Short Fiction by Mack Reynolds (ready to read books .TXT) 📕

Crowley has, ah, infiltrated the institution you expected to burglarize tonight. He is inside, and you are still outside. There are four guards also inside, whom he is expected to eliminate before you can join him.”

“He told you everything all right, the jerk,” Larry said coldly. “But so what?”

“So Dan Crowley had us make up a new amount of serum tonight and tested it on a chimpanzee in the lab. If you’ll go and check, you’ll undoubtedly find the chimp is again visible.”

The gunman looked at Paul Teeter blankly.

The other’s reactions were quicker. “The serum lasts for twelve hours,” Teeter barked.

“This batch lasts for three hours,” Patricia said definitely. “Your friend Crowley is suddenly going to become visible right before the eyes of those four guards⁠—and long before he had expected to eliminate them.”

Teeter barked, “Larry, check that monkey.”

Doc Braun spoke up for the first time since the appearance of the two. He said dryly, “You’ll also notice that the animal is sound asleep. It seems that I added a slow-acting but rather potent sleeping compound to the serum.”

The gunman started from the room in a rush.

Ross called after him, “If you’ll look closely, you’ll also note the chimp’s skin has turned a brilliant red. There have been some basic changes in the pigment.”

“Holy smokes,” Paul Teeter protested, moping his face with a handkerchief. “Didn’t he take any precautions against you people at all?”

Ross said, “He was too busy telling us how smart a country boy he happened to be.”

Larry returned in moments, biting his lip in the first nervous manifestation any of them had ever seen in him. He took Teeter to one side.

Patricia called to them impatiently. “You have no time and no one to contact Crowley now. Don’t be fools. Mend your bridges while you can. Let us out of here, and we’ll prefer no charges.”

Larry was a man of quick decisions. He snapped to the blank-faced guard who had assimilated only a fraction of all this, “Go on back to the boys and tell them to start packing to get out of here. Tell them the fix has chilled. It’s all off. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“OK, chief.” The other had the philosophical outlook of those who were meant to take orders and knew it. He left.

Larry and Teeter opened the cell doors.

Teeter said, “How do we know we can trust you?”

Ross looked at him.

Larry said, “It’s a deal. Give us an hour to get out of here. Then use the phone if you want to call a taxi, or whatever. I ain’t stupid, this thing was too complicated to begin with.”

When Teeter and Morazzoni were gone, the three stood alone in the corridor, looking at each other.

The doctor pushed his glasses back onto his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “By Caesar,” he said.

Ross ran a hefty paw back through his red crew cut and twisted his face into a mock grimace. “Well,” he said, “I have to revise my former statement. I used brute strength against Crowley, the doctor used sweet reason, and Pat her womanly wiles. And all failed. But as biochemists, each working without the knowledge of the others, we used science⁠—and it paid off. I suppose the thing to do now is buy three jet tickets for California.”

Braun and Patricia looked at him blankly.

Ross explained. “Didn’t you hear what Crowley said? His brother, Donald, has moved out to San Francisco. He’s our real Common Man, we’ll have to start the experiment all over again.”

Dr. Braun snorted.

Patricia O’Gara, hands on hips, snapped, “Ross Wooley, our engagement is off!”

Frigid Fracas I

In other eras he might have been described as swacked, stewed, stoned, smashed, crocked, cockeyed, soused, shellacked, polluted, potted, tanked, lit, stinko, pie-eyed, three sheets in the wind, or simply drunk.

In his own time, Major Joseph Mauser, Category Military, Mid-Middle Caste, was drenched.

Or at least rapidly getting there.

He wasn’t happy about it. It wasn’t that kind of a binge.

He lowered one eyelid and concentrated on the list of potables offered by the auto-bar. He’d decided earlier in the game that it would be a physical impossibility to get through the whole list but he was making a strong attempt on a representative of each subdivision. He’d had a cocktail, a highball, a sour, a flip, a punch and a julep. He wagged forth a finger to dial a fizz, a Sloe Gin Fizz.

Joe Mauser occupied a small table in a corner of the Middle Caste Category Military Club in Greater Washington. His current fame, transient though it might be, would have made him welcome as a guest in the Upper Caste Club, located in the swank Baltimore section of town. Old pros in the Category Military had comparatively small sufferance for caste lines among themselves; rarified class distinctions meant little when you were in the dill, and you didn’t become an old pro without having been in spots where matters had pickled. Joe would have been welcome on the strength of his performance in the most recent fracas in which he had participated as a mercenary, that between Vacuum Tube Transport and Continental Hovercraft. But he didn’t want it that way.

You didn’t devote the greater part of your life to pulling your way up, pushing your way up, fighting your way up, the ladder of status to be satisfied to associate with your social superiors on the basis of being a nine-day-wonder, an oddity to be met at cocktail parties and spoken to for a few democratic moments.

No, Joe Mauser would stick to his own position in the scheme of things until through his own efforts he won through to that rarefied altitude in society which his ambition demanded.

A sour voice said, “Celebrating, captain? Oops, major, I mean. So you did get something out of the Catskill Reservation fracas. I’m surprised.”

A scowl, Joe decided, would be the best. Various others, in the course of the evening, had attempted to join him. Three or four