_This gloriously gay smiley character; this
astounding peace-pervading creature from Saturn's
inner moon, was radiating like a space beacon
in a meteor shower when it landed on Mars ...
it was madness ... gargantuan madness._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories January 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The Cargo Declarations mart at Areopolis spaceport was humming busily
when I walked in. A moment later it was as quiet as a church and twice
as attentive.
The sudden hush that fell wasn't out of deference to me, though I'm
pretty well known through the odd corners of the Solar System, but
because of the Mimasan smiley I carried in a ten-inch tungsten wire
cage under my arm. Nothing this side of Saturn's inner moon can lay
down the euphoric aura of peace and brotherhood that a smiley can, and
this one was doing a noble job of it. He was one of the first two ever
to hit Mars, young and healthy and still unmated, and he was radiating
like a space beacon in a meteor shower.
"Hey, it's Blaster Bill Bailey," I heard a trader--an Earthside homo by
the sound of him--say. "What's the beautiful little item you brought
back this time, Bill?"
They crowded around me, Earthies and Eetees--Extraterrestrials--alike,
all trying to get closer to that lovely peace-be-on-you euphoria. I
looked them over carefully, counting the house and estimating their
probable bids, and for the hundredth time it struck me that the place
was more like a zoo than a mart for serious business.
Cargo Declarations is a regular Mecca for Eetee traders from the
outlands. I saw both kinds of Martians, the cat-whiskered, man-like,
yellow city dwellers and their wilder, little, brown baboon-faced
cousins from the red upland deserts; pink-and-white Venusians
glistening like four-foot snails under the celloplast sheaths that kept
them from dehydrating in the dry Martian air; Callistans teetering like
scaly green sawhorses on their four stiff-jointed legs and walking
stick tails; wooly blue tree men from Titan and ponderous Europans
rolling on the little three-wheeled carts they used to carry their
barrel-bellied tonnage.
"It's a smiley," I told them, holding the cage up so they could admire
the soulful little brute. "From Mimas, Saturn's first moon. His name is
Joey and he is very much for sale."
Everybody wanted Joey, naturally. I'd have wanted him myself if I
hadn't learned from the Mimasan natives, who are as rare as smileys and
a damned sight less friendly, that chewing khiff roots would immunize
me against his hypnotic aura. That aura makes smileys remarkable
even among Eetees, so remarkable that nobody had ever brought one in
before. It's their mating call, a very practical gimmick evolved to
attract each other and at the same time protect themselves from native
predators while they carry on their courtship. It works on anything
from swamp gnats to Syrtis Major sand snakes, and it's literally
irresistible.
Joey looked something like a fist-sized marmoset shaped out of
pale blue smoke, his body so insubstantial that you could see the
cage wires through and behind him. It was hard to put a finger on
the quality unless you had learned the hard way, but there was a
weird incompleteness about him that escaped definition. Smileys are
paradoxical little brutes. Unmated, they're only half material because
they actually aren't complete entities. But when they mate--
"Gleef?" Joey said plaintively, yearning at the assorted faces around
him and loving every one of them.
That clinched it. "How much?" somebody asked, and there was a general
digging for wallets and Eetee equivalents.
I had figured my price already, allowing for dealers' profits and
transferral expenses. On Earth Joey would be worth at least a hundred
thousand credits to psychomedic clinics treating mental disorders
ranging from simple hypertension to paranoia. He should net me twenty
thousand, ten of which would go to settle a grubstake lien held by
Martian Bankings against the _Annabelle_, my little eighty-foot space
tug.
The other ten would leave me knee-deep in credit notes for a two week
spree that would begin at the Argonaut Club, which is as far as any
chunk-hopping asteroid prospector ever plans.
* * * * *
"First let me point out," I said, giving Joey's aura time to soak in
properly, "that Joey is the first smiley ever captured."
Which was strictly true, though I didn't see fit to mention the second
one, a female named Cora which I had left hidden in an old abandoned
oxygen reduction plant I knew out in Syrtis Major. I had two good
reasons for that: they'd bring higher prices if sold separately, and I
wasn't taking any chances on their getting together before I disposed
of them. Anything could happen if they did.
"Worth a hundred thousand on Earth," I said. "How much am I bid?"
But nobody made me an offer. I might have known it. Some days you just
can't turn an honest credit.
Joey's euphoric appeal should have had the traders scrambling for him,
but I had underestimated his effect. They wanted him, sure, but the
brotherly love he instilled in them made every buyer, Earth homo or
Eetee, ashamed to jack up the price against his neighbor.
We compromised finally by listing Joey for proxy sale, and I took him
out of Cargo Declarations to clear the air. He would be safe in the
_Annabelle's_ cabin because no one who got close enough to steal him
would have the heart to do it, and I'd have time while the bids rolled
in to sample a pitcher or two of yellow Martian skohl down at the
Argonaut Club.
Joey was safe enough, but I wasn't. I hadn't walked more than forty
yards from the _Annabelle_ after putting Joey away when I bumped into
Captain Giles of the spaceport police.
"Wait up," the Captain said. "I'll warn you this time before it
happens, Bailey. If you start another riot at the Argonaut Club--"
Captain Giles was a rail-thin six-footer with a dour hatchet face
burned to leather by Martian sun and wind, a hard-boiled but
conscientious patrol officer who had missed his calling. He should have
been a missionary, being as chaste as a Cosmicist monk and twice as
stern.
I heard variations of his ultimatum every time I put down at Areopolis.
But this time I had the answer to it.
"Will you step over to the _Annabelle_ with me, Captain?" I asked. "I'd
like your opinion on the cargo I brought in."
He went, glowering and suspicious. Sixty feet from the _Annabelle_ we
walked into Joey's euphoric aura, and his grumbling was shut off as if
somebody had turned a spigot.
"I don't understand this," the Captain said, giving me a saintly smile
that would have sent his hard-boiled crew into a mass faint. "But it's
really rather wonderful.... Let me beg you again, William, to shun that
disreputable Argonaut Club. Some day--"
"I know," I finished for him. "Some day your patrolies will sweep me
out of there in small, unidentifiable fragments. A dirty job."
I left him there with his bright new smile wearing strange creases in
his hard hatchet face and walked down from the landing apron to the
street. That was when I learned that I wasn't as safe as Joey.
The instant I set foot in the street a couple of professional uglies
closed in on me, a sharp-faced Earth homo and a cat-whiskered yellow
Martie in bright Terran clothing. The two of them were armed with
bell-mouthed freeze guns, and they were bent on business.
I never had a chance. They ushered me into a waiting sand-car and took
away the Quantrell blaster I wore buckled over my coveralls.
"We hear you got a smiley for sale, chunk-hopper," the sharp homo said
while the Martie started the sand-car. "Well, we got you a buyer for
it."
They didn't really need the car except for privacy. Our trip took us
only half a block down the street where we stepped out at the last
place I'd have expected to market a smiley--at the palatial office
building of Solar Shipping, a billion-credit corporation headed by one
Hume Shanig, space-line tycoon and crooked financier extraordinary.
* * * * *
I had heard plenty about Shanig, though I'd never done business with
him. He had a finger in every financial pie on Mars from import houses
to the Argonaut Club, which was directly across the street and which he
owned outright. Dealing with Shanig, rumor said, was like stepping into
a Venusian boghole--easier to get into than out of.
Shanig's uglies chivvied me into a reception room that was all
skylights and soft rugs and shining saffa-wood furniture. A big desk
stood in the center. Behind the desk sat Shanig's secretary.
It was almost worth being kidnapped to be able to stand and look at
her. She was a beauty, a tall clean-lined redhead with all the curves a
prodigal heredity ever promised a female of the species homo. And she
had a warm red mouth and clear green eyes that matched her hair.
"Buzz the boss that we got his homo, Cheryl," the Earthie said. "And
snap it up, baby. The Chief is but eager about this smiley deal."
The girl gave him a curt green glare. "Miss Trayne, to you," she
snapped. But she pushed the buzzer on her desk, and a rasping voice
from her audiphone said that we should come in.
I knew only one of the three men in the office beyond. He was a little
blond truckler named Perry Acree who held a booking-clerk's berth
at Cargo Declarations, and I didn't need to look twice at the smug
complacence of his chicken-chinned face to guess who had tipped Shanig
about my smiley.
The second was a fat, dignified homo with a clipped gray mustache and
the deliberate look of a top-flight medic. The third was Shanig himself.
Physically, the great man had seen better days. He was small and old
and wizened and bald, and the creases in his sallow face could have
been carved with a kit of engraver's tools. His scrawny neck hung in
slack wattles, and the hooked nose and hot black eyes of him made him
look like a dissipated desert buzzard. But I wasn't tempted to sell
him short for even in illness Shanig had the air about him of a baited
steel trap. He was an empire builder, one of these human dynamos who
pile up fortunes and then die of gastric ulcers before they can spend
their loot.
"I dislike bringing you here under duress, Bailey," Shanig said. He was
trying to make it smooth, but even so he barked like a Syrtis Major
jackal. "Dr. Humphrey will explain my reasons for being so precipitate."
The medic harumphed reluctantly and fiddled with his mustache. Plainly
he didn't like any part of it.
"Mr. Shanig," he said, "suffers from a chronic condition of extreme
nervous tension, a result of the years of overstrain imposed upon him
by his business enterprises. I have prescribed rest and relaxation, but
at this late date Mr. Shanig is constitutionally unable to pursue that
course.
"He is, in a word, incapable of relaxing; yet relax he must or collapse
completely. Sedatives are unsatisfactory, impairing the mental
processes. Mr. Shanig does not trust hypnotherapy.
"As a consequence we find ourselves with only one alternative--a happy
chance resulting from your arrival at Areopolis with this, ah, smiley."
I got it then. At first glance it was a neat enough idea; the catch
was that Shanig didn't know his smileys. He couldn't put himself under
Joey's euphoric golden-rule spell and still direct a big business.
And besides that I hadn't gone through the slimy hells of those Mimasan
jungles to rehabilitate a burned-out old credit-shark like Hume Shanig.
Joey belonged to humanity, to the poor overwrought hypertensive homos
who really needed him.
"If you want my smiley to keep this old goat from snapping his leash,"
I said, "the answer is no. Joey would quiet him down like a country
churchyard, sure, but--"
Shanig cut me short by smacking a peremptory hand on his desk top.
"That will be all, Dr. Humphrey," he barked. "Get out."
* * * * *
When the medic had gone Shanig turned on me. "I have no time to waste
in haggling, Bailey. How much do you ask for this creature?"