Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (78 page)

“Never,” asserted Harper. “A battlefield is a torn and sterile area pock-marked with craters, littered with rubble and stinking of decomposition. That’s what their brains are like.”

He walked away, twitching fingers as he went. The war for a world had been won because, as usual, the few had sacrificed themselves for the many. The few who were humanity’s best. Always it had been so, always would be.

It was two years before the last echoes of combat died away. That was when they called upon him to inspect and pass judgment on a small group of frightened people finally run down in faraway places. These were the only remaining contacts with any of the possessed. None proved subject to otherworld mastery.

During that long time he had looked over more than eight thousand suspects, many of them shipped back from overseas by co-operation of warned and wary governments. In the first week he had discovered four men who were not men, and in the second week one woman who was not a woman. After that there had been no more. The world had cleared itself of mental sepsis.

The missing space-vessel had been discovered lying in a hundred fathoms beyond Puget Sound, and salvage outfits were still toiling to raise it piecemeal. Scientists were busily devising positive means of protection for a second Venusian expedition and seeking an effective weapon with which to free the Wends, an agile, intelligent, lemur-like creature that could speak.

“Var silvin, Wend?”

The Lunar Development Company had won its suit and the powers-that-be had received a legalistic rap across the knuckles. A reward of five thousand dollars had been used to start a fund for the dependents of spacemen and already the total sum had passed the million mark. From Harper’s viewpoint, these were by far the two most pleasing items to date.

But no heavy hand bashed open his door, nobody brushed his papers aside to make seating room on his desk, nobody claimed some of his time for an exchange of insults. Riley was away in a big house in the country, helping with the gardening, doing petty chores, smiling at chirping sparrows, being gently led to his bedroom when sleepy time came. Like all the others, a little child. He would never be any different. Never, never, never.

So far as Harper personally was concerned, the aftereffects of the fracas would remain with him all his life. Not only in memory but also in immediate circumstances.

For instance, business had grown as he expanded into ancillary products. Forty men now worked in the plant. One of them, Weiss, was not only a highly skilled instrument maker, but also a government stooge. Conway’s eye. He could blind it by firing the man—-only to be watched by another. There was no way of getting rid of constant observation.

His mail was watched. There were many times when he suspected a tap on his telephone line. Whenever he made a swift move by car or plane he was followed. Norris or Rausch called once a month for an idle chat designed to remind him that the memory of authority is long and unforgiving.

What they were after was continued proof of his genuine uniqueness to the end of his days or, alternatively, evidence that birds of a feather were beginning to flock together. One Harper was enough. Two would be dangerous. Ten would represent a major crisis.

Despite rapidly increasing prosperity he was irritable, frustrated and desperately lonely. He experienced all the soul-searing solitude of a rare animal in the zoo constantly stared at by numberless curious eyes. Sometimes he felt that they’d willingly shoot him and stuff him but for the remote possibility of a recurrence of past events. They might need him again.

Yes, they feared him, but feared other things more.

There was no escape from the situation other than that of burying himself in business, of concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of everything else. That he had done to the best of his ability. So the plant had grown and micromanipulators become only a minor part of his output. He was heading for the role of a wealthy man locked in a worldwide jail.

Another thirty months crawled by, making four and a half years in all. Then the miracle happened. It was unbelievable. But it was true.

He was about to take his car from a parking lot when he caught a brief flicker of alien thought. It struck him like a physical blow. The direction and range were sensed automatically: from the south, about four miles away. A distance far beyond his normal receptivity.

With sweating hand on the car’s door he stood and listened again, seeking it directively. There it came. It was not alien. It had only seemed to be so because new and strange, like nothing previously encountered. It had power and clarity as different from other thought-streams as champagne differs from water.

He probed at it and immediately it came back with shock equal to his own. Getting into his car, he sat there shakily. His mind fizzed with excitement and there were butterflies in his stomach while he remained staring through the windshield and apparently day-dreaming. Finally, he drove to a large restaurant, ordered dinner.

She had a table to herself far away at the opposite end of the room. A strawberry blonde, small, plump, in her middle thirties. Her face was pleasantly freckled and she had a tip-tilted nose. At no time did she glance his way. Neither did he pay any attention to her when he departed.

After that they met frequently without ever coming near each other or exchanging one vocal word. Sometimes he ate in one place while she sipped coffee in another hall a mile away. Other times he mused absently in the office while she became thoughtful in a distant store. They took in the same show, he in one part of the theater and she in another, and neither saw much of the performance.

They were waiting, waiting for circumstances to change with enough naturalness and inevitability to fool the watchers. The opportunity was coming, they both knew that. Moira was wearing a diamond ring.

In due course Moira departed with congratulations and a wedding gift. Twenty girls answered the call for her successor. Harper interviewed them all, according the same courtesy, putting the same questions, displaying no visible favoritism one way or the other.

He chose Frances, a strawberry blonde with plump figure and pert nose.

Ten days later Norris arrived on his periodic visit, looked over the newcomer, favored her with a pleasant smile, mentally defined her as nice and nothing more. He started the chit-chat while Harper listened and gazed dreamily at a point behind the other’s back.

“For the fiftieth time, will you marry me?”

“For the fiftieth time, yes. But you must be patient. We’ll fall into it gradually. ”

“So this fellow showed the manager a bunch of documents certifying him to be a bank manager from head office,” droned Norris. “The manager fell for it and—” He paused, added in louder tones, “Hey! Are you paying attention?”

“Of course. Carry on. I can hardly wait for the climax.”

“I don’t want to be patient. I don’t want to be gradual. I want to fall into it fast. ”

“You know better than that. We must be careful. ”

“I want children just like us. ”

“Wait!”

She slipped paper into her typewriter, adjusted it, pink-faced and smiling.

“That was his downfall,” finished Norris, completely innocent of the byplay. “So he tied himself up for life.”

“Don’t we all?” said Harper, hiding his bliss.

Next of Kin
is one of those rare science fiction novels that is sheer fun. Oh, it has much of Russell’s cynicism and his opinions of authority and bureaucracy, and, as with many of his classic shorter fiction tales, its hero is somebody who is so off-kilter his superiors are
happy
to send him off on what is probably a suicide mission. What our hero discovers is that the reason we’re so totally at war with the opposing galactic empire isn’t because of two different political systems or social systems or whatever, but, rather, because the enemy’s so much like us we can’t stand them.

If you have previously read some of Russell’s short fiction, though, and particularly if you’ve read
Major Ingredients,
NESFA Press’s collection of some of the best of Russell’s shorter works, you might have a sense of
deja vu
even if you’ve never heard of
Next of Kin
before. That’s because you probably read it—or, rather,
some
of it.

You see,
Next of Kin
was written not once, not twice, but three times.

As the novel
Next of Kin,
it was submitted, as much of Russell’s work always was, to John W. Campbell’s
Astounding Science Fiction.
This wasn’t because the British Russell was so in love with the United States, but rather it was because, from the start, Campbell paid more than anybody else in the field and had the largest audience. In a day when independent science fiction novels as books were just emerging as viable, having a three part serial in
Astounding
at three cents a word in 1950s dollars while retaining the option to then sell the book rights was irresistible. Campbell, however, for that very reason, was always up to his armpits in good novels to serialize, and
Next of Kin
wasn’t
Sinister Barrier
—that is, it wasn’t a novel with something new and different no matter how much fun it was. He did, however, see in the core of the novel a novelette that could be pulled from it retaining the entire main story. With Campbell’s markups, Russell then rewrote the story as a novelette and it was published in
Astounding
as “Plus X,” and may be found in
Major Ingredients.

Russell had little trouble selling the book in Britain as written, but his U.S. agent could get no takers from the hardcover or emerging paperback markets. The only nibble came from Ace, which at that time was publishing only Ace Double Novels—twin books of about 40,000 words each that were put together back to back and bound as one. Many of these pairings made no sense at all, combining authors that had far different appeal or very different sorts of books, but for some authors Ace would do a twin by the same popular name. If Russell could trim
Next of Kin
to around, say, 40,000 words, then, they’d publish it as one-half a double novel. They also then said that he could pick short stories of his that hadn’t been previously collected and make a similarly length collection for the other half. Russell agreed, and thus an in-between version, titled
The Space Willies,
appeared together with a collection of Russell shorts,
Six Worlds Yonder.
From that point, the only way to read the complete novel was in the U.K. Dobson hardcover or subsequent British paperbacks. It wasn’t until my project to get some of Russell’s best novels back in print in the U.S. via Del Rey in the late 1980s that
Next of Kin
finally appeared in the U.S., and then only in a one printing paperback.

Many people say that they can’t sense the extra length one way or the other from “Plus X”. Either way, it’s a fun exercise in Russell’s twisted logic and some reverse paranoia. In the end, Mayor Snorkum still lays a cake, we still don’t know if it’s a torpid mouse or a tepid moose, and the Sirians still have the Willies.

He knew he’d stuck his neck out and it was too late to withdraw. It had been the same since early childhood when he’d accepted dares and been sorry immediately afterward. They say that one learns from experience; if that were true the human race would now be devoid of folly. He’d learned plenty in his time and forgotten most of it within a week. So yet again he’d wangled himself into a predicament and undoubtedly would be left to wangle himself out of it as best he could.

Once more he knocked at the door, a little harder but not imperatively. Behind the panels a chair scraped and a harsh voice responded with hearable impatience.

“Come in!”

Marching inside, he stood at attention before the desk, head erect, thumbs in line with the seams of the pants, feet at an angle of forty-five degrees. A robot, he thought, just a damned robot.

Fleet-Admiral Markham surveyed him from beneath bushy brows, his cold gaze slowly rising from feet to head then descending from head to feet.

“Who are you?”

“Scout-Officer John Leeming, sir.”

“Oh, yes.” Markham maintained the stare then suddenly barked, “Button your fly.”

Leeming jerked and showed embarrassment. “I can’t, sir. It has a defective zipper.

“Then why haven’t you visited the tailor? That’s what the base tailor-shop is for, isn’t it? Does your commanding officer approve of his men appearing before me sloppily dressed? I doubt it! What the devil do you mean by it?”

“I haven’t had time to tend to it, sir. The zipper packed up only a few minutes ago,” explained Leeming.

“Is that so?” Fleet-Admiral Markham lay back in his chair and scowled at nothing. “There’s a war on, a galactic war. To fight it successfully and to win it we are wholly dependent upon our space-navies. It’s a hell of a thing when the navy goes into battle with defective zippers.”

Since he seemed to expect a reply to that one, Leeming gave it. “With all respect, sir, I don’t see that it matters. During a battle a man doesn’t care what happens to his pants so long as he survives intact.”

“I agree,” said Markham. “But what worries me is the question of how much other and more important material may prove to be substandard. If civilian contractors fail on little things they’ll certainly fail on big ones. Such failures can cost lives.”

“Yes, sir,” said Leeming, wondering what the other was getting at.

“A new and untried ship, for instance,” Markham went on. “If it operates as planned, well and good. If it doesn’t—” He let the sentence peter out, thought awhile, continued, “We asked for volunteers for special long-range reconnaissance patrols. You were the first to hand in your name. I want to know why.”

“If the job has to be done somebody must do it,” answered Leeming evasively.