then his enthusiasm wears off and he goes back to the bottle. Only now
he's got a keg."
Don snapped his fingers. "The keg. I almost forgot about that matter
duplicator. If it can give you perfume and Doc rum.... Come on. Let's
reopen negotiations with the Master."
They found the old man surrounded by a group of reporters, being
charmingly evasive with the science editor of _Time_. Professor Garet
had now joined this group, where he listened as eagerly as a student.
The Master was showing the vault-like chamber in which he had spent the
generations since the spaceships left Gorel-zed. He let them examine the
coffin-sized drawer that had been his bed and indicated the others where
the younger ones still slept, awaiting the birth of their new planet.
Don counted fewer than three dozen drawers.
"Is that all?" he asked.
"Infants and children take up less room," the Master said. "There are
two or three in each drawer, and still others in the ships that never
come to Earth. Even so, we number fewer than a thousand."
"But you have the matter duplicator," Don said. "Won't it work on
people?"
"Unfortunately, no. Transubstantiation has never worked on living cells.
Don't think we haven't tried. We shall have to encourage early marriages
and hope for a high birth rate."
"Now about this transubstantiator," the _Time_ man said, and Garet's
head cocked in delight, apparently at the resounding sound of the word.
"What's the principle? You don't have to give away the secret--just give
me a general idea."
The Master shook his head.
Don asked, "What will you trade for the transubstantiator and the
paralysis scepter you gave Hector?"
The old man smiled. "Not even New York," he said. "Our moral code
couldn't permit us to trade either. Earth has enough problems already."
"Offer him the formula for fusion," Frank Fogarty's voice said from the
Pentagon.
The old man shuddered. "I heard that," he said. "No, thank you, Mr.
Secretary!"
"This is the _clean_ bomb," Fogarty said. "It ought to come in very
handy in construction work on your new planet."
"We will try to manage in our own way," the Master said. He asked Garet,
"Wouldn't you say that magnology was sufficient for our purposes,
Professor?"
Alis' father beamed at being consulted and hearing his own term applied
to the Gorel-zed propulsion system.
"More than sufficient," he said enthusiastically. "Preferable, in fact.
Magnology is safe, stressless, and permanently powerful in stasis. It is
the ultimate in gravity-beam nullification. If anything can glue the
asteroids back into the planet they once were, magnology will do it. You
can understand how I was misled. Your system so fitted my theory that I
imagined it was I who had caused Superior to rise from Earth."
"I understand perfectly," the Master replied graciously. "And I cannot
say how glad I am that you and Mrs. Garet have chosen to stay with
Cavalier and Superior and become citizens of our new world."
"What will you call your new planet?" the AP man asked. "Asteroida?
Something like that?"
"We haven't decided. I welcome suggestions."
The UPI man was inspired. "How about Neworld?" he asked. "That describes
it perfectly, doesn't it? New world--Neworld?" He wrote it on a piece of
paper and admired it.
"Thank you," the Master said. "Well certainly consider it."
The UPI man was satisfied. He had a lead for his story.
* * * * *
_SUPERIOR, Nov. 6 (AP)--The floating city of Superior, Earthbound again
after nearly six days of aerial meandering, prepared today to discharge
its former residents. Its new inhabitants, the kangaroo-like Gizls who
came from beyond the stars to swing an unprecedented barter deal
involving the United States, Russia and Germany, said they would leave
almost immediately to join Superior with the new planet they have been
building in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter...._
* * * * *
_HEIDELBERG, Nov. 6 (AP)--This university city said good-by today to
some 400 interplanetary visitors it belatedly realized had long been
burrowed under it. The first officially acknowledged flying saucer
landed on Heidelberg's outskirts early today and took aboard the Gizls,
who, but for the shrewd maneuvering of the U. S. Secretary of State,
"Foghorn Frank" Fogarty, acting through a hastily commissioned
ex-sergeant troubleshooter, General Don Cort ..._
* * * * *
_MOSCOW, Nov. 6 (Reuters)--The industrial city of Magnitogorsk was
assured of remaining Soviet territory today with the departure of 1,000
kangaroo-like aliens. These visitors from Gorel-zed, the doomed world
whose survivors will increase the number of planets in the solar system
to ten with the creation between Mars and Jupiter of ..._
* * * * *
From the editorial page of the New York Daily News:
NICE KNOWING YOU, GIZLS, BUT--
_Next time you visit us, how about doing it openly, instead of burrowing
underground like a bunch of Reds?_
* * * * *
BULLETIN
_ABOARD THE SPACESHIP SUPERIOR, Nov. 6 (UPI)--This former Ohio town,
adapted for space travel, took off for the asteroid belt today after
transferring 2,878 of its citizens to a convoy of buses bound for a
relocation center. The other 122 of its previous population of 3,000
chose to remain aboard to pioneer the birth of the tenth planet of the
solar system--Neworld._
_Neworld, named by the United Press International correspondent
accompanying the survivors of the burned-out planet of Gorel-zed, will
become the second known inhabited planet in the solar system...._
* * * * *
"Just a minute, Alis," Don said.
"No, sir, Sergeant-General Donald Cort, sir. Not a minute longer. You
tell him now."
"All right. Sir," Don Cort (Gen., temp.) said to Frank Fogarty,
Secretary of Defense, "has the mission been accomplished?"
Don and Alis were in the back seat of an army staff car that was leading
the bus convoy.
"Looks that way, son. Our best telescopes can't see them any more. I'd
say Neworld was well on its way to a-borning."
Alis Garet, her arms around Don and her head on his shoulder, spoke
directly into the transceiver. "Mr. Fogarty, are you aware that I
haven't had a single minute alone with this human radio station since
I've know him? This is the most inhibited man in the entire U. S. Army."
"Miss Garet," the Defense Secretary said, "I understand perfectly. When
I was courting Mrs. Fogarty I was a pilot on the Meseck Line.... Well,
never mind that. Mission accomplished, General Cort, my boy."
"Then, sir," Don said, "Sergeant Cort respectfully requests permission
to disconnect this blasted invasion of privacy so he can ask Miss Alis
Garet if she thinks two of us can live on a non-com's pay."
The driver of the staff car, a sergeant himself, said over his shoulder,
"Can't be done, General."
Fogarty said, "Don't be too anxious to revert to the ranks, my boy. I'll
admit the T/O for generals isn't wide open but I'm sure we can
compromise somewhere between three stripes and four stars. Suppose you
take a ten-day delay en route to Washington while we see what we can do.
I'll meet you in the White House on November sixteenth. The President
tells me he wants to pin a medal on you."
"Yes, sir," Don said. Alis was very close and he was only half
listening. "Any further orders, sir?"
"Just one, Don. Kiss her for me, too. Over to you."
"Yes, sir!" Don said. "Over and out."
* * * * *
RICHARD WILSON, a part-time novelist, is a full-time newsman for an
international press service (Reuters). He is the author of two
previous books and several dozen short stories in science-fiction
magazines since 1940.
He finds time for his fiction writing at night and on week ends in
the attic workroom of his century-old ex-farmhouse exactly 35 miles,
as the odometer on his Volkswagen computes it, from Times Square.
Reviewers have not exactly compared his writing to those of some
others who once labored in Reuters' 109-year-old vineyards, among
them John Buchan and Edgar Wallace. But one _New York Times_ critic
praised "his whacky humor," which he said has "the bite of shrewd
satire behind its madness," and the _New York Herald-Tribune'_s man
maintained that "there's not another male in the science-fiction
field who can beat Wilson in the easy, intimate exposition of the
private lives of the space-future."
End of Project Gutenberg's And Then the Town Took Off, by Richard Wilson