What Mad Universe

Book 27: Gateway Essentials

by Fredric Brown

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

BUG-EYED MONSTERS ON BROADWAY Pulp SF magazine editor Keith Winton was answering a letter from a teenage fan when the first moon rocket fell back to Earth and blew him away. But where to? Greenville, New York, looked the same, but Bems (Bug-Eyed Monsters) just like the ones on the cover of Startling Stories walked the streets without attracting undue comment. And when he brought out a half-dollar coin in a drugstore, the cops wanted to shoot him on sight as an Arcturian spy. Wait a minute. Seven-foot purple moon-monsters? Earth at war with Arcturus? General Dwight D. Eisenhower in command of Venus Sector? What mad universe was this? One thing was for sure: Keith Winton had to find out fast - or he'd be good and dead, in this universe or any other.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 236

Sample

The first attempt to send a rocket to the moon, in 1954, was a failure. Probably because of a structural defect in the operating mechanism, it fell back to Earth, causing a dozen casualties. Although not equipped with an explosive warhead, the rocket – in order that its landing on the moon might be observed from Earth – contained a Burton potentiomotor set to operate throughout the journey through space to build up a tremendous electrical potential which, when released on contact with the moon, would cause a flash several thousand times brighter than lightning – and several thousand times more disruptive.

Fortunately, the rocket fell in a thinly populated area in the Catskill foothills, landing upon the estate of a wealthy publisher of a chain of magazines. The publisher and his wife, two guests and eight servants were killed by the electrical discharge, which completely demolished the house and felled trees for a quarter of a mile around. Only eleven bodies were found. It is presumed that one of the guests, an editor, was so near the center of the flash that his body was completely disintegrated.

The next – and first successful – rocket was sent a year later in 1955.

Keith Winton was pretty well winded when the set of tennis was over, but he tried his darnedest not to show it. He hadn’t played in years, and tennis – as he was just realizing – is definitely a young man’s game. Not that he was old, by any means – but at thirty-one you get winded unless you’ve kept in condition. Keith hadn’t; and he’d really had to extend himself to win that set.

Now he extended himself a bit more, enough to leap across the net to join the girl on the other side. He was panting a bit, but he managed to grin at her.

‘Another set? Got time?’

Betty Hadley shook her blond head. ‘Fraid not, Keith, I’m going to be late now. I couldn’t have stayed this long except that Mr Borden promised to have his chauffeur drive me to the airport at Greeneville and have me flown back to New York from there. Isn’t he a wonderful man to work for?’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Keith, not thinking about Mr Borden at all. ‘You’ve got to get back?’

‘Absolutely. It’s an alumnae dinner. My own alma mater. And not only that but I’ve got to speak; to tell them how a love story magazine is edited.’

‘I could come along,’ Keith suggested, ‘and tell them how a science-fiction mag is edited. Or a horror mag, for that matter – I had Bloodcurdling Tales before Borden put me on Surprising Stories. That job used to give me nightmares. Maybe your fellow alumnae would like to hear about them, huh?’

Betty Hadley laughed. ‘They probably would. But it’s strictly a hen party, Keith. And don’t look so down-hearted. I’ll be seeing you at the office tomorrow. This isn’t the end of the world, you know.’

‘Well, no,’ Keith admitted. He was wrong, in a way, but he didn’t know that.

He fell into stride beside Betty as she started up the walk from the tennis court to the big house that was the summer estate of L. A. Borden, publisher of the Borden chain of magazines.

He said, ‘You really ought to stay around to see the fireworks, though.’

‘Fireworks? Oh, you mean the moon rocket. Will there be anything to see, Keith?’

‘They’re hoping so. Have you read much about it?’

‘Not a lot. I know the rocket is supposed to make a flash like a flash of lightning when it hits the moon, if it does. And they’re hoping it will be visible to the naked eye so everybody’s going to be watching for it. And it’s supposed to hit at a quarter after nine, isn’t it?’

‘Sixteen minutes after. I know I’m going to be watching for it. And if you get a chance, watch the moon dead center, between the horns of the crescent. It’s a new moon, in case you haven’t been looking, and it’ll hit the dark area. If you’re looking without a telescope, it’ll be a faint small flash, like somebody striking a match a block away. You’ll have to be watching closely.’

‘They say it doesn’t contain explosives, Keith. What is it that will make the flash?’

‘Electrical discharge, on a scale nobody’s ever tried before. There’s a newfangled outfit in it – worked out by a Professor Burton – that uses the kickback of the acceleration and converts it into potential electrical energy – static electricity. The rocket itself will be something on the order of a monster Leyden jar. And it’s traveling through a vacuum in space, so the charge can’t flash over or leak off until it hits, and when it does – well, lightning won’t be in it. It’ll make the granddaddy of all short circuits.’

‘Wouldn’t an explosive charge have been simpler?’

‘Oh, sure, but we’ll get a lot brighter flash from this – weight for weight – than even from an atomic war-head. And what they’re interested in is a bright flash, not an explosion as such. Of course it will tear up a little landscape – not as much as an A-bomb, maybe, but more than a blockbuster – but that’s incidental. And they expect to learn a lot about the exact composition of the surface of the moon by training spectroscopes on the flash through every big telescope on the night side of earth. And they –’

The side door of the house was ahead and Betty Hadley interrupted by putting her hand on his arm. ‘Sorry to interrupt you, Keith, but I must hurry. Honestly, or I’ll miss the plane. ’Bye.’

She put out her hand for him to take but Keith Winton put his hands on her shoulders instead and pulled her to him. He kissed her and, for a breathless second, her lips yielded under his. Then she broke away.

But her eyes were shining – and just a bit misty. She said, ‘’Bye, Keith. See you in New York.’

‘Tomorrow night? It’s a date.’

She nodded and ran on into the house. Keith stood there, a fatuous smile on his face, leaning against the doorpost.

In love again, only this time it was different from anything that had ever happened to him before.

He’d known Betty Hadley only three days; had, in fact, seen her only once before this marvelous weekend. That had been on Thursday when she’d first come to Borden Publications, Inc. The magazine which she edited, Perfect Love Stories, had just been bought by Borden from a lesser chain. And Borden had been smart enough to take over the editor along with the magazine. Betty Hadley had done very well with it in the three years she’d run the magazine; the only reason the Whaley Publishing Company had been willing to sell was the fact that they had been changing to the exclusive publication of digest magazines; Perfect Love had been their only surviving fiction publication.

So Keith had met Betty Hadley on Thursday and now, to Keith Winton, Thursday seemed just about the most important day in his life.

Friday he’d had to go to Philadelphia to see one of his writers, a guy who could really write but who’d been paid in advance for a lead novel and didn’t seem to be doing anything about writing it. Keith had tried to get the writer started on a plot, and thought he’d succeeded.

Anyway, he’d missed seeing Joe Doppelberg, his prize fan, who’d picked Friday to happen to be in New York and to call at the Borden offices. Judging from Joe Doppelberg’s letters, missing a chance to meet him in person had been a definite gain.

Then yesterday, Saturday, afternoon he’d come out here at L. A. Borden’s invitation. This was Keith’s third time here, but just another weekend at the boss’s estate had turned into sheer magic when Betty Hadley turned out to be one of two other guests from the office.

Betty Hadley – tall and lithe and golden blond, with soft sun-tanned skin, with a face and figure that belonged on the television screen rather than in an editorial office –

Keith sighed and went on into the house.

In the big walnut-paneled living room, L. A. Borden and Walter Callahan, head accountant for Borden were playing gin rummy.

Borden looked up and nodded. ‘Hi, Keith. Want to take over after this game? We’re nearly finished. I’ve got some letters to write and Walter would probably as soon take your money as mine.’

Keith shook his head. ‘Got to do some work myself, Mr Borden. I’m smack against deadline on the Rocketalk Department; I brought along my portable and fan letter file.’

‘Oh, come now; I didn’t bring you out here to work. Can’t you do it at the office tomorrow?’

‘Wish I could, Mr Borden,’ Keith said. ‘But it’s my own fault for getting behind, and the stuff has to go to the printer tomorrow morning at ten sharp. They’re closing the forms at noon so there isn’t any leeway. But it’s only a couple of hours’ work and I’d rather get it done now and be free this evening.’

He went on through the living room and up the stairs. In his room he took his typewriter out of its case and put it on the desk. From his brief case he took the file folder that held the incoming correspondence addressed to the Rocketalk Department or, in the less inhibited cases, to The Rocketeer.

Joe Doppelberg’s letter was on top of the stack. He’d put it there because it had said Joe Doppelberg might be coming to call in person and Keith wanted to have the letter handy.

He worked paper into the typewriter, put down Rocketalk as a heading, and dived in.

Well, fellow space pilots, tonight – the night I’m writing this, not the night you’re reading it – is the big night, the big night, and the Ole Rocketeer was out there to see it. And see it he did, that flash of light on the dark of the moon that marked the landing of the first successful missile ever launched through space by man.

He looked at it critically, then yanked the paper out of the machine and put in a fresh sheet. It was too formal, too stilted, for his fans. He lighted a cigarette and wrote it again, and it came out better – or worse.

In the pause while he read it over he heard a door open and close and the sound of high heels clicking down the stairs. That would be Betty leaving. He got up to go to the door and then sat down again. No, it would be anti-climactic to say good-bye again, now, with the Bordens and Callahan around. Much better to leave it on the note of that quick but breathless kiss and the promise that she would see him tomorrow evening.

He sighed and picked up the top letter. Joe Doppelberg’s. It said:

Dear Rocky-Tear: I shouldn’t ought to write you at all, because your last ish stinks to high Arcturus, except for the Wheeler yarn. Who ever told that mug Gormley he could write? And his space navigation? The big bohunk couldn’t peelot a rowboat across Mud Creek on a sunny day.

And that Hooper cover – the gal was okay, more than okay, tho what gals aren’t on covers? But that thing chasing her – is it supposed to be one of the Mercurian devils in the Wheeler story? Well, tell Hooper I can think of scarier Bems than them, cold sober, without even a slug of Venusian sappy-sap.

Why don’t she just turn around and chase it?

Keep Hooper on the inside – his black and white stuff is okay – and get somebody else for covers. How about Rockwell Kent or Dali? I’ll bet Dali could make a dilly of a BEM. Get it, Rocky? Dali-dilly.

Lookit, Rocky, get the Uranian bug-juice ready and iced because I’m going to beard the lyin’ in his den, some day this week. Not coming to Spaceport N’Yawk just to see you, Rocky, don’t flatter yourself on that. But because I got to see a Martian about a dog-star anyway. I’ll be in town, so I’m going to see if you’re as ugly as they say you are.

One recent idea of yours, Rocky, is tops. That’s running half-col pix of your best and regularest correspondents with their letters. So I got a surprise for you. I’m sending mine. I was going to bring it, but letter’ll get there before I do and I might miss an ish going to press in between.

Ennahoo, Rocky, kill the fatted moon-calf, because I’ll be seeing you soon, if not sooner.

JOE DOPPELBERG

Keith Winton sighed again and picked up his blue pencil. He marked out the parts about the trip to New York; that wouldn’t interest his other readers, and anyway he didn’t want to give too many of them the idea of dropping in at the office; he could waste too much time that way.

He penciled out a few of the cornier phrases in the other parts of the letter, then picked up the snapshot that had come with the letter and glanced at it again.

Joe Doppelberg didn’t look like his letter sounded. He was a not unhandsome, rather intelligent-looking kid of sixteen or seventeen. He had a nice grin. Probably, in person, he’d be as shy as his letter was brash.

Sure, he might as well run the picture. Should have sent it to the photoengraver before but there was still time. He marked the copy to be set with a half-column runaround for a cut and wrote ‘½-col Doppelberg’ on the back of the photograph.

He put the second page of Joe’s letter into the typewriter, thought for a moment, and then typed at the bottom:

So okay, Doppelberg, we’ll get Rockwell Kent to do our next cover. You pay him. But as for having the glamour-gals chasing the bug-eyed monsters (Bems to you), it can’t be done. In our stories the gals are always chaste. Get it, Doppelberg? Chastechased. And that ain’t half as bad as your Dali-dilly, either.

He took the page out of the typewriter, sighed, and picked up the next letter.

He finished at six, which left him an hour before dinner. He took a quick shower and dressed and there was still half an hour left. He wandered downstairs and out the French doors that led to the garden.

It was just turning dusk and the new moon was already visible in the clear sky. The seeing would be good, he thought. And, dammit, that rocket flash had better be visible to the naked eye or he’d have to write a new opening paragraph for the Rocketalk Department. Well, there’d be time for that after nine-sixteen.

He sat down on a wicker bench beside the main path through the garden and sniffed deeply of the fresh country air and the scent of flowers all about him.

He thought about Betty Hadley, and just what he thought about her need not be recorded here.

But thinking it kept him happy – or perhaps happily miserable would be a more apt phrase – until his mind wandered to the writer in Philadelphia and he wondered if the so-and-so was actually working on that story or was out getting plastered.

Then he thought about Betty Hadley again and wished that it was twenty-four hours later, Monday evening in New York instead of Sunday evening in the Catskills.

He glanced at his wrist watch and saw that they’d be ringing the dinner bell in a few minutes. That was good news because, in love or not in love, he was hungry.

And being hungry made him think, for no reason at all, of Claude Hooper, who did most of the covers for Surprising Stories. He wondered if he could keep on getting covers from Hooper. Hooper was a swell guy and a fairly good artist, and he could draw women who made your mouth water, but he just couldn’t draw sufficiently horrible-looking monsters to pursue them. Maybe he just didn’t have enough nightmares or had too happy a home life, or something. And most of the fans were kicking. Like Joe Doppelberg. What did Doppelberg –

The moon rocket, falling back to Earth, was traveling faster than sound and Keith neither saw nor heard it, although it struck only two yards away from him.

There was a flash.

There was no sense of transition, of change or of movement, no lapse of time. It was merely as though, simultaneously with a bright flash, someone had pulled the wicker bench out from under him. He grunted from impact with the ground and, because he had been leaning against the back of the bench, went over backward full length. There he was lying flat on his back, staring up at the evening sky.

And it was seeing the sky that was the most amazing thing; it couldn’t have been merely that the wicker bench had collapsed under him – or even merely vanished from under him – because the bench had been under a tree and there was now no tree between him and the dull blue dusk.

He raised his head first and then sat up, for the moment too shaken – not physically but mentally – to stand up. Somehow he wanted his bearings before he quite trusted his knees.

He was sitting on grass, smoothly mowed grass, in the middle of a yard. Behind him, when he turned his head around, he saw a house. A quite ordinary-looking house, not nearly so large or well designed as Mr Borden’s house. And it had the look, somehow, of a vacant house. At least there was no sign of life, no light at any window.

He stared at what should have been Mr Borden’s house, but wasn’t, for several seconds, and then turned to look the other way. A hundred feet in that direction, at the edge of the lawn on which he sat, was a hedge; at the other side of the hedge were trees – two orderly rows of them, as though on either side of a road. They were tall and very beautiful poplars.

There was no maple tree – it had been a maple under which he had been sitting – anywhere in sight. Nor was there even a splinter of a wicker bench.

He shook his head to clear it and stood up cautiously. There was a momentary touch of dizziness but, outside of that, he was all right. Whatever had happened to him, he wasn’t hurt. He stood still until the dizziness passed and then started walking toward a gate in the hedge.

He looked at his wrist watch. It was three minutes of seven and that was impossible, he thought. It had been three minutes of seven, just about, when he’d been sitting on the bench in Mr Borden’s garden. And wherever he was now he couldn’t have got there in nothing flat.

He held the wrist watch to his ear; it was still ticking. But that didn’t prove anything; maybe it stopped from – from whatever had happened, and had started again when he stood up and started walking.

He looked up again at the sky to judge the time lapse; he could detect none. It had been dusk then and it was dusk now. The silver crescent moon was in the same place; at least it was the same distance from the zenith. He couldn’t be sure here – wherever here was – about his bearings and directions.

The gateway through the hedge led to an asphalt-paved three-lane highway. There were no cars in sight.

As he closed the gate he looked again at the house behind him and saw something he had not previously noticed; there was a sign on one of the porch pillars that read: For Sale. R. Blaisdell, Greeneville, NY.

Then he must still be near Borden’s estate, for Greeneville was the nearest town to Borden’s. But that was obvious anyway; . . .