Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe September 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.
[_In most ideally conceived Utopias the world as it exists
is depicted as a mushrooming horror of maladjustment, cruelty and
crime. In this startlingly original short novel that basic premise is
granted, but only to pave the way for an approach to Utopia over a
highway of the mind so daringly unusual we predict you'll forget
completely that you're embarking on a fictional excursion into the
future by one of the most gifted writers in the field. And that
forgetfulness will be accompanied by the startling realization that
Irving E. Cox has a great deal more than a storyteller's magic to
impart._]
the cartels jungle
_by ... Irving E. Cox, Jr._
It was a world of greedy Dynasts--each contending for the
right to pillage and enslave. But one man's valor became a
shining shield.
* * * * *
_... and he who overcomes an enemy by fraud is as much to be
praised as he who does so by force._
Machiavelli, DISCORSI, III, 1531
The captain walked down the ramp carrying a lightweight bag. To a
discerning eye, that bag meant only one thing: Max Hunter had quit the
service. A spaceman on leave never took personal belongings from his
ship, because without a bag he could by-pass the tedious wait for a
customs clearance.
From the foot of the ramp a gray-haired port hand called up to Hunter,
"So you're really through, Max?"
"I always said, by the time I was twenty-six--"
"Lots of guys think they'll make it. I did once myself. Look at me
now. I'm no good in the ships any more, so they bust me back to port
hand. It's too damn easy to throw your credits away in the
crumb-joints."
"I'm getting married," Hunter replied. "Ann and I worked this out when
I joined the service. Now we have the capital to open her clinic--and
ninety-six thousand credits, salted away in the Solar First National
Fund."
"Every youngster starts out like you did, but something always
happens. The girl doesn't wait, maybe. Or he gets to thinking he can
pile up credits faster in the company casinos." The old man saluted.
"So long, boy. It does my soul good to meet one guy who's getting out
of this crazy space racket."
Max Hunter strode along the fenced causeway toward the low,
pink-walled municipal building, shimmering in the desert sun. Behind
him the repair docks and the launching tubes made a ragged silhouette
against the sky.
Hunter felt no romantic inclination to look back. He had always been
amused by the insipid, Tri-D space operas. To Hunter it had been a
business--a job different from other occupations only because the
risks were greater and the bonus scale higher.
Ann would be waiting in the lobby, as she always was when he came in
from a flight. But today when they left the field, it would be for
keeps. Anticipation made his memory of Ann Saymer suddenly vivid--the
caress of her lips, the delicate scent of her hair, her quick smile
and the pert upturn of her nose.
Captain Hunter thought of Ann as small and delicate, yet neither term
was strictly applicable except subjectively in relation to himself.
Hunter towered a good four inches above six feet. His shoulders were
broad and powerful, his hips narrow, and his belly flat and hard. He
moved with the co-ordination that had become second nature to him
after a decade of frontier war. He was the typical spaceman, holding a
First in his profession.
As was his privilege, he still wore his captain's uniform--dress boots
of black plastic, tight-fitting trousers, and a scarlet jacket bearing
the gold insignia of Consolidated Solar Industries.
Hunter entered the municipal building and joined the line of people
moving slowly toward the customs booth. Anxiously he scanned the mass
of faces in the lobby. Ann Saymer wasn't there.
He felt the keen, knife-edge disappointment, and something
else--something he didn't want to put into words. He had sent Ann a
micropic telling her when his ship would be in. Of course, there was
that commission-job she had taken--
Abruptly he was face to face again with the vague fear that had nagged
at his mind for nearly a month. This wasn't like Ann. Always before
she had sent him every two or three days a chatty micropic, using the
private code they had invented to cut the unit cost of words. But four
weeks had now passed since he had last heard from her.
In an attempt at self-assurance, he recalled to mind just how exacting
a commission-job could be. Perhaps Ann had been working so hard she
had simply not had the time to send him a message.
Not even five minutes to send a micropic?
It didn't occur to him that she might be ill, for preventive medicine
had long ago made physical disease a trivial factor in human affairs.
A maladjustment then, with commitment to a city clinic? But Ann Saymer
held a First in Psychiatry.
Hunter fingered the Saving Fund record in his pocket--the goal he and
Ann had worked for so long. Nothing could go wrong now, nothing! He
said the words over in his mind as he might have repeated the litany
of a prayer, although Max Hunter did not consider himself a religious
man.
At sixteen he and Ann Saymer had fallen in love, while they had both
been in the last semester of the general school. They could have
married then, or they might have registered for the less permanent
companionship-union.
In either case, both of them would have had to go to work. Hunter
could not have entered the space service, which enrolled only single
men and Ann could not have afforded the university.
It hadn't mattered to Hunter. But Ann had possessed enough ambition
for them both. She knew she had the ability to earn a First in
Psychiatry, and would settle for nothing less. The drive that kept
their goal alive was hers. She was determined to establish a clinic of
her own. The plan she worked out was very practical--for Ann was in
all respects the opposite of an idle dreamer.
Hunter was to join a commercial spacefleet. His bonus credits would
accumulate to supply their capital, while he paid her university
tuition from his current earnings. After they married, Hunter was to
manage the finances of the clinic while Ann became the resident
psychiatrist.
Even at sixteen Ann Saymer had very positive ideas about curing mental
illness, which was the epidemic sickness of their world. Eight years
later, while she was still serving her internship in a city clinic,
Ann had invented the tiny machine which, with wry humor, she called an
Exorciser.
She had never used the device in the public clinic. If she had, she
would have lost the patent, since she had built the Exorciser while
she was still serving out her educational apprenticeship in the city
clinic.
"I'm no fool, Max," she told Hunter. "Why should I give it away? We'll
coin credits in our own clinic with that little gadget."
Hunter had no objection to her aggressive selfishness. In fact, the
term "selfishness" did not even occur to him. Ann was simply
expressing the ethic of their society. He admired her brilliance, her
cleverness; and he knew that her Exorciser, properly exploited, would
be the touchstone to a fortune.
During one of his furloughs Ann demonstrated what the machine could
do. After a minor surgical operation, a fragile filigree of
microscopic platinum wires was planted in the cerebral cortex of a
patient's skull. From a multi-dialed console Ann verbally transmitted
a new personality directly into the maladjusted mind. After twenty
minutes she removed the wire grid, and the disorganized personality
was whole again, with an adjustment index testing at zero-zero.
"A cure that leaves out the long probe for psychic causes," she said
enthusiastically. "In minutes, Max, we'll be able to do what now takes
weeks or months. They'll swarm into our clinic."
Hunter reasoned that Ann had taken the commission-job in order to
experiment with her machine in a privately-operated clinic. Her
internship had ended a month before, and it had been an altogether
legal thing for her to do. The fact that she had taken a commission
meant she would work for only a specific contract period. And because
a commission-job carried a professional classification, Ann had not
been compelled to join the union.
Nevertheless the haze of anxiety still lay oppressively over Captain
Hunter's mind. No matter what the requirements of Ann's commission may
have been, she could have met him at the spaceport. She knew when his
ship was due, and had never failed to show up before.