The PLANET of SHAME
By BRUCE ELLIOTT
Illustrated by FINLAY
_One day, James Comstock's father took James
aside and started to tell him the facts of life. Which
was not so unusual--except that James was 35._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories May and June 1961.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Illustration: At 35, James Comstock was still an infant when it came
to knowing what life was all about.]
AT THE END....
The three who had endured so much sat and waited. Their reward was in
sight. When you have fought for so long against forces strong beyond
imagining, when you have struggled in despair, lived without hope,
success when it finally comes, is almost anti-climactic. Despite the
traps, the violence, the hurts, the fear, they were now where they had
wanted to be.
They sat quietly, their hands folded, and if any feeling of triumph
was in them, it was so muted as not to be observable. At that precise
moment, when they sat in the ante-room, waiting for their reward,
waiting to become part of the Board of Fathers, working directly under
The Grandfather, the only common emotion they shared was that they had
fought the good fight. Fought as hard as it is in a person to fight for
what they consider right....
The door opened and The Grandfather was in the room. His visage was
marked by a high hooked nose, broad high forehead, and deep set harsh
blue eyes, focussed on the middle distance. His strong old hands were
crossed on his stomach just below his patriarchal beard.
It was hard to believe.
Hard to believe that they, or anyone below the rank of Father would
ever actually behold Him in the flesh.
When he spoke his voice was all the things they had known it would
be. Deep as an organ bass, calm, full of authority, stern yet with a
leavening of those other things that make up the whole man, his voice
was almost gentle as he said, "Follow me, please."
They rose and feeling like children, followed his tall spare back out
of the ante-room, into that other room where the Board waited for them.
There was no fear in them now as there would have been a year ago. For
they were not coming before the Board for judgment, but to be rewarded.
The Grandfather said, "These three are the ones...."
There was silence.
"They have come to join us," The Grandfather said.
The silence expanded.
"Gentlemen, Fathers all, these are the three new Fathers." The
Grandfather's voice faded away and there was no other sound. None of
the ten men who made up the Board of Fathers said a word.
But the three who had fought their way up to this eminence stood in
silence and looking about them, examined the ten men with whom they
would now share the control of their whole world.
This was the moment of their triumph.
CHAPTER 1
When the first space ship landed on that pleasant world (the only
pleasant planet of which Alpha Centauri could boast) the crew was so
happy to get rid of the passengers that they took off the moment they
could. Not even the interminable boredom of the return trip was enough
to make them want to stay in anything like proximity with the thirty
men and thirty women who had been sentenced to be marooned as far from
earth as was humanly possibly.
There had been maximum security prisons in the past. But this was the
ultimate maximum. When the ship took off, the prisoners were isolated
as no human beings ever had been in the recorded history of men.
It was part of a plan of course. Earth did want the planet inhabited
just as earlier powers had wanted Mars colonized. But when no
volunteers appeared despite the cleverest high pressure advertising
campaigns, the alternative became clear. If no one wanted to go to the
new planet, to New Australia, then someone would have to be forced to
go there.
It was just too bad for the exiles, but they could not protest too
loudly, since they had long since forfeited any claim on anyone's
sympathy. A little back eddy of intransigent inner-directed people,
fanatics in a world of other-directed humans, positive that they, and
they alone, knew what was good and what was evil; the world heaved a
communal sigh of relief when they were taken away. Attempting, as these
sixty had, to turn back the clock, to bring back into being the dark
days of the twenty-second century, was such a horrid crime as to merit
even so harsh a sentence as they received.
* * * * *
The first hundred and fifty years on New Australia were, in a way,
difficult. But not too difficult. To these inner-directed people
fighting for existence on a new planet was precisely the kind of
crusade which to them was worth living.
Five hundred years after they established themselves, their last
scientist managed to set up a system of protective devices which
prevented any communication with Mother Earth at all. No earth ship
landed or took off, and no other means of communication had yet been
devised that would work in interstellar space.
A thousand years later even the memory of earth had faded and grown
dim. There were mentions of it of course in old books, but they were
not the kind of books that these people read.
Their sun rose and set, their erratic moon rose when it seemed to feel
like it, and sank seemingly just as randomly, their days were full and
to them worth living.
All sixty of the first settlers had married. Sixty humans, thirty
family names. They were, to these people, good names, and therefore
there had never been felt any need for new patronymics.
The planet's sprawling surface now contained millions of people but all
of them shared thirty last names. It was nothing for anyone to question
since to them this had always been the case. Science as such was an
unknown word. It was one of the things that the original sixty settlers
had fought against. When they made their brave new world, science was
one of the earth things that was jettisoned. This, of course, led to
some strange circumstances....
James Comstock 101 had reached maturity. At thirty-five he felt that
the time had come for him to leave the home nest and go out on his own.
His mother, as was to be expected, fought against his plans. But dad
came through, as good old dad would.
Dad had said, "Now mother, admittedly Jimmy is still a little boy, but
even little boys have a right to strike out for themselves."
"But Father," mother only called him that when something serious was
under discussion, for after all, "Father" was a term of ... Jimmy
didn't know quite what to think of it as ... power? Awe? It was, in
any event, a word that one did not bandy about.
"But Father," mother had become embarrassed, and surely that was a
blush on her cheeks, "did you ... have you ever ... that is ... what
about ... oh, you know."
Father had looked very serious. He had said, his voice deep in his
chest, "You're right, of course. Come, son."
Then had come that conversation which had stunned Jimmy, opened up
vistas unheard of, unthought of, really. So that was where babies came
from.... If anyone but his Father had told him about it he'd have
struck them, perhaps killed them. To think that his mother had suffered
through such an abysmal, horrible experience ... and the results of
that experience.... Tremors swept through him in retrospect.
But that had been five years previously and Jimmy had become a man then
under his father's aegis. That first time had been cataclysmically
awful. The whole atmosphere of that place had been so foreign to him
that it was only because he knew that his father was waiting downstairs
in the parlor, waiting for a good report from the fallen woman that
enabled Jimmy to go through with it at all. Not that the woman had
waxed very enthusiastic, but then, a creature like that....
* * * * *
His monthly visits to the brothel were now part of his being and
although he still did not relish going, he forced himself to, for after
all it was part of the duty of a man. He did so wish, however, that it
was not necessary. Life would be so much simpler if he could just skip
the whole unsavory thing.
Sighing, he pressed the button on the door. Inside the curtained window
the brash lights of the place, red as sin, shone on his weakly handsome
face. The tinkle of the piano droned on.
Swinging the door wide, the fat madame said jovially, "Jimmy my boy.
Come on in and let joy be unrefined."
Shuddering delicately and wishing that the madame would not be quite so
robust, Jimmy inched his way into the parlor. The red plush chairs and
the dingy lights were just as they always were. At the piano the little
man looked up, said, "Hi-ya, Jimmy, how's every little thing?"
"Pretty good, professor, pretty good." The whole conversation was as
stereotyped as the act which would follow it. Sometimes Jimmy wished
that just once the madame would sneer at him, or the professor be
grouchy, but they never were.
Lydia came down the stairs, her wrapper as dirty and unkempt as it
always was. He wondered if she had a succession of these wrappers all
equally dilapidated, or if she owned just one which she managed to keep
looking the same way all the time.
Jimmy wished too, that Lydia were a little older. It seemed somehow a
little indecent for her to be only forty. A child like that should not
be forced to make a living the way she had to, but then they were all
about her age. Jimmy had shopped around, tried to find an older woman
but had been forced back into Lydia's arms. After all, she had been the
one Father selected for him and good old dad knew best.
She said, "Come on upstairs honey lamb."
He followed her dolefully, averting his eyes from her full breasts
which were altogether too prominent through the tight cloth of the
wrapper.
Her room looked as if it had not been cleaned since the previous month.
Stuck to the mirror was the picture of The Grandfather that always
embarrassed him. The stern old eyes should not be forced to look down
on the scenes in this room. Jimmy had tried to turn the picture to the
wall one time, but Lydia had become hysterical and he had given up. As
a matter of fact it was only after a long argument and an increase in
fee that Jimmy had been able to force her to turn out the light in the
room when they did--what they did.
The old brass bed jingled just as embarrassingly as ever when he sat
down on the edge of it to remove his shoes. It was only by keeping
his eyes on his stockinged feet that he was able to avoid looking at
Lydia who had dropped her wrapper to the floor and was now shamelessly
considering herself in front of the mirror that lined the whole wall.
That had been the main reason he had insisted on the light being
extinguished. The combination of the wall of mirror, the ceiling mirror
and the searching eyes of The Grandfather were just more than he could
bear.
There was no use, he knew, in asking Lydia not to look at her n..e
body. She had told him many times that she enjoyed doing it; there was
no law against it and what was he going to do about it?
Of course there _was_ a law against women admiring themselves in any
way, let alone n..e and in front of a mirror, but the law, of course,
did not apply to p.........s.
Whistling gaily, Lydia dropped onto the bed next to him and wound her
arms about him. Almost dying with embarrassment he mumbled, "Lydia,
the light ... you promised."
Grumbling, she switched off the light. Then it began, again.
But this time, right in the middle, a lancing pain unlike anything he
had ever experienced shot through his heart. The hurt was so great that
he cried out in agony.
Lydia, unknowing, said cheerfully. "Attaboy. That's what I like to
hear."
It was only after he gasped, "Don't ... stop ... my heart ... I think
I'm going to die ..." that she finally stopped and turned on the light.
His face was whiter, much whiter than the grey pillow case under his
head. His lips were purple. He still felt what he could only visualize
as iron fingers pressing into his heart.
Racing out of bed the girl ran towards the door. She gasped. "I'll call
the madame, get a doctor...."
Crouched on the bed in agony, his hand pressing deep into the center
of the pain, he was still able to retain the presence of mind to call
weakly, "Put on your wrapper, Lydia, you can't go out that way."
Then the pain became so great that he passed out.
* * * * *
When he opened his eyes he was in bed but it was another bed, with
crisp white linen on it. The pain, he was grateful to find, had eased
up.
The adult woman in the nurse's uniform, who must have been a pleasant
sixty-five, bent over him and whispered, "There, there, you'll feel
much better now."
"The doctor?" he whispered.
"Coming." Her sweet face was wreathed in an angelic smile. Her buxom
body was omnipresent. Wondering what kind of perverted monster he was,
he found that he was fantasying her in Lydia's bed. If only fallen
women were mature, like this one, so many of his problems would be
easier of solution. He guessed he just did not like young chits and
that was all there was to it.
Luckily the doctor entered the room before the fantasy could go too
far. Feeling mentally defiled, he greeted the doctor anxiously, glad of
the interruption. "Doctor, do you know what's wrong with me?"
"Yes son," the white-haired elderly man was slow of speech, he
considered each syllable before he allowed it to leave his thin lips.
His sunken cheeks and hollow eyes were so typical of the whole medical
profession that Jimmy found himself wondering, as he had before, what
there was about doctoring that made men look like this.
"What do I have, doctor?" Jimmy's voice was tremulous.
"I've got bad news for you, son." It must have taken three minutes for
the single sentence to be articulated by the doctor.
Sweating, Jimmy wondered what he had ever done, what commandment he
could have unconsciously broken that was now punishing him for his sin.
"What is the cure, doctor?"
"First," the doctor said, "we must consider the disease."
Jimmy wasn't the least bit interested in what disease he had, there
were cures for all known diseases. But he waited with bated breath to
be told what terrible, what terrifying thing he would have to do in
order to be cured.
"You have," the doctor said even more slowly, "angina pectoris."
Scrambling through his memory, Jimmy tried to remember what heart
patients had to do. All he could think of at the moment was the
treatment for arterio-sclerosis. It was so awful that he found himself
saying a little prayer of thankfulness to The Grandfather, that he did
not have to indulge in that cure. Adultery was the only known cure for
hardening of the arteries and the prospect of what he would have had
to go through made Jimmy almost glad that he had angina. Imagine, he
kept thinking, "I'd have had to get married and then be untrue to my
wife...."
His gratitude faded a little when the doctor's droning voice went on,
"As you may or may not know, son, the only cure for what you've got is
drunkenness. We'll have to make you into an alcoholic, boy. I'm sorry."
The world reeled.
Jimmy had seen drunks, who hadn't, but the thought of having to share
their disgraceful conduct was more than he could bear. He gasped, "I
won't do it. I'd rather die."
"Ummm ..." the doctor said, "a lot of them say that ... but remember,
boy, suicide is what you're talking about!"
Suicide, Jimmy thought sickly, the sin against The Grandfather!
Horrible as the cure for his disease was, he'd have to go through with
it. But what would mother think when he came reeling home, singing
songs, consorting with ... he retched. No more seeing Lydia once a
month, he'd have to consort with fallen women all the time....
Thank Grandfather, he thought dully, that dad is dead. It was the only
thing for which he could feel grateful at the moment.
"Cheer up," the grey-faced doctor said and his voice was if anything
more doleful than before, "be grateful you don't have cancer."
That was another thing for which to be grateful. The cure for cancer
was the only thing he had ever heard of that was more horrible than
that awful cure for arterio-sclerosis.
"Of course," the doctor said, "before we release you, we'll test you
for all the known diseases."
Grandfather above, he thought despairingly, suppose something else is
wrong with me!