Nine by Laumer Read online

  Here for the first time, is a collection of nine exciting short stories by Keith Laumer, one of the most creative and imaginative minds in science fiction today.

  Among the stories included are these three very different tales from the world of tomorrow:

  Placement Test — Mart Maldon was a forced drop out from his school and now he couldn’t even pass a test to get a job as a toll collector. But Mart thought he could outsmart an infallible system to get the job for which he knew he was qualified and needed.

  A Trip to the City — Bret Hale was anxious to get away from small townliving, but it was a frightening world that waited for him at the end of an all too short train ride.

  The Walls — A shattering tale of a woman who has been imprisoned in her own home for so long that she doesn’t even know if there is a world existing beyond her front door.

  The other stories included in this anthology are: Hybrid, End as a Hero, Dinochrome, Doorstep, The Long Remembered Thunder, Cocoon.

  Also By Keith Laumer

  Non-fiction

  HOW TO DESIGN AND BUILD FLYING MODELS

  General Fiction

  EMBASSY

  Science Fiction

  WORLDS OF THE IMPERIUM

  ENVOY TO NEW WORLDS

  A TRACE OF MEMORY

  THE GREAT TIME MACHINE HOAX

  A PLAGUE OF DEMONS

  GALACTIC DIPLOMAT

  THE OTHER SIDE OF TIME

  THE TIME BENDER

  RETIEF’S WAR

  CATASTROPHE PLANET

  EARTHBLOOD (with Rosel George Brown)

  THE MONITORS

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1967 by Keith Laumer

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-10401

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Hybrid” from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 1961 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  “End As a Hero” from Galaxy Magazine. Copyright © 1963 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  “The Walls” from Amazing Stories. Copyright © 1963 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

  “Dinochrome” as “Combat Unit” from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 1960 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  “Placement Test” from Amazing Stories. Copyright © 1964 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

  “Doorstep” from Galaxy Magazine. Copyright © 1960 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  “The Long Remembered Thunder” from Worlds of Tomorrow. Copyright © 1963 by Barmaray Company, Inc.

  “Cocoon” from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 1962 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  “A Trip to the City” as “It Could Be Anything” from Amazing Stories. Copyright © 1962 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

  NINE BY LAUMER

  Keith Laumer

  DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.

  GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

  1967

  Introduction

  THE UNIVERSE, ACCORDING TO LAUMER

  Perhaps it is because I work at the same craft as Keith that I concur with his philosophy that in a time silly enough to revere politicians, soldiers, rock singers, pneumatic starlets, bunnytailed cocktail waitresses and cops, there are only two really holy occupations: teaching and writing. For only these two commit themselves completely to preserving history, furthering culture, alerting man and beautifying the days through which we stumble, usually downcast and bludgeoned.

  Those who know Laumer’s work only through the series of clever Retief stories (thus far collected in two volumes—Envoy to New Worlds [Ace Books, 1963] and Galactic Diplomat [Doubleday, 1965]—and a novel, Retief s War [Doubleday,. 1966]), may be largely shocked and bewildered by the works that follow hereafter. For without exception—even when there is a humorous or satiric strain—every piece in the following nine is serious, and completely unlike the Retief oeuvre.

  In the Retief stories Laumer uses his familiarity with matters diplomatic (based on over two years with the U.S. Foreign Service) to take quarterstaff lunges and noggin-knocks at the pomposity and stupidity of career diplomats. He does it with high good humor. Keith calls them “funny stories.” I would try to be more precise in calling them “waggish” or “whimsical,” but the semantics are certainly the property and province of the creator.

  Little of this gentle kidding shows in the nine stories we have here. Yet there are subsurface similarities, of course. Within the framework of political satire, fast-action space opera, caricature characterization and the neighbor-next-door familiarity of a continuing series protagonist, Laumer has managed to say some rather explicit and serious things in his Retief stories. Statements, however, that are made much more baldly and forcefully here, though I am a fan of the Retief series. And, in point of fact, I consider this collection a much truer cross-section of Laumer as man and as writer than the Retief stuff. For here he deals with topics that compel him, rather than merely clever story-gimmicks. (This is not intended to demean the Retief series, which is self-abrogating of criticism by its interior consistency and wry good humor.) I’m just not sure the genre knows quite the depth of the writer whose best work polls second to his frippery.

  It is possible to be charmed by the writings-for-children of Wilde, St. Exupery, Dickens, Twain, Graves or Tolstoy, and still categorize them on the value scale of a serious author’s work. I think in this rating A Christmas Carol rates lower than Dombey and Son, The Little Prince rates lower than Wind, Sand and Stars, and the Retief stories rate lower than either “Hybrid” or “Dinochrome.”

  So if the student of science fiction wishes to seriously understand and appreciate Laumer (an undertaking of some merit: Laumer is the only first-rank writer the field has produced since Kurt Vonnegut, some years ago), I submit this book is inestimably more valuable than the “entertainments” (as Graham Greene would tag them) of the Retief drolleries.

  Hence, if we are to offer this volume as a critique, a few words of analysis and discussion seem relevant, both in terms of writing (and writing science fiction) and of the writer who produced them.

  On at least four separate occasions, usually during late-hour discussions with other arguers, Keith has said to me, “The single most important thing a human being can do is establish mind-to-mind communication, through speech or writings.”

  Keith’s literal obsession with this concept is reflected in his many attitudes toward life-things about him: his advocacy of the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conferences which hold relatively little in the way of education for him as a growing writer; his frustration at listening to an argument in which both parties make the same point and are merely disputing semantics; his frenzy at the type of young woman who lives her life in a contemporary fantasy that barely impinges on the real world, who uses language merely to dissemble, to obfuscate, to taunt; his loathing of the bulk of television, which he considers a corruption of the medium of communication for “entertainment” or commercial ends.

  Most writers—by the very insurmountable nature of trying to verbalize their own thoughts on paper—at one time or another deal with the subject of communication between humans. Whether it manifests itself as the frustration of blood and love as Baldwin attacks it in Another Country or Go Tell It on the Mountain … or as protocol, as class and society strangle it in Marquand’s The Late George Apley … or as the nightmare alienation of nobody listening which Joseph K. suffers in Kafka’s The Trial … I have seldom encountered a writer who has dealt with it on such a literal and crusading leve
l.

  (The above examples, incidentally, are not offered as evidence of my erudition, but as specific references to similarity in the postures assumed by Laumer in his fictions. It would be unfair and fustian to claim that Laumer is treading ground never before explored. But that he ventures into the terra incognita of this subject as very much his own man is important.)

  Keith often asserts that he is not out to change the world, that he cannot write about contemporary topics, that he would much rather write and exist in a mist-world of his own building. Manure! The writer in Laumer keeps betraying his lip service. He deals with contemporary problems constantly, albeit disguised by the false-faces of science fiction. Of some of the others, more in a moment, but of this subject of communication—something of penetration and impact, rather than merely mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—there are prime examples in this book.

  In “End As a Hero,” Granthan spends the entire time of the story trying desperately to communicate with his superior, Kayle.

  He tries to convince him he has the solution to the problem of the Earth-Gool war. No one will listen. So he forces them to listen. It is not my place to reveal the content of the story here, but it is worthy of note that a mental device is used in “End As a Hero” that is similar to a device used in “The Long Remembered Thunder.” This is the concept of following thoughts back to their owners, and reaching directly into the mind. In “Thunder” it is used to destroy the Niss, and in “Hero” it is used to destroy the Gools. I only offer this as a possibility, but it seems Laumer may even unconsciously consider such mind-to-mind communication ultimately destructive, yet necessary despite the risk—as if he were determined to get completely into the mind of his communicant, whether the images and reasoning on the inside were bom of the pit or not. I take this as an attitude of great courage, on the part of the writer, and on the part of the man.

  That Laumer’s own thought processes are frequently muddied by past memories, experiences, predilections, reaction formations, even sophisticated prejudices of both harmful and beneficent properties—is something that cannot be avoided. Nor should we care to avoid it: the writer is the sum of the parts that make up the man. The edges, comers, convolutions and topography of those parts is what separates each writer from the next. If we were not prepared to enjoy and suffer the psychoses and special hell-images of the writer-as-individual, we would never be able to look out of the eyes of a Rimbaud, a Kesey, a Céline, a Conrad. We will take the man, however imperfect, blessedly imperfect; for it is men who write stories, not computers. Laumer is a man, not an IBM machine, and thus, thankGodly, a flawed mechanism, as are we all.

  But if we might postulate for a moment that a Writer is merely a Man hag-ridden and in symbiosis with his Talent, then we might conclude that were it not for the men in us, the writers might be better. Then again, the writers might melt away like a fizzing tablet in a glass of water. Which sustains the other? Is it a necessary symbiosis: writer and man? Is it the shark and the pilot-fish? Or is it the Glory hauling around the worthless husk of Homo sapiens merely to keep its spark with a roof over its head?

  Whatever the conclusion, it becomes apparent that to know the Writer we must know the Man. Not by any means to understand the writing, but to understand the wellsprings of the Talent. To examine where the past of the Man touches the statements of the Writer… .

  John Keith Laumer was bom June 9, 1925 (that’s Gemini, for those who dabble in such fripperies; and to further allow the sage nodding of their zodiacally-oriented heads, the same sign as the author of this introduction) in Syracuse, New York. His early reading was in the Land of Oz and the Kingdom of Barsoom.

  In 1937, he moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, not entirely under his own volition. At the age of twelve, one pretty much does as one’s parents suggest. He attended high school, lived on the beach, owned a Model T, a .22 and a dog named Snuffy. He built model airplanes like mad, and admired Janice from afar. He wore short pants till the age of thirteen, “thus achieving,” he remembers, “the status of a persecuted minority.”

  Graduated high school at age sixteen. In 1942, at 10:00 P.M., saw a light plane hit a telephone pole fifty feet from where he was parked with a young lady, in Coffeyville, Kansas. He drove to a local cemetery for privacy with the young lady, and a second light plane crashed among the tombstones, thus reinforcing a persecution complex Laumer has maintained to this day.

  In August of 1943 Keith volunteered for the U.S. Army, took his basic training at Fort Benning, and was sent to the University of Indiana by the Army for pre-med training. When he refused assignment to medical school, he was returned to the infantry in December of 1944.

  As Keith tells it: “More Basic at Camp Howze, Texas, and then a charming free trip to Europe. Saw many interesting sights, such as dead Germans in ditches, more dead men lying on hillsides, overturned rusty locomotives, leveled cities, dead horses, D.P.’s. Spent three nights and two days in a genuine 40 and 8. Quartered in a house in Bonn, found stuffed owl lying in flower bed in very nice park; fowl had been blown out of side of museum by a U.S. bomb. All very neat but for owl. Germans very neat people. Toured Buchenwald the day after liberation. Neatness of Germans slipped here.”

  He lucked into a supply of chocolate bars, chewing gum, cigarettes and other trade goods, which pyramided into other goods and services. If you find my note of this series of activities vague, it is because Keith’s references to it have always been vague, and the one time I mentioned that some might misinterpret it as working in the black market, Keith pursed his lips in that peculiarly sinister manner he has, and tried to assume the look of a woodland nymph or sprite. Neatness of Laumer slipped here.

  With the Army, Keith saw Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and other capitals of Europe which he has somehow, inexplicably, failed to use in his stories. At one point he was entertained by a young lady who told an interesting tale concerning a goose.

  (Incidentally, the lack of real-life locales that any other self-respecting writer would mine out of memory to lend authenticity to his stories is a peculiar omission in Laumer’s work. Were I the conjecturing sort, I might take it as a silent verification of Laumer’s oft-attested loathing for the real world, and his determination to create a newer, better one in his stories.)

  He returned to the United States in 1946 and was discharged from the service. He spent that summer hitchhiking around the country and in the fall went to the University of Illinois. The following summer he decided to attend the University of Stockholm, and sailed in September for Sweden on the Gripsholm.

  A year in Sweden, during which he learned to speak the language fluently, is a topic of fond reminiscence during an evening of conversation with Keith. He avers that the local customs of the Swedish ladies are as reported by starry-eyed bachelor tourists.

  In February of 1949, back in the States, Laumer married the admired-from-afar Janice. I have met Janice. Laumer’s taste, based on that one act of selection, repudiates all the other gaucheries so trying to his fans, friends and admirers. Not to mention kind strangers.

  He graduated from the University of Illinois that same year with a Bachelor of Science degree and promptly started over as a freshman on the G.I. Bill. His daughter Virginia was born in December of that year. To survive, supporting his wife and child, he designed and made clay-modeling tools, worked at odd jobs, rescued rusty bikes from the backyards of fraternity houses and rebuilt them, and sold them … and his daughter Tony was born in April of 1951.

  A degree in Architecture in 1952, a position on the University staff from ’52 to ’53, and then came Korea. In January 1953 Laumer enlisted once again, this time as a first lieutenant in the Air Force.

  He was sent to Labrador—alone. He spent a year in monastic isolation, and made the verge-of-madness discovery that exposure to extreme cold slows the metabolism, thus increasing the subjective time-rate. He spent all his time outside freezing, and completed the year in three and a half months. Or so he says.

  He
applied for the U.S. Foreign Service, and after eighteen months of elaborate testing, was appointed Vice Consul of Career in the Consular Service, Third Secretary of Embassy in the Diplomatic Service, and Foreign Service Officer of Class Six in the Foreign Service. He was trained in Washington and then assigned to Rangoon, where his third daughter, Sabrina, was born in December of 1956.

  He and the State Department parted company late in 1958, and during the same period he wrote his first story, “Greylorn,” which was purchased immediately out of the slush pile by the then-editor of Amazing Stories/Fantastic magazines, Cele Goldsmith.

  During the next year and a half, Keith spent his time in Florida, chopping wood and writing. It was a meager living for a wife and three open mouths. He returned to active duty with the USAF, as Captain, in May of 1960, stationed in London. Three years in London, and he returned to the United States where he settled down into off-base suburbia in a house with an air conditioner.

  After two years this became intolerable and he left the service. He decided now was the time to plunge into the writing full-time, and writing furiously all the while, he went to take a look at Mexico, and afterward returned to Florida and his family to complete a novel nearing deadline.

  Since 1959 he has sold sixteen books, nearly twenty Retief stories and a Retief novel, innumerable unrelated stories, and a mainstream novel, Embassy, based on his experiences with the Foreign Service.

  He is currently living in Brooksville, Florida, with family, writing furiously. The last communication I received from him, when this introduction was only seven months tardy, went as follows:

  “I have decided to forgive you for not showing up to eat all that southern fried hog jowl and chitlins that Jan bought for you at the Kwik-Chek. I’m building the house on the island, and I’m counting on you winging in from the Coast when it’s done, and paying a visit, out of which will come, I predict, a memorable collaborative short story! Kick Norm Spinrad for me for not showing up to bid adieu when I left the City of the Angels. Adieu, K.”