conductor was saying to a small, worried-looking man in a parka labeled "New Agricultural

Planets" that, "There's always room for one morel!" The outline said: "But is there—and is it

worth it?"

The top editorial was "a glowing tribute from the Phoenix to the Phoenix for its

pioneering work in yaks, pinned on the shipment that arrived today. The second editorial

was anti-UP, echoing the cartoon and quoting from the Sirian in the page-one ISN piece.

It was a good, efficient job of the kind that turns a working newsman's stomach while he

admires the technique.

"Well, what do you think of it?" asked Chenery proudly.

I was saved from answering by a brrp from the ethertype.

"GPM FRB GA PLS" it said. "Good-afternoon, Frostbite Bureau—go ahead, please."

What with? I hunted around and found a typed schedule on the wall-that Kennedy had

evidently once drawn up in a spasm of activity.

"MIN PLS" I punched out on the ethertype, and studied the sked.

It was quite a document.

0900-1030: BREAKFAST

1030-1100: PHONE WEEMS FOR BITCHES RE SVS

1100-1200: NOTE MARSBUO RE BITCHES

1200-1330: LUNCH

1330-1530: RUN DROPS TO WEEMS: GAB WrTH

CHENERY 1530-1700: CLIP PHOENIX, REWRITE PUNCH & FILE

SUNDAYS 0900-1700: WRITE AND FILE ENTERPRISERS.

Chenery spared my blushes by looking out the window as I read the awful thing. I hadn't

quite realized how low I'd sunk until then.

"Think it's funny?" I asked him—unfairly, I knew. He was being decent. It was decent of

him not to spit in my eye and shove me off the sidewalk for that matter. I had hit bottom.

He' didn't answer. He was embarrassed, and in the damn-fool way people have of

finding a scapegoat I tried to make him/ feel worse. Maybe if I rubbed it in real hard he'd

begin to feel almost as bad as I did. "I see," I told him, "that I've wasted a morning. Do you or

Weems have any bitches for rate to messenger-boy to Mars?"

"Nothing special," he said. "The way I said, we always like low-temperature and

high-altitude agriculture stuff. And good f arm-and-home material."

"You'll get it," I told him. "And now I see I'm behind clipping and rewriting and filing stories

from your paper."

"Don't take it so hard," he said unhappily. "It's not such a bad place. I'll have them take

your personal stuff to the Hamilton House and the bureau stuff here. It's the only decent hotel

in town except the Phoenix and that's kind of high—" He saw that I didn't like him jumping to

such accurate conclusions about my pay check and beat it with an apologetic grimace of a

smile.

The ethertype went brrp again and said "GB FRB CU LTR" "Good-by, Frostbite. See

you later." There must have been many days when old Kennedy was too sick or too sick at

heart to rewrite pieces from the lone client. Then the machine began beating out news items

which I'd tear off eventually and run over to the Phoenix.

"Okay, sweetheart," I told the clattering printer. "You'll get copy from Frostbite. You'll get

copy that'll make the whole damned ISN sit up and take notice—" and I went on kidding

myself in that vein for a couple of minutes but it went dry very soon.

Good God, but they've got me! I thought. If I'm no good on the job they'll keep me here

because there's nothing lower. And if I'm good on the job they'll keep me here because I'm

good at it Not a chance in a trillion to do anything that'll get noticed—just plain stuck on a

crummy planet with a crummy political machine that'll never make news in a million years!

I yanked down Kennedy's library—"YOUR FUTURE ON FROSTBITE," which was a C. of

C. recruiting pamphlet, "MANUAL OF ETHERTYPE MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR," an

ISN house handbook and "THE UNITED PLANETS ORGANIZATION SECRETARIAT

COMMITTEE INTERIM REPORT ON HABIT-FORMING DRUGS IN INTERPLANETARY

COMMERCE," a grey-backed UP monograph that got to Frostbite God knew how. Maybe

Kennedy had planned to switch from home brew to something that would kill him quicker.

The Chamber of Commerce job gave a thumbnail sketch of my new home. Frostbite had

been colonized about five generations ago for the usual reason. Somebody had smelled

money. A trading company planted a power reactor—still going strong—at the South Pole in

exchange for choice tracts of land which they!d sold off to homesteaders, all from Earth and

Earth-colonized planets. In fine print the pamphlet gave lip service to the UP ideal of

interspecific brotherhood, but— So Frostbite, in typical hick fashion, thought only genus

homo was good enough for its sacred soil and that all non-human species were more or

less alarming monsters.

I looked at that editorial-page cartoon in the Phoenix again and really noticed this time

that there were Sirians, Venus-ians, Martians, Lyrans, and other non-human beings jammed

into the jetbus, and that they were made to look sinister. On my first glance, I'd taken them in

casually, the way you would on Earth or Mars or Vega's Quembrill, but here they were,

supposed to scare me stiff and I was supposed to go around saying, "Now, don't get me

wrong, some of my best friends are Martians, but—"

Back to the pamphlet The trading company suddenly dropped out of the chronology. By

reading between the lines I could figure out that it was one of the outfits which had

overextended itself planting colonies so it could have a monopoly hauling to and from the

new centers. A lot of them had gone smash when the Greenhough Effect took interstellar

flight out of the exclusive hands of the supergiant corporations and put it in the reach of

medium-sized operators like the rusty-bucket line that had hauled in me, the yaks, and the

ten-penny nails.

In a constitutional convention two generations back the colonists had set up a world

government of the standard type, with a president, a, unicameral house, and a three-step

hierarchy of courts. They'd adopted the United Planets model code of laws except for the bill

of rights—to keep the slimy extra-terrestrials out—with no thanks to the UP.

And that was it, except for the paean of praise to the independent farmer, the backbone

of his planet, beholden to no man, etc.

I pawed through the ethertype handbook. The introduction told me that the perfection of

instantaneous transmission had opened the farthest planets to the Interstellar News Service,

which I knew; that it was knitting the colonized universe together with bonds of

understanding, which I doubted; and that it was a boon to all human and non-human

intelligences, which I thought was a bare-faced lie. The rest of it was "see Fig. 76 3b," "Wire

944 will slip easily through orifice 459," "if Knob 545 still refuses to turn, take Wrench 31 and

gently, without forcing—" Nothing I couldn't handle.

The ethertype was beating out:

FARM—NOTE FROSTBITE

NOME, ALASKA, EARTH—ISN—HOUSEWIVES OF THE COLDER FARM PLANETS

WOULD DO WELL TO TAKE A LEAF FROM THE BOOK OF THE PRIMITIVE

AMERINDIAN SEAMSTRESS. SO SAYS PROFESSOR OF DOMESTIC SCIENCE

MADGE MCGUINESS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NOME'S SCHOOL OF

LOW-TEMPERATURE AGRONOMY. THE INDIAN MAID BY SEWING LONG, NARROW

STRIPS OF FUR AND BASKET-WEAVING THEM INTO A BLANKET TURNED OUT

COVERINGS WITH TWICE THE WARMTH AND HALF THE WEIGHT OF FUR ROBES

SIMPLY SEWED EDGE TO EDGE—

That was my darling, with her incurable weakness for quote leads and the unspeakable

"so says." Ellie Masters, I thought, you're a lousy writer but I love you and I'd like to wring your

neck for helping McGillicuddy con me into this. "Dig up all sorts of cute feature stories," you

told me and you made it sound sensible. Better I should be under the table at Blogri's with a

hangover and sawdust in my hair than writing little by-liners about seventeen tasty recipes

for yak manure, which is all that's ever going to come out of this Godforsaken planet

Rat-Face barged in without knocking; a moronic-looking boy was with him toting the box

of ethertype spare parts.

"Just set-it anywhere," I said. "Thanks for getting it right over here. Uh, Joe, isn't

it?—Joe, where could I get me a parka like that? I like those lines. Real mink?"

It was the one way to his heart. "You betcha. Only plaid mink lining on Frostbite. Ya

notice the lapels? Look!" He turned them forward and showed me useless little hidden

pockets with zippers that looked like gold.

"I can see you're a man with taste."

"Yeah. Not like some of these bums. If a man's Collector of the Port he's got a position to

live up to. Look, I hope ya didn't get me wrong there, at the field. Nobody told me you were

coming. If you're right with the Phoenix you're right with the Organization. If you're right with

the Organization, you're right with Joe Downing. I'm regular."

He said that last word the way a new bishop might say: "I am consecrated."

"Glad to hear that. Joe, when could I get a chance to meet some of the other regular

Boys?"

"Ya wanna get In, huh?" he asked shrewdly. "There's been guys here a lot longer than

you, Spencer."

"In, Out," I shrugged. "I want to play it smart. It won't do me any harm."

He barked with laughter. "Not a bit," he said. "Old man Kennedy didn't see it that way.

You'll get along here. Keep ya nose clean and we'll see about The Boys." He beckoned the

loutish porter and left me to my musings.

That little rat had killed his man, I thought—but where, why, and for whom?

I went out into the little corridor and walked into the "ride-up-and-save" parka emporium

that shared the second floor with me. Leon Portwanger, said the sign on the door. He was a

fat old man sitting cross-legged, peering through bulging shell-rimmed glasses at his needle

as it flashed through fur.

"Mr. Portwanger? I'm the new ISN man, Sam Spencer."

"So?" he grunted, not looking up.

"I guess you knew Kennedy pretty well."

"Never. Never."

"But he was right in front there—"

"Never," grunted the old man. He stuck himself with the needle, swore, and put his finger

in his mouth. "Now see what you made me do?" he said angrily and indistinctly around the

finger. "You shouldn't bother me when I'm working. Can't you see when a man's working?"

"I'm sorry," I said, and went back into the newsroom. A man as old as Leon, tailoring as

long as Lepn, didn't stick himself. He didn't even wear a thimble—the forefinger was

calloused enough to be a thimble itself. He didn't stick himself unless he was very, very

excited—or unless he wanted to get rid of somebody. I began to wish I hadn't fired those

bottles of Kennedy's home brew down to the incinerator so quickly.

At that point I began a thorough shakedown of the bureau. I found memos torn from the

machine concerning overfiling or failure to file, clippings from the Phoenix, laundry lists, style

memos from ISN, paid bills, blacksheets of letters to Marsbuo requesting a transfer to

practically anywhere but Frostbite, a list of phone numbers and a nasty space-mailed memo

from McGillicuddy.

It said: "Re worldshaker, wll blv whn see. Meanwhile sggst keep closer sked avoid

wastage costly wiretime. Reminder guppy's firstest job offhead orchidbitches three which

bypassed u yestermonth. How? McG"

It was typical of McGillicuddy to memo in cablese. Since news bureaus began—as "wire

services"; see his archaic "wiretime"—their executives have been memoing underlings in

cablese as part of one-of-the-working-press-Jones-boys act that they affect. They also type

badly so they can slash up their memo with copyreader symbols. This McGillicuddy did too,

of course. The cablese, the bad typing, and the copy-reading made it just about unintelligible

to an outsider.

To me it said that McGillicuddy doubted Kennedy's promise to file a worldshaking story,

that he was sore about Kennedy missing his scheduled times for filing on the ether-type, and

that he was plenty sore about Kennedy failing to intercept complaints from the client

Phoenix, three of which McGillicuddy had been bothered by during the last month.

So old Kennedy had dreamed of filing a worldshaker. I dug further into the bureau files

and the desk drawers, finding only an out of date "WHO'S WHO IN THE GALAXY." No

notes, no plans, no lists of interviewees, no tipsters—no blacksheet, I realized, of the letter to

which McGillicuddy's cutting memo was a reply.

God only knew what it all meant. I was hungry, sleepy and sick at heart. I looked up the

number of the Hamilton House and found that helpful little Chenery had got me a reservation

and that my luggage had arrived from the field. I headed for a square meal and my first night

in bed for a week without yaks blatting at me through a thin bulkhead.

It wasn't hard to fit in. Frostbite was a swell place to lose your ambition and acquire a

permanent thirst. The sardonic sked posted on the bureau wall—I had been planning to tear

it down for a month, but the inclination became weaker and weaker. It was so true to life.

I would wake up the Hamilton House, have a skimpy breakfast and get down to the

bureau. Then there'd be a phone conversation with Weems during which he'd nag me for

more and better Frostbite-slant stories. In an hour of "wire-time" I'd check in with Marsbuo.

At first I risked trying to sneak a chat with Ellie, but the jokers around Marsbuo cured me of

that. One of them pretended he was Ellie on the other end of the wire and before I caught on

had me believing that she was six months pregnant with a child by McGillicuddy and was

going to kill herself for betraying me. Good dean fun, and after that I stuck to spacemail for

my happy talk.

After lunch, at the Hamilton House or more often in a tavern, I'd tear up the copy from the

printer into neat sheets and deliver them to the Phoenix building on the better end of Main

Street. (If anything big had come up, I would have phoned them to hold the front page open.

If not, local items filled it, and ISN copy padded out the rest of their sheet.) As in Kennedy's

sked, I gabbed with Chenery or watched the compositors or proof pullers or transmittermen

at work, and then went back to the office to clip my copy rolling out of the faxer. On a good

day I'd get four or five items—maybe a human interester about a yak mothering an orphaned

baby goat, a new wrinkle on barn insulation with native materials dial the other cold-fanning

planets we served could use, a municipal election or a murder trial verdict to be filed just for

the record.

Evenings I spent at a tavern talking and sopping up home brew, or at one of the

two-a-day vaudeville houses, or at the Clubhouse. I once worked on the Philadelphia

Bulletin, so the political setup was nothing new to me. After Joe Downing decided I wouldn't

get pushy, he took me around to meet The Boys.

The Clubhouse was across the street from the three-story capitol building of Frostbite's

World Government. It was a little bigger than the capitol and in much better repair. Officially it

was the headquarters of the Frostbite Benevolent Society, a charitable, hence tax-free,

organization. Actually it was the headquarters of the Frostbite Planetary Party, a standard

gang of brigands. Down on the wrong end of Main Street somewhere was an upper room

where the Frostbite Interplanetary Party, made up of liberals, screwballs, and disgruntled

ex-members of the Organization but actually run by stooges of that Organization, hung out.

The Boys observed an orderly rotation of officers based on seniority. If you got in at the

age of 18, didn't bolt and didn't drop dead you'd be president some day. To the party you

had to bring loyalty, hard work—not on your payroll job, naturally, but on your

electioneering—and cash. You kept bringing cash all your life; salary kickbacks, graft

kickbacks, contributions for gold dinner services, tickets to testimonial banquets, campaign

chest assignments, widows' and orphans' fund contributions, burial insurance, and dues,

dues, dues.

As usual, it was hard to learn who was who. The President of Frostbite was a

simple-minded old boy named Wither-spoon, so far gone in senile decay that he had come

to believe the testimonial-banquet platitudes he uttered. You could check him off as a

wheelhorse. He was serving the second and last year of his second and last term, and there

was a mild battle going on between his Vice-President and the Speaker of the House as to

who would succeed him. It was a traditional battle and didn't mean much; whoever lost would

be next in line. When one of the contestants was so old or ill that he might not live to claim

his term if he lost, the scrap would be waived in a spirit of good sportsmanship that the

voters would probably admire if they ever heard of it.

Joe Downing was a comer. His sponsorship of me meant more than the friendship of

Witherspoon would have. He was Chenery's ally; they were the leadership of the younger,

sportier element. Chenery's boss Weems was with the older crowd that ate more, talked

more, and drank less.

I had to join a committee before I heard of George, though. That's the way those things

work.

It was a special committee for organizing a testimonial banquet for Witherspoon on his

40th year in the party. I wound up in the subcommittee to determine a testimonial gift for the

old buffer. I knew damned well that we'd be expected to start the subscription for the gift

rolling, so I suggested a handsome—and—inexpensive—illuminated scroll with a sentiment

lettered on it. The others were scandalized. One fat old woman called me "cheap" and a fat

male pay-roller came close to accusing me of irregularity, at which I was supposed to

tremble and withdraw my suggestion. I stood on my rights, and wrote a minority report

standing up for the scroll while the majority of the subcommittee agreed on an inscribed

sterling tea service.

At the next full committee meeting we delivered our reports and I thought it would come

to a vote right away. But it seemed they weren't used to there being two opinions about

anything. They were flustered, and the secretary slipped out with both reports during a

five-minute adjournment. He came back and told me, beaming, "Chenery says George liked

your idea." The committee was reconvened and because George likedHmy idea my report

was adopted and I was appointed a subcommittee of one to procure the scroll.

I didn't learn any more about George after the meeting except that some people who

liked me were glad I'd been favorably noticed and others were envious about the triumph of

the Johnny-come-lately.

I asked Chenery in the bar. He laughed at my ignorance and said, "George Parsons."

"Publisher of the Phoenix? I thought he was an absentee owner."

"He doesn't spend a lot of time on Frostbite. At least I dont think he does. As a matter of

fact, I don't know a lot about his comings and goings. Maybe Weems does."

"He swings a lot of weight in the Organization."

Chenery looked puzzled. "I guess he does at that Every once in a while he does speak

up and you generally do what he says. It's the paper, I suppose. He could wreck any of the

boys." Chenery wasn't being irregular: newsmen are always in a special position.

I went back to the office and, late as it was, sent a note to the desk to get the one man

subcommittee job cleaned up:

ATTN MCGILLICUDDY RE CLIENT RELATIONS NEED SOONEST ILLUMINATED

SCROLL PRESENT HOMER WITHERSPOON PRESIDENT FROSTBITE HONORING HIM

40 YEARS MEMBERSHIP FROSTBITE PLANETARY PARTY USUAL SENTIMENTS

NOTE MUST BE TERRESTRIAL STYLE ART IF NOT ACTUAL WORK EARTHER

ACCOUNT ANTIBEM PREJUDICE HERE FRBBUO END.

That happened on one of those Sundays which, according to Kennedy's sardonic sked,

was to be devoted to writing and filing enterprisers.

The scroll came through with a memo from McGillicuddy: "Fyi ckng w/ clnt etif this gag wll

hv ur hide. Reminder guppy's firstest job offheading orchidbitches one which bypassed u

yesterweek. How? McG"

There was a sadly sweet letter from Ellie aboard the same rust-bucket. She wanted me

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AMILEBEYONDTHEMOQNC.M.Kornbluthv3.0fixedgarbledtext,brokenparagraphs,formatting;byparagwinnMANORBOOKSINC.AMANORBOOKFirstprinting.......January,1962Secondprinting........May,1966Thirdprinting....December,1972ManorBooksInc.329FifthAvenueNewYork,NewYork10016Copyright,©,1958,byDoubleday&Company,Inc.Allr...

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