Short Fiction, Mack Reynolds [best book reader txt] 📗

I stared at it and then at him. “What in kert is Venusian Elephantiasis, and where’d you get the idea I have it?”

He shrilled proudly, “I had to do a lot of research. It’s one of the few diseases left in the system that’s incurable. So rare, for one thing.”

I was still half asleep. I shook my head.

He said, “Don’t you get it? You won’t have to fight now. You can retire from the arena, as undefeated champ, and make a top notch living for the rest of your life endorsing⁠—”

I jumped out of the bed and dashed to the telo, but even before I could reach it it glowed on and Suzi’s face, cold as a winter day on Pluto, was there.

Her eyes seemed to focus about three feet beyond my head and she said, “Jak Dempsi, you’re a phony. A cheap, petty, cowardly phony. Venusian Elephantiasis, indeed!” Her voice dripped scorn. “I never want to hear from you again.”

“Suzi, wait a minute. I can explain,” I yelled. “My manager⁠—” But the screen had died.

I spun on him, but he wasn’t at the side of the bed where I’d seen him last. Instead he was over at the Viziscreen, the glee gone from his chicken-like face, and anxiety beginning to become evident.

He shrilled, “They can’t do this to me. We’re being robbed!”

I started for him, my fingers stretched out like claws. Here was one Mercurian Bouncer who was going to have his neck wrung, like the fowl he resembled.

Something in his attitude stopped me. I came up beside him and growled, “What now, you makron?”

He pointed at the news sheet which had recorded the item.

“Forty-three thousand Solar System scientists working on cure for Venusian Elephantiasis.”

He shrilled despairingly, “They’ll have you cured in days.”

I snorted, “Especially since I haven’t got it in the first place. Listen, what gave you the idea I wanted to get out of this fight, anyway? I’m not afraid⁠—”

He started hopping at that. “You’re not afraid! You’re too stupid, too conceited to be afraid. I’m afraid, understand? I’m your manager; I know how good a gladiator you are, and I’m afraid. I’m afraid first that you’ll get killed and I’ll lose the best thing I’ve ever had, but even more than that I’m afraid that this Solar System isn’t going to be fit to live in after you lose this fight and the Centaurians take over.”

I growled truculently, “I can whip anybody in the Solar System and I can whip⁠—”

He flung two of his wing-arms up in despair. “We have Slabers, we have fast moving Spidermen, we have four armed Martians; but who do we get to represent us in the most important gladiatorial fight in history? A second-rate, inflated, balloon headed⁠—”

“Hey.⁠ ⁠…” I protested indignantly.

But he’d stopped of his own accord and clicked his heels in the Mercurian version of snapping of fingers in sudden inspiration.

“Look,” he whistled. “If they can put forty-three thousand scientists to work figuring out a way to cure a disease they think you have, why can’t they put ten times that number⁠—a thousand times⁠—to work on some new weapons you can use against this Centaurian makron?”

I scowled at him, not getting it. “You know better than that. In the arena the only weapons allowed are primitive ones, swords, spears, battle axes, boomerangs⁠—”

“Yes, yes,” he shrilled excitedly, beginning to hop again. “But this is different. They⁠—the Centaurians⁠—don’t know that.” He clicked his heels together again. “It’s the solution! We’ll devise, in the next month, some sure thing weapon. You can’t lose!”

But I was worried more about Suzi than about the fight. I growled at him, “I don’t need anything but my short sword. All I want to be sure about is that I’m in that fight, see? If I’m not I’ll never see⁠—”

But he was already darting for the door.

Well, within the week the scientists had “cured” me of the disease that Mari Nown had dreamed up. I was scheduled for the fight again.

But no word from Suzi. And no way of getting in touch with her. I tried everything, but Suzi just wasn’t having any of me.

We started my training, and it became more or less of an Earth-wide secret that the scientists were fixing me up with some secret weapons which would guarantee the victory. Most of the sportswriters who came to the training camp were tight lipped and disapproving about it⁠—not quite playing the game, you know⁠—but the governmental big shots who were trembling in their boots over the Centaurian threat, made it clear that anything was going to go to insure Solar System victory. So the reporters didn’t print the stories they might have.

Except for Suzi.

Evidently the word got back to her about the weapons I was learning to use, and she let loose at me in her column. Nothing that the Centaurians would understand, of course, but the digs were there. She made it pretty clear that Jak Dempsi was a phony and that only with the use of unsportsmanlike weapons would he consent to go into the arena at all.

She had some nasty comebacks, because sentiment was running pretty high throughout the League planets, and anybody saying a word against the Champ was apt to find himself mobbed. They were frightened, understand? The whole Solar System was frightened, and they couldn’t bear the thought that I was less than their saviour.

But Suzi kept it up. She was the only sports reporter in the system who dared point out what they were all probably feeling.

The great trouble in the training was that we hadn’t the vaguest idea of what the Centaurians looked like. Their tremendous ship, several times the size of the greatest of ours, hovered motionlessly over Krishna-Krishna, the Venusian capitol city, but thus far not one of them had been spotted. They communicated with us, blank-screened, and we had nothing to go on to decide whether or not they were humanoid, or even if they were air breathers, although the latter would