“We made it! You . . .” She smiled, tried to sit up, looked startled, then indignant. “What’s the idea of tying me down to this thing?”
Dasinger nodded. “I guess you’re all there!” He reached down to unfasten her from the cot. “After what happened, I wasn’t so sure you’d be entirely rational when the kwil wore off and you woke up.”
Duomart paled a little. “I hadn’t imagined . . .” She shook her blond head. “Well, let’s skip that! I’ll have nightmares for years. . . . What happened to the others?”
* * *
Dasinger told her, concluded, “Egavine may have run into the Spy, but I doubt it. He’ll probably show up in the Hub eventually with the gems he took from Calat, and if he doesn’t get caught peddling them he may wind up with around a million credits . . . about the sixth part of what he would have collected if he’d stopped playing crooked and trying to get everything. I doubt the doctor will ever quit kicking himself for that!”
“Your agency gets the whole salvage fee now, eh?”
“Not exactly,” Dasinger said. “Considering everything that’s happened, the Kyth Interstellar Detective Agency would have to be extremely ungrateful if it didn’t feel you’d earned the same split we were going to give Dr. Egavine.”
Miss Mines gazed at him in startled silence, flushed excitedly. “Think you can talk the Kyth people into that, Dasinger?”
“I imagine so,” Dasinger said, “since I own the agency. That should finance your Willata Fleet operation very comfortably and still leave a couple of million credits over for your old age. I doubt we’ll clear anything on Hovig’s generators . . .”
Miss Mines looked uncomfortable. “Do you have those things aboard?”
“At the moment. Disassembled of course. Primarily I didn’t want the Fleet gang to get their hands on them. We might lose them in space somewhere or take them back to the Federation for the scientists to poke over. We’ll discuss that on the way. Now, do you feel perky enough to want a look at the stuff that’s cost around a hundred and fifty lives before it ever hit the Hub’s markets?”
“Couldn’t feel perkier!” She straightened up expectantly. “Let’s see them . . .”
Dasinger turned away towards the wall where he had put down the little steel case with the loot of the Dosey Asteroids robbery.
Behind him, Duomart screamed. He spun back to her, his face white. “What’s the matter?”
Duomart was staring wide-eyed past him towards the instrument console, the back of one hand to her mouth. “That . . . the thing!”
“Thing?”
“Big . . . yellow . . . wet . . . ugh! It’s ducked behind the console, Dasinger! It’s lurking there!”
“Oh!” Dasinger said, relaxing. He smiled. “That’s all right. Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about . . . are you crazy?”
“Not in the least. I thought you were for a second, but it’s very simple. You’ve worked off the kwil and now you’re in the hangover period. You get hallucinations then, just as I usually do. For the next eight or nine hours, you’ll be seeing odd things around from time to time. So what? They’re not real.”
* * *
“All right, they’re not real, but they seem real enough while they’re around,” Duomart said. “I don’t want to see them.” She caught her breath and her hand flew up to her mouth again. “Dasinger, please, don’t you have something that will put me back to sleep till I’m past the hangover too?”
Dasinger reflected. “One of Doc Egavine’s hypno sprays will do it. I know enough of the mumbo jumbo to send you to dreamland for another ten hours.” He smiled evilly. “Of course, you realize that means you’re putting yourself completely in my power.”
Duomart’s eyes narrowed for an instant. She considered him, grinned. “I’ll risk it,” she said.
Afterword
In James H. Schmitz’s heyday, he was one of science fiction’s best known and loved authors. But that heyday was brief—not much more than a decade. Although Schmitz published his first science fiction story in 1943—”Greenface,” which appeared in the August issue of Unknown—his SF writing career was desultory for the next many years.
1961 was the turning point of Schmitz’s career. The previous eighteen years had produced exactly that number of stories—most of them (with the notable exceptions of “Grandpa” and the four Agent of Vega stories) of rather mediocre quality. Then, in the dozen years which followed, the same man wrote and publish over fifty. And these stories included his best writing: his four novels—Legacy, The Witches of Karres, The Demon Breed, The Eternal Frontiers—as well almost the entirety of his Federation of the Hub tales. Every one of the Telzey Amberdon stories, which, along with The Witches of Karres, were Schmitz’s most popular works, were written in that period.
There has rarely been anything comparable in the history of any SF writer. Throughout the sixties, especially in the first half of the decade before he turned to novels, not more than a couple of months would go by without a Schmitz story appearing in one of the premier SF magazines of the day. And those stories were, with few if any exceptions, invariably the lead story of that month’s issue.
That was the period in which I first encountered James H. Schmitz, as a teenager newly introduced to science fiction. To me, he loomed as large in the pantheon of science fiction’s great writers as such figures as Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov. I would have been shocked to discover, had someone told me at the time, that he would eventually fade into near oblivion.
Yet, fade away he did. Schmitz’s writing career was effectively over by the end of l974, and he died in 1981. Many of the Telzey stories were reissued in paperback in the early eighties, along with a new edition of The Witches of Karres, but those went out of print after a time. Since then, except for the New England Science Fiction Association’s 1990 one-volume hardcover edition of some of his stories, there has been nothing.
Why? It’s not because his reputation has declined, that’s for sure. My own allegiance to Schmitz is by no means uncommon among longtime SF readers. I have met many others who, like me, would never go into a bookstore without checking to see if there might, hopefully, be a new reissue of something by him.
I think, more than anything, that Schmitz fell victim to a profound shift in the science fiction market. Because of the nature of the market in his time, and his own natural talent and inclination, Schmitz was basically a writer of short fiction. He wrote only four novels, and, except for The Witches of Karres, none of them are the length associated in today’s world with the term “novel.” The Demon Breed, for instance, may well be a perfect short novel—SF’s equivalent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But, although its length (50,000 words) officially qualifies it as a “novel,” there isn’t a commercial publisher today outside of the young adult market who would accept that short a manuscript.
Today’s world is the world of the Novellus Giganticus. It is a science fiction market dominated by thick novels—more often than not, massive multi-volume series. In that new land of behemoths, the supple charm of Schmitz’s multitude of short stories, novelettes, novellas and short novels quickly gets trampled underfoot.
The one exception, of course, is The Witches of Karres. But that novel, although it is respectably long even by modern standards and is generally considered his masterpiece, is not enough to keep Schmitz afloat. With rare exceptions, “one-work” authors do not stay in print.
As it happens, however—this is my opinion, at least—The Witches of Karres is not James H. Schmitz’s masterpiece. As delightful as it is—and Witches is perhaps the greatest example of a successful picaresque novel in all of science fiction—it takes second place to something else.
That “something else” is Schmitz’s universe of the Federation of the Hub, taken as a whole. Depending on exactly where you draw the boundary, that universe includes approximately thirty stories of varying length. Ranging from two novels—Legacy and The Demon Breed—through a multitude of novellas, novelettes and short stories, the entirety of Schmitz’s works centered in his Hub universe comprises the majority of his total output and comes to well over half a million words of print. More than enough, even in this modern world of literary dinosaurs, to hold its place.
This edition is the first time—ever—that the Federation of the Hub has been presented that way to science fiction readers. Not in bits and pieces, some Telzey here and the occasional Trigger over there, but as a whole. All of it. For the first time, through four volumes, readers will be able to follow the adventures of Schmitz’s characters as they continually intersect, interact, and cross each other paths. Telzey Amberdon occupies pride of place, of course, but you will also find all of Trigger Argee (my personal favorite), the roguish Heslet Quillan, Holati Tate, Pilch, Professor Mantelish, Wellan Dasinger—each and every one.