Far Beyond the Stars Read online

  "Hey, Pabst," Herbert called. He had just extracted a doughnut from a box on the table, and taken the first bite. Little flecks of powdered sugar were sprinkled on his chin. "Get out here," his words were muffled by doughnut.

  Douglas Pabst appeared, looking a bit weary, as if he had just spent the last thirty-six hours poring over manuscripts, and of course, it was perfectly possible that he had. "What's wrong now, Herb?"

  There was something odd about Pabst today—and Benny found his imagination filling in the blank. He had seen the man interact in too many different surroundings: parties, press conferences, talking to illustrators and artists, writers, repairmen, and creditors, and with each of them he took a slightly different tack, as if he had a protean talent for molding himself to the necessary interaction. He saw Pabst as fluid … yielding. Suddenly, and rather amusingly, he had an image of Pabst pouring himself into a mold … reforming into an editor, and then seeping through the floor.

  Benny was almost beside himself with excitement. Unbidden, his muse was absolutely working overtime creating yet another character, another bizarre creature for a story that had yet to even be triggered. That story might not be birthed for months yet, but whatever it was already seemed peopled to the bursting point.

  Odo, he thought. The name had just popped into his mind, unbidden, as had the others. His name is Odo.

  Benny repressed a giggle. He had done this before, had transmogrified real people into fictional characters, but usually only if he was fairly certain they would never read the story. If he did this, if he transformed these people, friends, and associates into characters in a book, he would have to be very careful to keep them from ever guessing what he had done.

  "What's wrong now, Herb?" Pabst said wearily.

  Herb held up a doughnut. "I'll give you one guess," he said.

  Kay wagged her head. "The battle of the doughnuts, round twenty-eight."

  Pabst groaned. "That's what you called me out here for—to complain about the doughnuts?"

  Herbert mimed biting into a cruller. "They're stale again, Doug."

  He thrust the box rather aggressively at Pabst's chest. For a moment it was a standoff, then Pabst took a chocolate glazed pastry from the box and bit down. He chewed, never taking his eyes off Herbert. "Delicious," he announced.

  "Delicious my eye," Herbert said pugnaciously. "These are two days old and you know it."

  "I've been eating doughnuts my whole life, and these weren't baked more than—," he took another bite, and this time used the exaggerated delicacy of a seasoned wine taster, "—six hours ago."

  It was a lie, and they all knew it was a lie. Everyone in the office knew that if they were to go to the corner bakery today, and see what confections remained unsold by closing time, those same doughnuts would appear in the Incredible Tales office come tomorrow. Or the next day.

  He glanced around the room, finally seeming to notice Benny. "Here. Apparently, we have a labor dispute. Yours may be the deciding vote." Benny chose a disk filled with red jelly, reasoning that the moist filling would keep the doughnut tasty longer. He bit into it, and found it fine. A little hard, but perfectly edible. Hell, he was used to day-old bread. No problem.

  "Fine," he said.

  "What's the world coming to?" Herbert said. "Labor siding with management. He threw up his hands. "That's it. I quit. I'm going over to Galaxy."

  Pabst sneered. "That rag?"

  "I bet that rag knows the difference between a doughnut and a doorstop."

  "You want to go to Galaxy, go ahead. But they're not going to pay you four cents a word for your stories."

  Benny looked to Kay and Julius. "Who's winning?" he asked.

  Kay's smile would have done credit to the Mona Lisa. "A draw. Same as always."

  Julius, on the other hand, was suddenly quite interested in the discussion. "You're paying him four cents a word?"

  "Stay out of this, Julius," Pabst warned. There was no room for equivocation when he used that tone.

  Albert might have been prepared to offer a comment, but suddenly found himself quite interested in his missing matches again. He patted his pockets. "Did you … ah … see where I put …?"

  Benny was glad for the chance to deal himself out of the discussion. "The matches? I gave them to you."

  Albert kept patting himself, without result. "Then they should be here …"

  Julius wasn't ready to let it go. "If he's getting four," Julius insisted, "Kay and I should at least get three."

  Herbert seemed almost sadistically happy to pounce. "For that fantasy crap you write? You're lucky to be getting two."

  Julius colored. "I beg your pardon?"

  Kay leaped in, stabbed a finger at Benny's magazine like a matron on the Titanic might have pointed out a life preserver. "What's that?"

  Benny extracted it from his side pocket. "The latest Galaxy."

  She plucked it from Benny's hands. "Hey. Benny has the new Galaxy!"

  And that finally got everyone's attention. Herbert snatched the magazine from Kay.

  "Hmmm," he said, eyes scanning swiftly. "Heinlein, Bova, Smith … quite a lineup. Add Herbert Rossoff and it's complete!"

  Pabst sighed. "What if I promised you fresh doughnuts tomorrow?"

  "Why should I believe you?"

  "I'll even throw in a couple of cream puffs."

  At that, Rossoff's eyes began to gleam. "Okay … I'll stay."

  Julius snorted. "Don't do us any favors."

  Pabst held up his hands, trying to signal an end to hostilities. "All right, now that we've taken care of the old business—," he pitched his half-eaten doughnut into the trash can, where it thudded with a resounding clunk, "—on to the new. Time to hand out next month's story assignments!" His voice raised to a booming pitch. "Ritterhouse!" he called. "We're waiting!"

  From the back of the offices came an answering call. "Coming!" A moment later Roy Ritterhouse emerged, carrying a folder of pencil sketches. Roy was a powerhouse, burly, but always cheerful, a man who truly enjoyed his work. Benny liked him.

  But at the moment, staring at him, he saw someone else. Someone with the deeply furrowed brow, dusky skin and attached ears of that Klingon race from his earlier stories. And his name was …

  Martok.

  "All right, friends, and neighbors," the big man said. "Let's see what Uncle Roy brought you today!"

  He held up the first sketch proudly. It was a drawing of a little girl standing in the woods near a picnic table. Her gaze was riveted on two aliens in space suits.

  Pabst craned his neck at it. "I've titled this one 'Please, Take Me With You.'" He seemed very proud of himself. "Who wants this one?"

  This was the Game, and it was one which Benny had taken to like a fish to water. On the first day of the month, Pabst invited a select group of his very favorite writers into the office to witness the unveiling of Roy's month-long labors. Some paintings were wonderful. Some were dreadful. Most were on some slippery slope in between. The trick was to never speak up if you weren't sure, absolutely, positively sure that you could do something good with the picture, and that it genuinely sparked your imagination. If you spoke too soon and staked your claim to one of the early paintings, you might miss out on something even better later on. Worst, you might get it home and find out that you didn't really have a decent idea to go with the image, and end up slogging your way through some 12,000 word morass which Pabst would choke on.

  Two, maybe three real duds, and you were no longer a member of that select group. That had happened more than once, to both aspiring newcomers and a couple of seasoned pros who had simply bitten off worse than they could chew.

  Of course, on the other hand, you could wait too long and end up with some gawdawful image that Pabst, for his own perverse reasons, had fallen completely in love with. There were only so many giant sex-crazed Martian worm stories one could write before needing a long vacation in the rubber room.

  Julius seemed to have gotten the go-ahead from h
is wife. "I think we can do something like that," he said.

  Rossoff's smile was battery acid. "What a surprise," he sneered. "I can see it now—the lonely little girl, befriended by empathetic aliens who teach her how to smile." He shuddered as if the thought roiled his stomach worse than Pabst's doughnuts. "It's enough to make you go out and buy a television."

  Julius smiled politely, and Benny had a sudden hunch that he wasn't the only one who occasionally placed actual people in his stories. And for all of Julius' apparent placidity, he could, sometimes, dispose of certain characters quite gruesomely, and Benny wondered how many of them were secretly named Herbert Rossoff.

  Roy held up another drawing. This one had a bugeyed monster climbing over the ledge of an apartment building, about to crawl onto the rooftop where a buxom lady sunbathed on a towel.

  Kay winced. "You have got to be kidding, Roy."

  The big man shrugged. "What can I say? I must've had too much sauerkraut on my hot dogs that night—it gave me bad dreams."

  Herbert sputtered, trapped between art and avarice. "That's the worst piece of crap I've ever seen," he began, and then sighed. "I'll take it."

  "Of course you will," Julius said gleefully. "You've an affinity for trash, don't you?"

  Herbert held the drawing, turning it this way and that, as if framing it in his mind. "The picture may be trash," he said, and his voice was already beginning to take on a dreamy tone that Benny recognized easily. "But once I'm done with the story, the story will be art."

  Julius smiled thinly, and quoted his favorite limerick:

  There once was a painter named Seff

  Who was color-blind, palsied and deaf

  When he asked to be touted,

  The critics all shouted:

  'This is Art—with a capital F.'

  Herbert smiled thinly and said two words: "Four cents."

  Benny began to rummage through the remainder of Roy's illustrations. They were a nice bunch, actually, much better than those produced on the not infrequent occasions when the big man fought with his chubby wife, drank, and slept on the sofa. On those occasions, he produced nightmares that looked like they had crawled out of that kid Ellison's mind.

  This time, there were creatures of varying shapes and sizes, odd astronomical anomalies, and weather formations never seen by man or framed by God. Albert rummaged with him, going oooh! with that one, or aah! for the other, but never quite aligning with any of them …

  Until one of them caught Albert's attention. It was a drawing of a space station. It looked rather like a flat disk bisecting a pair of parentheses. A spaceship or something was docking with the tip. Benny stared at it, and his heart began to beat a little faster.

  Benny hardly knew when Pabst came up behind him. "I don't have a title for it yet," Pabst apologized.

  "That's all right," Benny said, the dream rising up more strongly now. "I'll think of something."

  Benny continued to stare at the illustration. In his mind, the station began to revolve. He imagined that he saw the ships sliding, coasting on energy sails against an ocean of night, their ports the stars themselves. He thought he could almost see tiny faces in the windows of the space station, for that was almost certainly what it was. It was a station, and it was a work of practiced men. This wasn't the first such that they had built. How many before her? Five? Ten?

  Somehow, nine seemed the right number.

  Pabst's voice broke him out of his reverie. "By the way," Pabst said. "Some of our readers have been writing in, wanting to know what you people look like."

  "Write back and tell them we look like writers," Kay said. "Poor, needy, and incredibly attractive." She snorted, but somehow managed to make it an attractive, quite ladylike snort.

  Pabst continued. "The publisher has come up with a better idea. Mister Stone has decided to run a picture of you in next month's issue."

  Albert rolled his eyes. "Is this absolutely …"

  "Necessary?" Pabst asked. "I'm afraid so." But now his face darkened a bit and he looked a little embarrassed. "Kay?" he said hesitantly. "You can sleep late that day."

  There was a long beat. When she spoke, her expression and voice were atypically acid. "Of course I can. God forbid the public ever found out K.C. Hunter is a woman."

  Pabst smiled sickly. It was clear to Benny that he didn't enjoy what he had just done. It was even clearer that everyone in the office understood that Pabst's next task was inevitable.

  He was an employer, but Benny had dared to consider him a friend. And he would not have his friend have to give such news, make such a request as the one which had to follow. "I suppose I'm sleeping late that day, too," Benny said. And hoped that he had kept the bitterness from his voice.

  "It's not personal, Benny," Pabst said quietly. "But as far as our readers are concerned, Benny Russell is as white as they are. Let's just leave it that way."

  There was silence in the office for a long, embarrassed moment, a silence broken only by the distant sound of automobile horns on the street below. Benny shifted his glance to the floor, and then out of the window. Distantly, the Empire State building rose above the skyline, pointing to the stars.

  Herbert was the first to speak. Of course. "Well. If the world's not ready for a woman writer—imagine what would happen if it learned about a Negro with a typewriter—run for the hills! Its the end of civilization!"

  Benny took a deep breath, and was almost shocked to hear himself speak, knew that if he didn't get his words out swiftly, he wouldn't be able to speak them at all. "What about James Baldwin," he asked plaintively. "Richard Wright? Ever heard of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes?"

  Pabst was dismissive, but not unkind, and behind his words was a damnably implacable reasonableness. "That's literature for liberals and intellectuals," he said, as if he was speaking to children. "The average reader isn't going to spend his hard-earned cash on stories written by Negroes."

  Herbert choked back a groan. "Would someone please shoot me and put me out of my misery?"

  Julius narrowed his eyes. "How I long for a gun."

  Benny closed his eyes, seeking some inner space to maintain, trying to control his temper and maintain his dignity; he felt the effort slipping through his fingers—

  But in that darkness, again, everything was different.

  He wasn't a black man surrounded by whites. He was an Earth man, one of three in the room: O'Brien, Bashir, and the others. They were, in comparison with the aliens, closer than triplets. But even with that genetic and cultural gulf, he and all of those in the room—Dax, Odo, Kira, Bashir and O'Brien—they were all, if not friends, comrades. They had saved each other's lives, bound each other's wounds. In another time, the petty differences meant less than nothing. They were individual aspects to celebrate. But that was another time.

  A better time.

  He opened his eyes again and was back in the offices of Incredible Tales. The silence was oppressive.

  "I'm sorry, Benny," Pabst said. "I wish things were different, but they're not."

  "Wishing never changed a damn thing," Benny said bitterly.

  "Come on, Benny. It's just a photo."

  Benny looked Pabst in the eyes, and as he did he heard his mother's voice, saying: "When I was a girl we couldn't look no white folks dead in their eyes. That made them think that you thought you were as good as them. They don't like that. Little black boys who acted like that used to get lynched. So you be careful . . ."

  But Benny had fought a war to defend his country. He had seen white boys who were just as scared as he could ever have been. Who, under fire, behaved just as stupidly as any coon butler in a bad comedy. And he knew that they were no better. He knew it. He knew it.

  Even if he couldn't prove it.

  He thought of many things that he wanted to say. He wanted to scream out the unfairness of it, but ultimately all he could say was: "I'll try to remember that."

  Pabst looked around for support, but the others were frozen in solid
arity for once, for all of their bickering, all of them knew that this was pure bull. They were all respectful of each other's minds and words. The offices of Incredible Tales formed a kind of sanctuary, a fortress against the mundane world which their imaginations had rejected and embellished. Now, suddenly, into their private little protective aerie had crept a bit of real-world ugliness, and it stole some of the magic from their lives.

  True, Kay couldn't get her picture in, either. But that didn't stop her from living in any neighborhood where she could afford a house. It didn't stop her children from attending the best schools, or being served in the finest restaurants, or healed in the best hospitals. What was a matter of ego for Kay was survival for Benny.

  And it was almost as if he was on an ice floe, suddenly separated from the rest of them, drifting in a current that was old before any of them were born. They hated that. In that moment, they were ashamed of the privilege they had been born to, and sought some means of expressing their disapproval of something that none of them could change.

  And despite the fact that they were writers—fine writers—the clever words eluded them. There was no witty repartee, no logical argument, no appeal to some higher American ideal. The only thing to pierce that oppressive silence was Herbert Rossoff's mutter: "You're a dog, Pabst."

  Benny could barely breathe. He felt so ashamed that he wanted to flee from the office, to hide. Who was he to think that he could find haven here, could find acceptance for his mind and his heart among these strangers. Better that he had stayed uptown, even with its memories—

  "All right, enough jawing," Pabst said. Apparently, he had decided that there was no graceful way out of this. "Enough standing around. Get back to work."

  And with that, he headed back into his office.

  Benny glanced at the others, and then, almost accidentally, his eye fell on the glittering model of the Trylon tower. He felt as if he were about to fall over. He had to get out of there, but there was something about the tower. Something about the fair, something that pried up the edge of his memory and tugged at him, something he couldn't quite conjure out of the dark.