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  Complete Fiction

  Fox B. Holden

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  Jerry eBooks

  Title Page

  “Introducing the Author”

  Bibliography

  Noise is Beautiful!

  Stop, Thief!

  Sidewinder from Sirius

  The Builders

  The Death Star

  Yachting Party

  Hideout

  Milk Run

  Here Lie We

  Beyond the X Ecliptic

  The Time Armada (Part One)

  The Time Armada (Conclusion)

  Earthmen Ask No Quarter!

  The Women-Stealers of Thrayx

  The Man the Tech-Men Made

  A Gift for Terra

  Down Went McGinty

  Task Mission

  A Matter of Order

  Dearest Enemy

  Introducing the Author

  Fox B. Holden

  BREATHES there a newsman with soul so dead who never plugged up the holes in his head and muttered “damme, I wish somebody would interview me for once”? And, having so wished and gotten no place, toyed idly with the idea of doing the job himself someday . . .

  Anyhow, this one’s got the chance to give it a whirl in 500 words, and so, excelsior—

  Holden: (interviewing) Well go ahead and talk!

  Holden: (leaning back, contemplating) I suppose there are a few things that can be printed. I was one of a family of one boy, born in Rochester, N.Y. in 1923 B.S.—that’s Before Sisters—of whom there were a couple some 12 and 15 years later. There still are, and my life hasn’t been the same since. There, print that.

  H: (interviewing) You’ve got 380 words to go and I don’t think we can use that about sisters.

  H: (solemnly) Better keep it tame, at that. At the peculiar age of 12, in a Poughkeepsie, N.Y. grammar school, I got interested in aeronautics, Willy Ley, science-fiction, and money. Some time later, at Poughkeepsie High School, my interests broadened perceptibly. They now included aeronautics, Willy Ley, science-fiction, and money.

  H: (still interviewing) No girls?

  H: (thinking) I had heard the word; came across it once at Middlebury College, in Vermont. That’s where I went to study aeronautical engineering. I did, too—for about six months. But someplace there was a slip between the slide-stick and the psyche—by now I had read so much science-fiction that I wanted to write some myself. Switched to liberal arts, learned the alphabet, and viola, siehst-du?

  H: (already losing interest) And that’s where you learned to write things.

  H: (more seriously for a moment) I might never have really begun, or kept trying, if it hadn’t been for a fine professional in Middlebury who, for some reason, liked me. What I know, and where I’ve gotten so far, I owe largely to him. His name is Murray Hoyt.

  H: (still interviewing) Keep going. 196 words left.

  H: (getting warmed up now that it’s almost over) Army. Air Corps first as a cadet, but things didn’t quite work out. Infantry. Then ASTP, and Signal Corps. Wound up at Fort Knox as a tanked shave-tail (commanded a tank, you know) with a minor adventure here and there, and finally made it home—quite unheroically, not from overseas—and after getting the B.A. I’d started out for six years before, got my first newspaper job. General reporter, feature-writer, part-time desk-man, and you-name-it. Left there after a couple of years, and am now in West Haven, Conn., an assistant telegraph editor on the New Haven Register. And—oh yes. I got married. Two years ago, to a terrific art teacher.

  H: (still interviewing) And does she—

  H: (still talking) Reads science-fiction. Paints, too, of course, but reads science-fiction. Listens to sci—

  H: (tiring) And now for your future?

  H: (not tiring a bit) Oh, I have a very diversified field of interests. Aeronautics, Willy Ley, science-fiction, and money. Which, by the way, reminds me of the time I—

  H: (sick of the whole thing) Learned, I’m sure, what “thirty” meant!

  —Fox B. Holden

  Originally appeared in Imagination, October 1953

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Serial

  The Time Armada, Imagination, October-November 1953

  Short Fiction

  Noise is Beautiful!, Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1943

  Stop, Thief!, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter, February 1945

  Sidewinders from Sirius, Planet Stories, November 1950

  The Builders, Imagination, February 1951

  The Death Star, Super Science Stories, April 1951

  Yachting Party, Imagination, January 1952

  Hideout, Imagination, May 1952

  Milk Run, Space Stories, April 1953

  Here Lie We, Startling Stories, June 1953

  Beyond the X Ecliptic, Planet Stories, November 1953

  Earthmen Ask No Quarter!, Imagination, December 1953

  The Woman-Stealers of Thrayx, Planet Stories, January 1954

  The Man the Tech-Men Made, Planet Stories, March 1954

  A Gift for Terra, If, September 1954

  Down Went McGinty, Planet Stories, Fall, September 1954

  Task Mission, If, April 1955

  A Matter of Order, If, August 1956

  Dearest Enemy, If, October 1956

  Chapbooks

  The Woman-Stealers of Thrayx (2010)

  A Gift for Terra (2010)

  Omnibus

  Somewhere I'll Find You/The Time Armada (2011) with Milton Lesser

  Noise is Beautiful!

  Chief Staff Surgeon Carhart Manung took a deep breath and blew hard. Through the swirling eddies of cigar smoke that he had so brutally disturbed, he found his chair and sat down.

  The other scientists at the large banquet table managed to see him, but they thought twice about escape. Hearing Manung talk would be preferable to braving the blankets of smoke that stubbornly obscured the indefinite no man’s land of the sinfully spacious dining room.

  George Burt Edson, head of the Tri-State Medical Research Bureau, attempted bravely to grab the conversation first.

  He should have known better.

  “I say, Manung . . . that’s you, isn’t it? We . . . uh . . . dispensed with after-dinner speeches tonight. Sorry you were late for the dinner. It was a large one, and I’m afraid none of us are very talkative. It’s . . . heh . . . nice without noise, though—” Edson tried vainly to smile the man into submission.

  Manung chuckled from somewhere under his stiff white collar.

  “You’re wrong, my dear doctor. Noise is beautiful!”

  Somebody sighed, and choked. This was it.

  “Gentlemen, how do you suppose the Mars-Venus treaty ever got signed? No. The Venusians weren’t dying from starvation. The Martians didn’t have an overpowering fleet. People will tell you that, but they’re wrong, gentlemen!”

  “Al-l-lright—” Somebody asquiesced. He was drunk. “How did it?”

  “Well, I was with the man—Gifford McWestebee—Mac for short—who carried the secret treaty papers from Mars to Venus. Radio couldn’t be trusted—if the incensed, fanatic armies found out about the treaty before it was officially accepted and agreed to, they’d’ve revolted against their respective governments.

  “So two of us were sent to Venus City via mosquito-rocket. We made our flight all right—almost. But as we neared the Venusian capitol, our stern tubes went haywire. Naturally, we tried to make it over the jungle between us and our goal, b
ut it was no go.

  “We crashed, gentlemen—and what a crash! Right in the middle of the only jungle military outpost between us and the city! If we were sighted our atoms would still be floating around Venus some place, and Venus and Mars’d be scrapping yet.

  “That wasn’t all. Mac’d banged his head a whale of a wallop on a stern bulkhead—right above the eyes. I knew it’d mean blindness if something wasn’t done fast.

  “I grabbed my small medical kit which I’d been farsighted enough to bring along, and got to work.

  “I opened his skull. His auditory and visual synapses were a tangled mess. Operating even with ultra-modern equipment and my portable electronic-microscopes, I knew chances of Mac seeing again were slim. His hearing was definitely ruined. He’d be stone-deaf for life. But I set to work to do what I could.

  “There was so little time—

  “I operated with desperate speed. In forty-five minutes the job was completed as well as I could do it with the equipment I had. Forty-five minutes, and Mac’s hashed-up nerve synapses were straightened out again. I knew he’d be able to see—never normally—but he would, as I’d feared, be stone-deaf. With such limited time, however, an expert nerve job was impossible.”

  Someone protested violently.

  “If you think we’ll believe that—”

  “That? ‘That,’ as you phrase it, was only routine and in the line of duty.

  “I revived Mac with a special nerve-tonic treatment, and he seemed O.K. when he regained consciousness. There was no time for examination or explanation—we struck out through the jungle immediately.

  “It was twenty hours later when we had crawled, exhausted, to the edge of the outpost. A hundred more yards, and we would be safe, gentlemen—safe to deliver our papers into the right hands! Miraculously, we had escaped detection—

  “I could hear nothing but our hoarse breathing. But, suddenly, Mac’s hand jerked out and hauled me back—hard.

  “ ‘Stop!’ he said. ‘Ahead of us—a patrol! We almost blundered into ’em! C’mon easy. We c’n take ’em by surprise!’

  “And take them by surprise we did, gentlemen. Five of the sneaking rats were there—and if it hadn’t been for Mac’s superb hearing, we’d’ve walked straight into the sneaking band of patrolmen. The worlds’d be fighting yet!”

  Someone roared protest immediately.

  “Superb hearing? You said he was deaf!”

  “Well—yes, in the ears. But we found later that I’d made an awful blunder. I’d crossed Mac’s visual synapses with his auditory! He saw the noise of the patrol which I had failed to hear!”

  The paroxysms that followed weren’t from smoke.

  Stop, Thief!

  From a distant galaxy comes Crown Prince Fuj, seeking new worlds to conquer—and finds something more than he bargained for!

  Meet the Author of this Story

  AS SOON as I finish this my typewriter goes in the garage with the car and they can keep each other company for the duration. I think that reasons for such drastic action are rather evident from the photo. Do I look too much like Frankenstein?

  But to begin as far back as I dare—and am I glad I never kept a diary!—let me just say that I have lead a relatively normal, confused, chaotic, Holden-like life.

  I began fiction-writing a year ago when I was a sophomore in Middlebury College. I think Fuj was a freshman that year—I’ll never forget when he was my room-mate, though perhaps Fuj wasn’t his real name. Yes, all names and events in STOP, THIEF! are fictitious.

  This year my stuff began to bear a little fruit. But the Army hasn’t given the groove I’m in a chance to turn into my usual rut. That’s another good thing about Uncle Sam.

  But aside from being under the few minor restrictions of a buck-private, I’m as free as the wind. As free as I want to be, anyway, because I have a sweetheart—I hope. At least I’ve been trying to persuade her of that for a long time.

  I like to write this kind of material more than any other type of fiction, you know, because I like the THRILLING WONDER of it all. I was never good at science, or at straight fiction. So I combined them.

  In my twenty years of life—beard tangled with the platin again—I have also done other things, but this is a thumb-nail autobiography, not a confession. Yet I will admit having two small sisters, for as far as my writing and plotting goes, credit belongs where credit is due. I always told the folks that another year in kindergarten would have done me lots of good.

  That’s all I have time to write now. This soldier has to be on hand just in case Crown Prince Fuj got lost. —FOX B. HOLDEN

  NOTHING, probably, would have happened at all if it hadn’t been that I was angry at Professor Sanders. He said something in class that I just didn’t agree with, and so I decided not to go home for Christmas vacation, but to stay at the University and do some research to disprove the old buzzard. He said that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

  Sheer nonsense.

  I made Sanders admit that there are more ways than one to write music, to paint, and, in general, to do almost anything. But he wouldn’t admit that there were other ways of doing geometry beside the Euclidean method. Not that I am a non-conformist. I just don’t like a one-track mind.

  It was just after the third day of pretty fruitless book-worming when I met the Little fellow. I wasn’t, frankly, in any mood to meet or notice anybody, but you just don’t calmly pass up something that looks like a run-away from a side-show. Anybody’d stare. I stared.

  Cute little man. About four and a half feet tall with a funny, wrinkled face, a nose that would have turned Cyrano de Bergerac green, and feet that served him just as well as snow-shoes. Checkered-silk shirt. Khaki shorts. High-button shoes. No overcoat.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Ah—hello! I, er—I’m sorry.”

  “Can I help it if I haven’t had a chance to get any clothes like you’re wearing? Stop staring and come here a minute!”

  I walked over to him. Cautiously.

  “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “My name’s Fuj. Crown Prince Fuj is all. Just came from Krolix. What I want—”

  “From where?”

  “Krolix. That’s the name of the solar system where I live. Further than that I won’t tell. It’s a royal secret.”

  “Oh.” I began computing the reward the State Insane Asylum offered for the return of one of these. I wondered if I would get a bonus or anything. Then I wondered how much resistance he’d be able to put up. “How did you get here?”

  “Warped.”

  “You’re not kiddin’, chum.”

  “I had a confederate—in camera, you understand—at the controls of the master-machine on my planet. I was—well, projected, you might say.”

  MY LIPS formed another round O.

  “I know you distrust me. You even think I’m speaking your language. I’m using telepathy, of course. That’s how I know you not only distrust me, but you’re all confused. What’s more, if you’ll help me, I’ll help you. A deal?”

  I hate wise-guys. A lunatic or not, I decided to call his bluff. “All right, I do distrust you. But if you’re so good, tell me what I’m confused about. Go on—go ahead.”

  “You are completely baffled about the simplest concept in geometry—the straight line. You’re really quite stupid. Anybody knows that the shortest distance between two points is a warped line.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. And now, I’d like you to get me into the Physics lab.”

  “I suppose I should humor you, Fudgy, but the place is locked up during vacation. So hadn’t you better just come with me? Some place where we can talk.”

  “You know where you can get a key. Don’t lie.”

  It was about then that I began to wonder about my own mental well-being. How did he know what I was mixed up about? How did he know that I could get a key from the head-janitor? And as a matter of fact, why didn’t his mouth move when he ta
lked?

  Mother always told me I was too impulsive. The next thing I knew, this nutty little apparition was slogging along beside me in the snow toward the gymnasium where the head-janitor usually pottered around while earning his money. Then to the Physics lab. Don’t ask me why I did it. I don’t know.

  “Now, what and who ARE you, and what nut-house do you come from?” I said as I locked the door of the big laboratory after us. “This, little chum, has gone far enough. I am in a bad mood to-day.”

  The Little fellow straightened up to his full four feet seven, and almost murdered me with a look.

  “I suppose you think I’m in a good mood! I’m almost bankrupt. In case you didn’t know, Krolix is run on a plan of government known as Autocratic Plutocracy. Everybody with money is an absolute ruler, and the person with most money rules everybody. That’s why I’m here.”

  He didn’t explain further—just worked like the devil for the next few minutes. I watched Fuj as he took a bunch of gadgets from a large hip-pocket. He started hooking them together with fine wire. One was a translucent cone about five inches high made of some sort of plastic, I think, and he was hitching it between two long, upright rods that were about two feet tall. They were the telescoping variety. Next there was a small control-board that resembled an expensive radio console when he was through assembling it, and finally a bunch of things I can’t describe. I can’t describe them because they—they—faded!

  “How—uh, rich are you?” I asked finally.

  “Was I, you mean. You see, wealth, in Krolix, is real estate. The more planets you own the wealthier you are. Before the crash a century ago I was doing great. But I invested too many planets—bum tip-off—and you know how those things go. All I had left when the Exchange got through with me were about three good-sized worlds and a bunch of barren rocks.”

  “Oh,” I exclaimed. He looked as though he had almost finished the assembly. He messed around with all the instruments he could find in the lab, and finally looked satisfied.

  “This is going to work fine,” he said.

  “That’s good. All I want to know is what this has to do with your poverty.”