The Second Mack Reynolds Megapack. Mack Reynolds
brake for another couple of hours.” There was a sheen of sweat on his face. “A couple of hours more and they would have begun to enter the atmosphere. Curtains.”
* * * *
Later, after the clanging ambulance had left with the Barry children, after the crowds of thousands who had swarmed out to the spaceport to see the landing of the space lifeboat had dispersed, Bruce Camaroon and Dick MaGruder stood there alongside the vessel.
“Sharp little kid,” Bruce said.
“Yeah,” Dick said. “I suspect he’ll get by.”
“Suspect? That boy’s the biggest thing since Lindbergh. I doubt if there’s a person in the world, who has a TV or radio set, that doesn’t know who Jimmy and Jane Barry are. Before tomorrow is out, can you visualize the donations, the scholarships, the offers that will pour in on those two?”
“Yeah,” Dick said sourly. “No parents, no resources, no country, eh? They won’t need a country. The world is their country. Come on into this spacecraft. I can’t figure out what could have happened to that radio.”
They entered the small vessel and looked around.
“I’m glad I didn’t have to come almost a quarter of the way from Mars in this,” Bruce grunted. “Sure is confined.”
Dick sat down before the radio and fiddled with it. He looked up, after a time, his face strange.
“What’s the matter?” Bruce said.
Dick MaGruder was on the wide-eyed side. He said, “There’s nothing wrong with this set.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s working perfectly.”
Bruce Camaroon’s face went blank.
Dick said slowly, “He was receiving us all the time. Us and the spaceports at Dundee, Kiev and Peking as well.”
“But…but...”
“Don’t you see?” Dick said in disgust. “We’re the victims of the biggest publicity hoax the world has ever seen. When the Spaceship Promised Land blew, those two kids had no people, no resources, not even a country, as we both pointed out. Now they’re the darlings of all Earth. You know, I’ll bet that girl isn’t even badly burned. He didn’t really need a doctor’s advice. It was all a put-on. If he had really needed a doctor, for his sister’s care, he wouldn’t have pulled the trick.”
“But suppose we reveal that it was a hoax, that the radio was okay all the time?”
Dick looked at him and grunted sour amusement. “Who’d believe you? People love heroes and now they’ve got one. They’d think we repaired the set and were trying to give the kid a hard time. You might wind up getting yourself lynched.”
Bruce said, a certain element of respect in his voice, “Why, that little brat!”
COMPOUNDED INTEREST
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
This is one of my favorite stories. In the science-fiction field we have various themes that are a challenge. One of them is the “time travel” yarn. It’s something like the “murder taking place in a sealed room” theme in the detective-story genre. This has been done by just about every longtime detective-story writer since Edgar Allan Poe wrote Murders in the Rue Morgue. It would seem practically impossible to get a new departure. So, challenged, they try to come up with a new device. Thus it is with time travel for a science-fiction writer. You simply have to dream up some never-before-used plot on time travel. Obviously, it’s a corker. “If time travel was possible, suppose you went back and killed your own grandfather. Then you would never have been born! So you couldn’t go back and kill your grandfather!”
And so it goes. This story was first bought by Tony Boucher, possibly the best-loved science-fiction editor ever, for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It was picked up by Judith Merril for her second issue of The Year’s Best SF. Then, a decade later, she put it in her Best of the Best, in which she included what she thought were the ranking stories of her ten years of anthologies. It has been reprinted and translated many times.
—Mack Reynolds
* * * *
The stranger said in miserable Italian, “I wish to see Sior Marin Goldini on business.”
The concierge’s manner was suspicious. Through the wicket he ran his eyes over the newcomer’s clothing. “On business, Sior?” He hesitated. “Possibly, Sior, you could inform me as to the nature of your business, so that I might inform his Zelenza’s secretary, Vico Letta…” He let his sentence dribble away.
The stranger thought about that. “It pertains,” he said finally, “to gold.” He brought a hand from his pocket and opened it to disclose a half dozen yellow coins.
“A moment, Lustrissimo,” the servant blurted quickly. “Forgive me. Your costume, Lustrissimo…” He let his sentence dribble away again and was gone.
A few moments later he returned to swing the door open wide. “If you please, Lustrissimo, his Zelenza awaits you.”
He led the way down a vaulted hall to the central court, to the left past a fountain well to a heavy outer staircase supported by Gothic arches and sided by a carved parapet. They mounted, turned through a dark doorway and into a poorly lit corridor. The servant stopped and drummed carefully on a thick wooden door. A voice murmured from within and the servant held the door open and then retreated.
Two men were at a rough-hewn oak table. The older was heavy-set, tight of face and cold, and the other tall and thin and ever at ease. The latter bowed gently. He gestured and said, “His Zelenza, the Sior Marin Goldini.”
The stranger attempted a clumsy bow in return, said awkwardly, “My name is… Mister Smith.”
There was a moment of silence which Goldini broke finally by saying, “And this is my secretary, Vico Letta. The servant mentioned gold, Sior, and business.”
The stranger dug into a pocket, came forth with ten coins which he placed on the table before him. Vico Letta picked one up in mild interest and examined it. “I am not familiar with the coinage,” he said.
His master twisted his cold face without humor. “Which amazes me, my good Vico.” He turned to the newcomer. “And what is your wish with these coins, Sior Mister Smith? I confess, this is confusing.”
“I want,” Mister Smith said, “to have you invest the sum for me.”
Vico Letta had idly weighed one of the coins in question on a small scale. He cast his eyes up briefly as he estimated. “The ten would come to approximately forty-nine zecchini, Zelenza,” he murmured.
Marin Goldini said impatiently, “Sior, the amount is hardly sufficient for my house to bother with. The bookkeeping alone—”
The stranger broke in. “Don’t misunderstand. I realize the sum is small. However, I would ask but ten per cent, and would not call for an accounting for… for one hundred years.”
The two Venetians raised puzzled eyebrows. “A hundred years, Sior? Perhaps your command of our language…” Goldini said politely.
“One hundred years,” the stranger said.
“But surely,” the head of the house of Goldini protested, “it is unlikely that any of we three will be alive. If God wants, possibly even the house of Goldini will be a memory only.”
Vico Letta, intrigued, had been calculating rapidly. Now he said, “In one hundred years, at ten per cent compounded annually, your gold would be worth better than 700,000 zecchini.”
“Quite a bit more,” the stranger said firmly.
“A comfortable sum,” Goldini nodded, beginning to feel some of the interest of his secretary. “And during this period, all decisions pertaining