_For that elusive green-white glamour, go to Venus,
the ads urged vain women. But that was only half
the story--just ask olive-skinned Sukey Jones._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Her name was Sukey Kireina Jones, and the blood of South Asia was in
her veins. Mix that with the Celtic, brother, and you've got something
special. Her eyes were dark, and mostly a little sad; her hair was
black as the Rim, and she stood barely five feet in heels, unless you
count the curves, which, if Nature had been fool enough to straighten
them out, would have added quite a lot--and taken away a lot too.
We called her Sukey, and kidded her some, and what made her so
beautiful was, she didn't know it.
I had found her hanging around the Surface Transit offices, broke and
alone, and got her the job as counter girl in the Company hash house
on the edge of the space-port. That was where she met my friend, Harry
Thurbley.
Harry, was a licensed senior space pilot, but he would never let any
of us call him Captain Thurbley. He said the title sounded pompous,
and who the hell was he, anyway. The squarest guy I ever met, but you
would have thought that he was ashamed of that blue uniform. Me, Chuck
Morris, I am only an engineer--a space going mechanic--and I would
have given my share in the cosmic hereafter to wear it. I would have
strutted some.
But uniform or no uniform, I wouldn't have stood a chance with Sukey
Jones. From the moment those two set eyes on one another, she had been
Harry's girl. I used to wonder how it would have been with her and me
if I had never introduced them. Just wondering.
In those days there had got to be a heavy Venus passenger traffic. It
had become fashionable for Earth women to bleach their skin to match
their hair, and the coveted greenish-white paleness they wanted could
only be accomplished, it seemed, by spending several months under the
sunless Venusian overcast, with its odd radiations.
Caterers to this fad left in scores for Venus. Tourist lodgings and
recreational facilities sprang up on the frontier planet. Beauty got to
be big business overnight.
This was only available to women with considerable money, of course.
A round trip ticket cost just under twelve thousand dollars, and high
living, on Venus, came high indeed.
Their poor sisters had recourse only to special lamps and lotions to
simulate the pallor of the movie stars and the debutantes. It was not
the same. Not in their own minds. It was the dream of every woman to
make the pilgrimage, and not a few spent their life savings, embezzled,
stowed away, or even sold themselves to Venusian white slavers for the
chance of that elusive glamour.
Sukey's skin was of a wonderful, delicate olive shade, and she hated
it. Whenever one of the female travelers would come in to eat, looking
ghostly pale and opulent in their Martian lizard-skin coats, Sukey
Jones would sigh. I could tell that in her small body there was a
man-sized inferiority complex building up, but I didn't mention it to
Harry. He would only have worried about her.
He was thoughtful of Sukey, and many a time when we got in, and he
had business with Customs or the Port Authority, he would say to me,
"Chuck, go and see Sukey for me, and tell her I'll be along."
And as for Sukey Jones, she may not have been overly bright, but that
kind of treatment had been a rare thing in her twenty-three years of
hard knocks. She worshipped Harry Thurbley.
That night in March we had set the _Altair_ down on the field just
after dusk. Harry had business at the Office, and I was to drop in and
see Sukey first and let her know that he'd be in later. I didn't mind.
I was always glad to do it.
I went into the restaurant, and the place was crowded with passengers
for the 2200 Marsflight. I couldn't find Sukey. There was a strange
girl behind the cash register. I asked her about it, and she said she
didn't know anything; she had just been hired.
So I finally got Linda, one of the waitresses, aside, and got the story
from her.
Seemed there had been a couple of women--society dames in from Venus
on the Saturday run--and Sukey had heard one of them make a remark
about her complexion. It was nothing much, just a whispered knife
of criticism, but Sukey had flared up. Then the woman got really
insulting, and Sukey had reached over the cash register and pulled out
a big handful of her platinum locks.
That grab had cost her her job.
* * * * *
I went to her apartment, in a ramshackle tenement a couple of blocks
away, and knocked on the door. A girl who claimed to be her roommate
answered, and said that Sukey had moved out. She wasn't supposed to
tell me where Sukey had gone if my name was Harry.
I said, who was Harry. I was an insurance claim adjuster, and had some
money for her.
Sukey had gone to live with a Mrs. Althea Campbell. The address was
1711 Oak Drive. That was all the roommate knew.
Harry was waiting down at the office when I got back there. I told him
what I had learned, and we caught a coptercab out to 1711 Oak Drive. I
remember it was on a Thursday. That turned out to be kind of important.
It was almost ten o'clock when we arrived, but the lights were still
on, and 1711 turned out to be quite a palace. "I didn't know Sukey had
any friends like that!" I said.
Harry didn't answer. His mouth was a firm, tight line. He was still
thinking of Sukey running out on him.
I pressed the button, and an egg-headed man in a monkey suit answered.
He was the butler; you could tell that.
"A Miss Sukey Jones live here?" I said.
His eyebrows elevated half an inch. "There is a young woman _employed_
here," he said. "I regret to say that this is her night off, and she is
not here."
"Employed," I said to Harry. "She must have hired as a private
secretary or something."
I doubt if the stiff in livery had smiled in years. He shouldn't have
tried it. It almost cost him his teeth. "Hardly anything so grand as
that," he said. "The girl is Mrs. Campbell's personal maid."
Harry was silent for a moment. I waited for him to speak. We looked at
each other.
"Maybe we ought to talk to this Althea Campbell," I suggested.
The woman was nearer to forty than thirty, and she could have been
handsome once. Even now her shape wouldn't have been bad if she'd taken
off forty pounds. The poundage was unnatural and flabby, and her skin
was blotched and unpleasant. She was a faded, natural blonde, I would
say, but her hair was red now.
Harry was always polite. He went forward and introduced us. She was
wearing a silk wrapper a couple of sizes too small, and she didn't get
up to greet us.
Still, she didn't seem to be displeased by an unexpected visit by two
males at 10:00 p.m. The look she gave Harry was as if she might eat
him. Harry never seemed to notice how it was with women when he came
into a room, but I could see it, raw and naked, on her face.
She was a widow, and Sukey had been working for her a week. Harry said
he knew of a job in the Company office that he could get for Sukey, and
he asked Mrs. Campbell to let her go, without telling her we'd been
there.
Mrs. Campbell's face took on a little color, making it appear more
mottled than ever. And her voice was too shrill to be comfortable. She
said that maids were very difficult to find this day and time, and that
if Sukey didn't mind it, we shouldn't mind either. She wouldn't give
her up.
"Let's wait and see what Sukey has to say about it," I suggested.
Harry shook his head. "We can't do that. She mustn't know we've been
here, Chuck."
"Why? Servants may be out of date, but there's nothing disgraceful
about honest labor."
"Of course not," Harry said. "But to Sukey it must be embarrassing.
That's why she didn't let me know what she was doing, don't you see? It
must have been that."
Well, it was logical enough. And that was Harry for you. Always
thinking first of Sukey's feelings, whereas I would probably have
turned her across my knee. But we had to do something.
We were going to be in port for three weeks, and Harry made an
appointment to come back the following Thursday, when Sukey was away
from the house, and try to reason once more with Althea Campbell.
Harry went back the next week, and the week after that, and he wasn't
having any luck, but he said that at least he could make sure that
Sukey was still all right.
Meanwhile I did some snooping, and I found out several things about
Mrs. Campbell. She was worth eighteen and a half million bucks, and
she had spent half that much trying to regain a face, and figure, and
complexion of twenty years ago, that she probably remembered better
than they were.
I talked to one of her former servants and learned that Sukey could
expect a hard time working for her. The woman was a kind of sadist with
servants, but Sukey would put up with anything to get what she wanted,
and I knew what it was she was after now. I knew why she had taken the
job.
After I had learned this, I put in a visicall to the Oak Drive mansion.
The butler's face appeared on the screen. I was too late.
I got hold of Harry as quick as I could, but I could see right away
that he had already found out.
Mrs. Campbell had taken Sukey Jones and left last night for Venus.
* * * * *
I had known Harry Thurbley for ten years, and he was a phlegmatic sort.
He had the kind of unshakable calm and nerve you only find in a man
that's made peace with death a couple of times or so out beyond the
planets. Once I had seen him walk into a mining power plant on Callisto
and disarm a runaway pile that was due to explode in three minutes and
blast away half the moon.
When he came out he hadn't even been sweating.
But he was upset now. I tried to calm him, but I guess he had a hunch.
I had spent several years on Venus and knew the place as well as any
Terran. I tried to persuade him that Sukey Jones wouldn't be in any
danger so long as they stuck to the civilized northern part, but he
didn't seem to half hear what I was saying.
A month passed, and we made another trip beyond the Belt. When we got
back there was still no Sukey, and not even a letter. Harry and I went
into the Super's office and talked him into a transfer to the Venus run
for one trip.
It was less than five days later that we set the _Altair_ down on the
surface of the White Planet at Medea, the biggest port city on Venus.
The low, spidery towers of the native architects of old were crowded
and overshadowed by Earthstyle skyscrapers which had grown up, mostly,
since the last time I had seen Venus, fifteen years ago.
It was Harry's first trip to the sister planet of Earth, and he seemed
surprised at the mushrooming civilization. But he still couldn't rest
until we'd given the ship into the hands of the ground crew and gone to
hunt Sukey and her mistress.
Mrs. Campbell, we discovered, had checked in at the Majestic Hotel for
one week, and left, giving no forwarding address. After that she had
been heard from in two or three of the border cities. She had made the
rounds of all the beauty parlors and quack establishments in town. This
was her fourth trip to Venus, and all of the merchants knew her by
sight.
But she was not, currently, visiting any of these places. It seemed
that Althea Campbell, a couple of days ago, had disappeared, which was
nothing to me, except that she had taken a tiny girl named Sukey Jones
with her.
Mrs. Campbell may have had acquaintances about Venus, but not many
friends. Especially among the natives, whom she loathed and treated
like scum. The natives of the temperate belts were humanoid, and though
primitive in culture, fairly intelligent.
They were thin, and not too bad-looking if you could get used to the
fish-belly whiteness of their scaly skins, and a partial lack of
symmetry in their bodies, such as having one eye a couple of sizes
bigger than the other one.
It was from one of the Venusians that we found our first clue. He
was Argol Beg, the head of the native Security Police, an individual
with silvery, heavy-lidded eyes, and long, nervous, quadruple-jointed
fingers.
He mentioned a name that I had heard a long time ago, and forgotten.
Marjud. Marjud had been one of the rebel chieftains who had fought
against the Alliance in the late Venerian sectional war, and now was
outlawed from the Northern settlements.
I call him a man, but I had seen pictures of Marjud once, and there
were features about that gross body of his that no one except a
Venusian would believe. He was a native of the steaming jungles of
the torrid zone, a forbidden area where the native form mysteriously
shifted and changed from generation to generation for reasons at which
the anthropologists could only guess. His race was still barbaric, for
the most part, which was why it was off limits.
It seemed that Marjud was now in the beauty racket. That could have
handed me a laugh, except that we were too worried about Sukey.
We got a newspaper, the _Medean Times_, and sure enough, there was
his ad, in scrambled English that hadn't even been changed by the
proofreader.
See Marjud, High Priest of Love and Beauty
It Is for a Smooth, White Appearance and I
Will Give You the Limbs Long and Pale,
and Also Supple and Graceful.
The address of the contact man was given. I asked Argol Beg why he
had not arrested Marjud. But Marjud's man had set up in the Colonial
Quarter, where Argol Beg had no authority, and he was not wanted by the
Earth colonial police.
"Come on," I said to Harry. "Let's see if we can locate the old
gargoyle." Harry was pretty worried by this time, and he didn't half
understand what was going on, not knowing Venus.
"I'm with you, whatever you say," he said.
We visited the address given in the ad, and got to talk to a
normal-appearing native with slit eyes and a fishy stare. He said that
Marjud saw only Terran females, and he couldn't help us.
I persuaded him to change his mind in a few minutes, and then he told
us that Marjud was staying in a dhol cave outside the city. The dhol
caves were made by a long-dead, semi-intelligent race of quadrupeds,
and it wasn't uncommon for the none-too-particular Venusians to set up
housekeeping in them.
There was a guard hanging around the entrance to this one. The contact
man pointed out the guard and fled. The guard argued and I had to slug
him with the butt of my gun. Harry went over and looked at him.
He turned to me and his face was clammy white. It was one of the
equatorial species.
"What's the matter?" I said.
"What is it?"