ROUND ROBIN

“Go North, young man; go north into the land of the Deceivers. But do not count your steps, for there is no return.”

Drugs, Dregs, and Decay

EDWARD ELDRJDGE

*

For almost thirty years Mark Foster had worked at the craft of being a writer. He had written with a modicum of skill and a fair amount of success, but that success had dwindled during the current year. An historical novel had sold only a few thousand copies. A treatise on biocorbic chemistry had been rejected by his publishers. And a syndicated column which he had penned for as long as he could remember had been halted after a chain of newspaper cancellations.

The idea, Foster felt sure, would change all that.

Of course Round-Robins were an old device and a Round-Robin applied to a science fiction novel had been done before; that is, a book passed from one to another of a series of writers, each writing one or more chapters. But Foster proposed something different. He would utilize six authors who were tops in their fields and who, in addition, were citizens of other worlds with a regional awareness of their planets: Dureya on Allisto, Armstrong on Trobos, Royal on Marie Galante, the James brothers on Renitaron, and Watson Fay on 11QR5.

Of these six, Watson Fay was the only one with whom he had had any previous contact. Ten years ago he had instigated a lawsuit against this writer, charging plagiarism. The man had stolen a portion of one of Foster’s books and published it under his by-line. The case had been thrown out for lack of evidence but in the decade that had since passed, Foster’s hate for the man had not diminished.

Why then choose him for one of the authors of the Round-Robin? Well for one thing, Fay was a crack writer steeped in the history and geography of his nameless planet. And for another—reprisal. Foster thought he saw in the development of the projected book a subtle way to get even with this literary thief.

On April 5th he dispatched letters to the five other writers he had chosen and a month later old Updyke, the postman, delivered the replies almost concurrently. Foster’s pleasure knew no bounds when he read that all five had accepted his proposal. Filled with enthusiasm, he rolled a sheet of paper in the dictatype and started work. He was halfway through an outline of the plot when his friend and physician, Dr. Evans, made an unexpected call.

“Thought I’d stop by and see how you were getting along,” Evans said. “You were looking seedy a few weeks ago.”

“I’m all right,” Foster said.

“You had all the symptoms of deep-space malady,” Evans went on, “even though you hadn’t been away from Earth for ten years.”

“I told you my dream-machine shorted while I was asleep. The burns were superficial.”

Evans nodded. “They were also green in color and that’s a mark of the fever. Have you had any hallucinations lately?”

“The only hallucination I’ve had has been the sight of your bill,” Foster said with a laugh.

It was apparent, however, that Foster was not interested in further chit-chat and after a few moments the physician took up his hat to leave. At the door Evans paused.

“The malady strikes suddenly. If you should detect streaks going up your neck, don’t delay in calling me.”

Foster went back to his work.

He began by describing the small village of Victoria, deliberately selecting a placid bucolic setting to offset the fantasy passages. Skillfully he introduced three characters, then a fourth, narrated the initial event of the story-line, and carried the action to the nearest spaceport. There he described the space ship which was to be the scene of a crime. He was an old hand at all this and he enjoyed his work. When the chapter was completed he read it over and in the accompanying letter he suggested that Dureya make use of his Allistan background.

Martha, Foster’s wife, a buxom woman with flaxen hair turning grey, read the letter.

“Humph!” she said. “Why don’t you write all the chapters yourself? Are you afraid you can’t do a good enough job?”

“No, I’m nor afraid of that at all. But those five names on the book will insure a good sale.”

When it arrived Foster read Dureya’s manuscript several times. It wasn’t bad, he told himself; it wasn’t bad at all. Only one thing disturbed him and that was an intangible. It seemed he had read it before. Not the text but the style, which somehow was familiar.

Before continuing with the book, however—he had decided to write the sixth chapter himself—he set out to clear his brain by a walk through the city streets. Strolling aimlessly down dark byways, past shabby tenements, he heard the distant cry of a newsboy: “Earth spaceliner feared shot down! Washington concerned!” Stupid politicians, Foster thought. They won’t rest until they have us entangled in another planetary mess.

He came to an open corner, looked up into the spangled heavens and remembered his youth when he had not been chained to one world by middle-aged responsibilities. For Martha was no cosmopolite. She was content to live in one place, a life of sedentary respectability.

Something became visible in the darkness above him. A man’s face floated there, slowly turning. Was he quite mad or was it the face of Watson Fay? It disappeared and with a little shock Foster realized that it had been a trick of his vision.

In the next week Updyke brought more envelopes and each time, as before, asked payment for postage-due. “Don’t those chaps ever buy stamps?” Foster grumbled. The postman looked at him queerly but said nothing.

The seventh and eighth chapters were the work of the James brothers and they were excellent. Renitaron, under their combined pens, stood forth as a truly alien world with cat-tail trees twenty meters tall and scarlet grass that rippled in the wind like a sea of blood.

But pleased though he was with the growing script, Foster found himself disturbed by the old-time familiarity he read in it. This was spotted by Martha when she read the story as far as it had progressed.

“It sounds old-fashioned,” she said, “as if it had been written a generation ago. I thought you said the Jameses were young men.”

“Well, they’re not old,” Foster said.

“I wish you had never started this book,” Martha said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know why. I think you would have done better by yourself. People aren’t going to buy it because of names on the jacket. And who are these writers? I never heard of them.”

“They’re tops in their fields,” said Foster. And he added stubbornly, “The book will sell.”

On a hot summer day in the latter part of July when he least expected it Foster had another seizure with his eyes. Concerned, he called on Doctor Evans.

“I seem to see a man’s face floating above me,” he told the physician. “At first I thought it might be a refraction of the street lights. But yesterday it came again in daylight while I was in my apartment.”

“A man’s face…” the Doctor said. “Was it the same face on both occasions?”

Foster nodded.

“The face of someone you know?”

“I thought so at first. Now I’m not sure.”

Evans was noncommittal in his diagnosis. Foster hesitated at the door. “Doctor,” he said, “What’s Lethar?”

“Lethar? A mixture of Lebantropol and Tharnopsis. Why?”

“I heard it was good for a…case like mine.”

Evans smiled. “You’re thinking of Lethob. Lebantropol and other things but no Tharnopsis. You can try it if you wish.” He reached for his prescription pad. “Lethar you know is the principal drug in DRSH.”

“What’s that?”

“Delayed Remote Subliminal Hypnosis. I’m not a neurologist but I understand that if a small amount of Lethar can be introduced into the bloodstream a subliminal command will become a part of the patient’s mentality and induce complete obeyment. It doesn’t always work.”

Not at all satisfied, Foster returned to his apartment.

He cleared his desk and launched full tilt into his work, but after a few pages the script became a miserable blockade through which he labored with the greatest difficulty. Every sentence, every word of dialogue seemed stilted. At length in desperation he packaged the manuscript and sent it to Sanford Royal on Marie Galante, with the request that he rewrite the tenth chapter completely.

Two weeks went by, three. At the beginning of the fourth week a fat envelope finally arrived. Foster opened it hurriedly. Royal’s work was superb. Again however that nebulous thing called style set Foster to wondering. The chapters were somehow reminiscent of the past.

But now the manuscript took second place in Foster’s attention. The time had come to put into action the underground angle of his basic scheme. The time had come to contact Watson Fay.

With his letter to this sixth and last writer of the Round-Robin he enclosed tear-sheets from a rare old publication, Revue Metaphysique, a collector’s item he had come upon many years ago. It was an essay on the power of numerals, tracing their history from the shadowy past.

And that, he congratulated himself, was just the addition needed. For Watson Fay, the sublime fool, was an avowed numerologist.

Foster dispatched the letter, replete with a false signature, via YRB mail, which meant it would be subject to a minimum of censorship. That done, he sought to refresh himself again with a night walk through the city streets. Again he heard the cries of a newsboy: “Washington terms shooting down of second spaceliner act of treachery!” And again when he reached that open intersection and looked up into the dark sky he saw that same face hovering above him.

A nagging pain began to throb in his skull. In the mirror back in his apartment however, he could detect no streaks going up his neck and he resolved to postpone seeing the doctor until later.

For a long time there was no reply from Watson Fay. When the script finally was delivered, Foster, with Spartan deliberation, lit a cigar, drew a lamp close to him, and settled himself before beginning to read.

Half an hour later he was still sitting there, a meditative look in his eyes.

He went into the bathroom and took from the medicine cabinet a vial of Lethob, and from a shelf a bottle of Tharnopsis which had been there a long time. The label bore the warning: Do not mix with Lebantropol, either in tincture of granule form. Avoid contact with the skin. Foster found a mortar and pestle and proceeded to blend the contents of the two containers into a yellowish mixture.

He went back to his dictatype and composed a letter.

It was the most difficult piece of correspondence he had ever written. Outwardly it was routine, thanking Watson Fay for the chapter he had sent and discussing the Round-Robin in general, but concealed in every statement was a subliminal command that the reader leave his present position and move due North, according to the points of the 11QR5 compass.

The plan depended upon a number of details: the Lethar mixture must be introduced by skin contact into the reader’s bloodstream. The Watson Fay house must have remained unchanged during the years, since Foster had seen it. North must bring the reader out of his study onto the flagstone walk, across sixty yards of grounds to the sheer unprotected cliff projecting out over the Xonde Sea.

Careful not to blur the ink, Foster treated the margins and back side of the letter with the Lethar mixture.

He mailed the letter and sat back to wait.

Martha entered the sanctity of his workroom and found him there, doing nothing. Her anger was biting.

“Do you realize no money has come into this house for two months?” she said. “And there you sit like a millionaire! What’re you doing about your book?”

“What book?”

“Are you crazy? The book you’ve been doing with those other writers.”

“Oh that.” Foster shrugged. “It’ll be done presently. As a matter of fact we’re on the final episode.”

He did not tell her that the last chapter by Watson Fay had been a great disappointment to him. He did not tell her that Fay in the midst of his narrative abruptly had swung into a treatise on the folly of war. What right had he to concern himself with military problems in a media that was not his own? Foster didn’t give a damn about planetary relationships and he resented this move of Fay’s intensely.

The night of August first was hot and oppressive. Foster had gone to bed early but he lay there unable to court sleep. The skin of his hands where he had touched the drug was inflamed and no amount of washing or ointment he had applied would alleviate it.

He lay there thinking…thinking of Watson Fay and the final “trip” he would shortly make. Only one thing saddened Foster. Fay would come to his end unaware of Foster’s controlling part in it. He would never know that his impending demise would be the direct result of planned justice for an act he had committed and thought he had got away with ten years before. But he would be aware, tragically, painfully aware of what was happening and he would be unable to help himself. And that at least would supply the delicious taste of revenge for Foster.

About one o’clock Foster finally dozed off, only to awake suddenly, aware of a strange inner sensation. He lay there, fighting it. His eyes were rimmed with sleep but when he peered from them across the room the design on the wallpaper seemed to undulate and form queer shapes and designs. White objects scuttled about between the designs, fighting it appeared to gain freedom and reach him. Superimposed over this visual nightmare were streaks and ribbons of scarlet and brilliant orange that mounted vertically to the ceiling. And now the whole thing began to coalesce into a great lidless eye that stared at him malevolently.

Foster got out of bed, stepped across to the door and entered the living room. Opposite, French doors led to a small balcony overlooking the street, eight stories below, protected by a wrought-iron railing. As he stood there that strange compulsion to move North swept over him. Like a robot with frozen controls, he paced across the room, tumbling a chair out of his path. He moved to the French doors, thrust them open. A late summer breeze, redolent with the musk of the river, touched his face.

From a distance he heard again the voice of the newsboy: “Washington sends second note.”

He saw something floating just beyond the railing…a man’s face…smiling at him…the face of Watson Fay—he recognized it now for a certainty—as it had looked ten years ago during the plagiarism trial, mocking and triumphant. And now two hands joined the head and they motioned to him, indolently to and fro…

The beckoning hands joined with the North compulsion to form an irresistible urge. Foster reached out and touched the railing…climbed it and swept his arms into space, teetering there…

An inquest was held of course and among the testimonies given was that of Updyke, the postman.

“I don’t know what Foster was up to,” Updyke said, “but for the past three months he’d been receiving letters and envelopes—all sent by him and returned to him, addressees unknown. This included mail he had directed to Watson Fay who the postal department on 11QR.5 reported had been dead these five years…”

As for the other addresses, after a search through Foster’s papers, Martha testified they were actually five pseudonyms used by Foster for his own writings long before she had married him.