The Halfling and Other Stories Read online

  The Halfling and Other Stories

  Leigh Brackett

  An Ace Science Fiction Book/published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace edition/September 1973

  Second edition/September 1983

  All rights reserved. Copyright © 1973 by Ace Books

  Cover art by Mel Odom

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016

  ISBN: 0-441-31597-6

  Ace Science Fiction Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  “The Halfling” originally appeared in Astonishing Stories, copyright 1943 by Popular Publications, Inc.

  “The Dancing Girl of Ganymede” originally appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, copyright 1950 by Standard Magazines, Inc.

  “The Citadel of Lost Ages” originally appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, copyright 1950 by Standard Magazines, Inc.

  “All the Colors of the Rainbow” originally appeared in Venture Science Fiction, copyright 1957 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  “The Shadows” originally appeared in Startling Stories, copyright 1952 by Better Publications, Inc.

  “Enchantress of Venus” originally appeared in Planet Stories, copyright 1949 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.

  “The Lake of the Gone Forever” originally appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, copyright 1949 by Standard Magazines, Inc.

  “The Truants” originally appeared in Startling Stories, copyright 1950 by Better Publications, Inc.

  THE HALFLING

  CHAPTER I Primitive Venus

  I was watching the sunset. It was something pretty special in the line of California sunsets, and it made me feel swell, being the first one I’d seen in about nine years. The pitch was in the flatlands between Culver City and Venice, and I could smell the sea. I was born in a little dump at Venice, Cal., and I’ve never found any smell like the clean cold salt of the Pacific— not anywhere in the Solar System.

  I was standing alone, off to one side of the grounds. The usual noises of a carnival around feeding time were being made behind me, and the hammer gang was pinning the last of the tents down tight. But I wasn’t thinking about Jade Greene’s Interplanetary Carnival, The Wonders of the Seven Worlds Alive Before Your Eyes.

  I was remembering John Damien Greene running barefoot on a wet beach, fishing for perch off the end of a jetty, and dreaming big dreams. I was wondering where John Damien Greene had gone, taking his dreams with him because now I could hardly remember what they were.

  Somebody said softly from behind me, “Mr. Greene?”

  I quit thinking about John Damien Greene. It was that kind of a voice—sweet, silky, guaranteed to make you forget your own name. I turned around.

  She matched her voice, all right. She stood about five-three on her bronze heels, and her eyes were more purple than the hills of Malibu. She had a funny little button of a nose and a pink mouth, smiling just enough to show her even white teeth. The bronze metal-cloth dress she wore hugged a chassis with no flaws in it anywhere. I tried to find some.

  She dropped her head, so I could see the way the last of the sunlight tangled in her gold-brown hair.

  “They said you were Mr. Greene. If I’ve made a mistake …”

  She had an accent, just enough to be fascinating.

  I said, “I’m Greene. Something I can do for you?” I still couldn’t find anything wrong with her, but I kept looking just the same. My blood pressure had gone up to about three hundred.

  It’s hard to describe a girl like that. You can say she’s five-three and beautiful, but you can’t pass on the odd little tilt of her eyes and the way her mouth looks, or the something that just comes out of her like light out of a lamp, and hooks into you so you know you’ll never be rid of it, not if you live to be a thousand.

  She said, “Yes. You can give me a job. I’m a dancer.”

  I shook my head. “Sony, miss. I got a dancer.”

  Her face had a look of steel down under the soft kittenish roundness. “I’m not just talking,” she said. “I need a job so I can eat. I’m a good dancer. I’m the best dancer you ever saw anywhere. Look me over.”

  That’s all I had been doing. I guess I was staring by then. You don’t expect fluffy dolls like that to have so much iron in them. She wasn’t bragging. She was just telling me.

  “I still have a dancer,” I told her, “a green-eyed Martian babe who is plenty good, and who would tear my head off, and yours too, if I hired you.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I thought you bossed this carnival.” She let me think about that, and then grinned. “Let me show you.”

  She was close enough so I could smell the faint, spicy perfume she wore. But she’d stopped me from being just a guy chinning with a pretty girl. Right then I was Jade Greene, the camy boss-man, with scars on my knuckles and an ugly puss, and a show to keep running.

  Strictly Siwash, that show, but my baby—mine to feed and paint and fuel. If this kid had something Sindi didn’t have, something to drag in the cash customers—well, Sindi would have to take it and like it. Besides, Sindi was getting so she thought she owned me.

  The girl was watching my face. She didn’t say anything more, or even move. I scowled at her.

  “You’d have to sign up for the whole tour. I’m blasting off next Monday for Venus, and then Mars, and maybe into the Asteroids.”

  “I don’t care. Anything to be able to eat. Anything to—”

  She stopped right there and bent her head again, and suddenly I could see tears on her thick brown lashes.

  I said, “Okay. Come over to the cooch tent and we’ll have a look.”

  Me, I was tempted to sign her for what was wrapped up in that bronze cloth—but business is business. I couldn’t take on any left-footed ponies.

  She said shakily, “You don’t soften up very easily, do you?” We started across the lot toward the main gate. The night was coming down cool and fresh. Off to the left, clear back to the curving deep-purple barrier of the hills, the slim white spires of Culver, Westwood, Beverly Hills and Hollywood were beginning to show a rainbow splash of color under their floodlights.

  Everything was clean, new and graceful. Only the thin fog and the smell of the sea were old.

  We were close to the gate, stumbling a little in the dusk of the afterglow. Suddenly a shadow came tearing out from between the tents.

  It went erratically in lithe, noiseless bounds, and it was somehow not human even though it went on two feet. The girl caught her breath and shrank in against me. The shadow went around us three times like a crazy thing, and then stopped.

  There was something eerie about that sudden stillness. The hair crawled on the back of my neck. I opened my mouth angrily.

  The shadow stretched itself toward the darkening sky and let go a wail like Lucifer falling from Heaven.

  I cursed. The camy lights came on, slamming a circle of blue-white glare against the night.

  “Laska, come here!” I yelled.

  The girl screamed.

  I put my arm around her. “It’s all right,” I said, and then, “Come here, you misbegotten Thing! You’re on a sleighride again.”

  There were more things I wanted to say, but the girl cramped my style. Laska slunk in towards us. I didn’t blame her for yelping. Laska wasn’t pretty.

  He wasn’t much taller than the girl, and looked shorter because he was drooping. He wore a pair
of tight dark trunks and nothing else except the cross-shaped mane of fine blue-grey fur that went across his shoulders and down his back, from the peak between his eyes to his long tail. He was dragging the tail, and the tip of it was twitching. There was more of the soft fur on his chest and forearms, and a fringe of it down his lank belly.

  I grabbed him by the scruff and shook him. “I ought to boot your ribs in! We got a show in less than two hours.”

  He looked up at me. The pupils of his yellow-green eyes were closed to thin hairlines, but they were flat and cold with hatred. The glaring lights showed me the wet whiteness of his pointed teeth and the raspy pinkness of his tongue.

  “Let me go. Let me go, you human!” His voice was hoarse and accented.

  “I’ll let you go.” I cuffed him across the face. “I’ll let you go to the immigration authorities. You wouldn’t like that, would you? You wouldn’t even have coffee to hop up on when you died.”

  The sharp claws came out of his fingers and toes, flexed hungrily and went back in again.

  I dropped him.

  “Go on back inside. Find the croaker and tell him to straighten you out. I don’t give a damn what you do on your own time, but you miss out on one more show and I’ll take your job and call the I-men. Get it?”

  “I get it,” said Laska sullenly, and curled his red tongue over his teeth. He shot his flat, cold glance at the girl and went away, not making any sound at all.

  The girl shivered and drew away from me. “What was— that?”

  “Cat-man from Callisto. My prize performer. They’re pretty rare.”

  “I—I’ve heard of them. They evolved from a cat-ancestor instead of an ape, like we did.”

  “That’s putting it crudely, but it’s close enough. I’ve got a carload of critters like that, geeks from all over the System. They ain’t human, and they don’t fit with animals either. Mothmen, lizard-men, guys with wings and guys with six arms and antennae. They all followed evolutionary tracks peculiar to their particular hunks of planet, only they stopped before they got where they were going. The Callistan kitties are the aristocrats of the bunch. They’ve got an I. Q. higher than a lot of humans, and wouldn’t spit on the other halflings.”

  “Poor things,” she said softly. “You didn’t have to be so cruel to him.”

  I laughed. “That What’s-it would as soon claw my insides out as look at me—or any other human, including you—just on general principles. That’s why Immigration hates to let ’em in even on a work permit. And when he’s hopped up on coffee…”

  “Coffee? I thought I must have heard wrong.”

  “Nope. The caffeine in Earthly coffee berries works just like coke or hashish for ’em. Venusian coffee hits ’em so hard they go nuts and then die, but our own kind just keeps ’em going. It’s only the hoppy ones you ever find in a show like this. They get started on coffee and they have to have it no matter what they have to do to get it.”

  She shuddered a little. “You said something about dying.” “Yeah. If he’s ever deported back to Callisto his people will tear him apart. They’re a clannish bunch. I guess the first humans on Callisto weren’t very tactful, or else they just hate us because we’re something they’re not and never can be. Anyway, their tribal law forbids them to have anything to do with us except killing. Nobody knows much about ’em, but I hear they have a nice friendly religion, something like the old-time Thugs and their Kali worship.”

  I paused, and then said uncomfortably, “Sorry I had to rough him up in front of you. But he’s got to be kept in line.”

  She nodded. We didn’t say anything after that. We went in past the main box and along between the burglars readying up their layouts—Martian getak, Venusian shalil and the game the Mercurian hillmen play with human skulls. Crooked? Sure— but suckers like to be fooled, and a guy has to make a living.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl. I thought, if she dances the way she walks…

  She didn’t look much at the big three-dimensional natural-color pictures advertising the geek show. We went by the brute top, and suddenly all hell broke loose inside of it. I’ve got a fair assortment of animals from all over. They make pretty funny noises when they get started, and they were started now.

  They were nervous, unhappy noises. I heard prisoners yammering in the Lunar cell-blocks once, and that was the way this sounded—strong, living things shut up in cages and tearing their hearts out with it—hate, fear and longing like you never thought about. It turned you cold.

  The girl looked scared. I put my arm around her again, not minding it at all. Just then Tiny came out of the brute top.

  Tiny is a Venusian deep-jungle man, about two sizes smaller than the Empire State Building, and the best zooman I ever had, drunk or sober. Right now he was mad.

  “I tell that Laska stay ’way from here,” he yelled. “My kids smell him. You listen!”

  I didn’t have to listen. His “kids” could have been heard halfway to New York. Laska had been expressly forbidden to go near the brute top because the smell of him set the beasts crazy. Whether they were calling to him as one animal to another, or scared of him as something unnatural, we didn’t know. The other halflings were pretty good about it, but Laska liked to start trouble just for the hell of it.

  I said, “Laska’s hopped again. I sent him to the croaker. You get the kids quiet again, and then send one of the punks over to the crumb castle and tell the cook I said if he ever gives Laska a teaspoonful of coffee again without my say-so I’ll fry him in his own grease.”

  Tiny nodded his huge pale head and vanished, cursing. I said to the girl, “Still want to be a camy?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Anything, as long as you serve food!” “That’s a pretty accent you got. What is it?”

  “Just about everything. I was born on a ship between Earth and Mars, and I’ve lived all over. My father was in the diplomatic corps.”

  I said, “Oh. Well, here’s the place. Go to it.”

  Sindi was sitting crosslegged on the stage, sipping thil and listening to sad Martian music on the jukebox behind the screen of faded Martian tapestry. She looked up and saw us, and she didn’t like what she saw.

  She got up. She was a Low-Canaler, built light and wiry, and she moved like a cat. She had long emerald eyes and black hair with little bells braided in it, and clusters of tiny bells in her ears. She was wearing the skin of a Martian sand-leopard, no more clothes than the law forced her to wear. She was something to look at, and she had a disposition like three yards of barbed wire.

  I said, “Hi, Sindi. This kid wants a try-out. Climb down, huh?”

  Sindi looked the kid over. She smiled and climbed down and put her hand on my arm. She sounded like a shower of rain when she moved, and her nails bit into me, hard.

  I said between my teeth, “What music do you want, kid?” “My name’s Laura—Laura Darrow.” Her eyes were very big and very purple. “Do you have Enhali’s Primitive Venus?”

  Not more than half a dozen dancers in the System can do justice to that collection of tribal music. Some of it’s subhuman and so savage it scares you. We use it for mood music, to draw the crowd.

  I started to protest, but Sindi smiled and tinkled her head back. “Of course, put it on, Jade.”

  I shrugged and went in and fiddled with the jukebox. When I came out Laura Darrow was up on the stage and we had an audience. Sindi must have passed the high sign. I shoved my way through a bunch of Venusian lizard-men and sat down. There were three or four little moth-people from Phobos roosting up on the braces so their delicate wings wouldn’t get damaged in the crush.

  The music started. Laura kicked off her shoes and danced.

  I don’t think I breathed all the time she was on the stage. I don’t remember anyone else breathing, either. We just sat and stared, sweating with nervous ecstasy, shivering occasionally, with the music beating and crying and surging over us.

  The girl wasn’t human. She was sunlight, quicksilver
, a leaf riding the wind—but nothing human, nothing tied down to muscles and gravity and flesh. She was—oh, hell, there aren’t any words. She was the music.

  When she was through we sat there a long time, perfectly still. Then the Venusians, human and half-human, let go a yell and the audience came to and tore up the seats.

  In the middle of it Sindi looked at me with deadly green eyes and said, “I suppose she’s hired.”

  “Yeah. But it doesn’t have anything to do with you, baby.” “Listen, Jade. This suitcase outfit isn’t big enough for two of us. Besides, she’s got you hooked, and she can have you.”

  “She hasn’t got me hooked. Anyway, so what? You don’t own me.”

  “No. And you don’t own me, either.”

  “I got a contract.”

  She told me what I could do with my contract.

  I yelled, “What do you want me to do, throw her out on her ear? With that talent?”

  “Talent!” snarled Sindi. “She’s not talented. She’s a freak.”

  “Just like a dame. Why can’t you be a good loser?”

  She explained why. A lot of it didn’t make sense, and none of it was printable. Presently she went out, leaving me sore and a little uneasy. We had quite a few Martians with the outfit. She could make trouble.

  Oh, hell! Just another dame sore because she was outclassed. Artistic temperament, plus jealousy. So what? Let her try something. I could handle it. I’d handled people before.

  I jammed my way up to the stage. Laura was being mobbed. She looked scared—some of the halflings are enough to give a tough guy nightmares—and she was crying.

  I said, “Relax, honey. You’re in.” I knew that Sindi was telling the truth. I was hooked. I was so hooked it scared me, but I wouldn’t have wiggled off if I could.

  She sagged down in my arms and said, “Please, I’m hungry”

  I half earned her out, with the moth-people fluttering their gorgeous wings around our heads and praising her in their soft, furry little voices.