Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One (2 page)

“Three-Legged Joe” first appeared in
Startling Stories
for January 1953 and is in many ways the classic “gadget story”, to use Vance’s own term for much of his early work. If “Hard-Luck Diggings” might as easily have been set in the Amazon, then “Three-Legged Joe” is a backwoods tall story, very much the “fairy-tale stuff” Milke describes it as to his partner Paskell on the lonely, supposedly dead world Odfars. Given Vance’s flair for humor and witty dialog, it is easy to find similar “tall story” variations in his subsequent work, as with, say, the Bugardoig episode in
The Book of Dreams
nearly thirty years later.

“DP!” originally appeared in
Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader
, Vol 2, in April 1953. Addressing subject matter that is as topical now as the day it was written, it was completed while the Vances were staying in the village of Fulpmes in the Austrian Tyrol in 1951, turned out in the same spate of writing that produced Jack’s young adult novel,
Vandals of the Void
. As an interesting side-note, this particular tale remains one of Harlan Ellison’s all-time favorite Vance stories.

“Sjambak” was first published in
Worlds of If
for July 1953. Despite a somewhat perfunctory ending (if ever a Vance story cried out for an extra thousand words, this is it), we have a beguiling, transplanted terrestrial culture and an intriguing example of the close cultural observation that would remain such an important trademark feature throughout the author’s long career.

“Shape-Up” first appeared in
Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy
for November 1953. While the plot relies on a point of astral physics that seems all too obvious in hindsight, its staging is intriguing to the point of being compelling, even disturbing, a reminder too that many of Jack’s stories were designed along the lines of classic mysteries because of his own great love for the form.

“The Absent-Minded Professor” (the author’s preferred title) originally appeared as “First Star I See Tonight” in
Malcolm’s Mystery Magazine
for March 1954 under the pseudonym John Van See. Again, it shows a true mystery writer’s delight in creating situations where the schemer is caught out by his own schemes, both something his all-time favorite creation Cugel the Clever would specialize in eleven years later, and a reminder that the author’s mystery novels,
The Fox Valley Murders
and
A Room to Die In
(under the Ellery Queen byline) among them, would turn upon situations where characters sought to carry out perfect crimes, only to be brought undone. This modest but elegant sampling of the form is one of the author’s personal favorites, and lets Vance revel in his lifelong love of astronomy.

“When the Five Moons Rise” was first published in the March 1954 issue of
Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy
, and possesses the sort of eerie, unsettling quality Vance brings to so many of his tales set on alien worlds. This account of the fortunes of the occupants of a lonely lighthouse charged with safeguarding mariners sailing an alien ocean has much of the force and suspense of Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s haunting 1912 poem “Flannan Isle.” Here, too, it is the mood and staging as much as plot that accounts for its effectiveness.

“The Devil on Salvation Bluff” first appeared in
Star Science Fiction Stories, No 3
in 1955 and showcases a key axiom demonstrated in almost all of the author’s science fiction at novel length: alien worlds will invariably lead to alien ways and, in time, an alien humanity. This story enacts the process in a potent miniature form.

“The Phantom Milkman” originally appeared in
Other Worlds Science Fiction
for February 1956. Simple, linear and effective, it is based on a rather odd event in Vance’s own life while on his way to Mexico with wife Norma and Frank and Beverly Herbert, and was published the same year as
To Live Forever
.

“Where Hesperus Falls” first appeared in
Fantastic Universe
for October 1956, and is, on the one hand, a thoughtful, bitter tale of disillusionment and personal obsession; on the other, a relaxed, confident if curious return to the “gadget” angle of the earlier work.

Completing our line-up is another of Jack’s favorites, written when the author was in his early forties. “Dodkin’s Job” originally saw print in
Astounding Science Fiction
for October 1959, and in a world where an unspecified “they” are still held accountable for so much—“Look what
they
did!” “
They
don’t know what
they
’re doing!”—it holds as much irony now as when it was published half a century ago.

And a healthy sense of irony, a delight in wonder, a regard for craft, and a wholly allowable forbearance, are appropriate for approaching this sprightly, rag-tag bunch, this motley crew to push an entirely allowable seafaring, starfaring metaphor.

And to borrow one or two more,
Hard-Luck Diggings
becomes a kind of fireside archaeology, an agreeable armchair tour of how the Jack Vance enterprise came to be. It may be a “warts and all” tour at times, but it’s also full of zest and life, the thrill of the upward climb, of so much more to be done. As such, this is a book to be approached and savored with a twinkle in the eye, a knowing smile, but most of all, with an appropriate love of adventure and high romance firmly in place.

Terry Dowling & Jonathan Strahan

Sydney and Perth, September 2009

Hard-Luck Diggings

In solving
a problem, I form and consider every conceivable premise. If each of these results in an impossible set of implications, except one, whose consequence is merely improbable: then that lone hypothesis, no matter how unprecedented, is necessarily the correct solution of the problem.

—
Magnus Ridolph

Superintendent
James Rogge’s office occupied the top of a low knoll at Diggings A, and his office, through a semi-circular window, overlooked both diggings, A and B, all the way down to the beach and the strange-colored ocean beyond.

Rogge sat within, chair turned to the window, drumming his fingers in quick irregular tempo. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and strode across the room. He was tall and thin, and his black eyes sparkled in a face parched and bony, while his chin dished out below his mouth like a shovel-blade.

He punched a button at the telescreen, waited, leaning slightly forward, his finger still holding down the button. There was no response. The screen hummed quietly, but remained ash-gray, dead.

Rogge clenched his fists. “What a demoralized outfit! Won’t even answer the screen.”

As he turned his back, the screen came alive. Rogge swung around, clasped his hands behind his back. “Well?”

“Sorry, Mr. Rogge, but they’ve just found another,” panted the cadet engineer.

Rogge stiffened. “Where, this time?”

“In the shower room. He’d just been cleaning up.”

Rogge flung his arms out from his sides. “How many times have I told them not to shower alone? By Deneb, I can’t be everywhere! Haven’t they brains enough—” A knock at the door interrupted him. A time-keeper pushed his head in.

“The mail ship’s in sight, Mr. Rogge.”

Rogge took a step toward the door, looked back over his shoulder.

“You attend to that, Kelly. I’m holding you responsible!”

The cadet blinked. “I can’t help it if—” he began querulously, but he was speaking to the retreating back of his superior, and then the empty office. He muttered, dialed off.

Rogge strode out on the beach. He was early, for the ship was still a black spot in the purple-blue sky. When it finally settled, fuming and hissing, on the glinting gray sand, Rogge hardly waited for the steam to billow away before stepping forward to the port.

There was a few minutes’ delay while the crew released themselves from their shock-belts. Rogge shuffled his feet, fidgeting like a nervous race-horse. Metallic sounds came from within. The dogs twisted, the port opened with a sigh, and Rogge moved irritably back from the smell of hot oil, men, carbolic acid, paint.

A round, red face looked out the port.

“Hello, doc,” called Rogge. “All cleared for landing?”

“Germ-free,” said the red face. “Safe as Sunday school.”

“Well, open ’er up!”

The flushed medico eyed Rogge with a detached bird-like curiosity. “You in a hurry?”

Rogge tilted his head, stared at the doctor, eye to eye. The red face disappeared, the port opened wider, a short plump man in blue shorts swung out on the stage, descended the ladder. He flipped a hand to Rogge.

“Hello, Julic,” said Rogge, peering up past him to the open port. “Any passengers?”

“Thirteen replacements for you. Cat-skinners, a couple plumbers—space-sick all the way.”

Rogge snorted, jerked his head. “Thirteen? Do you know I’ve lost thirty-three men this last month? Didn’t you pick up a T.C.I. man in Starport?”

The captain looked at him sidewise. “Yes, he’s aboard. Looks like you’re anxious.”

“Anxious!” Rogge grinned wickedly, humorlessly. “You’d be anxious yourself with two, three men strangled every day.”

Captain Julic narrowed his eyes. “It’s true, is it?” He looked up to the two tall cliffs that marked Diggings A and B, the raw clutter of barracks and machine-shops below. “We heard rumors in Starport, but I didn’t—” His voice dwindled away. Then: “Any idea at all who’s doing it?”

“Not one in the world. It’s a homicidal maniac, no doubt as to that, but every time I think I’ve got him spotted, there’s another killing. The whole camp’s demoralized. I can’t get an honest day’s work out of any man on the place. I’m a month behind schedule. I radioed the T.C.I. two weeks ago.”

Captain Julic nodded toward the port. “There he is.”

Rogge took a half-step forward, halted, blinked. The man descending the ladder was of medium height, medium weight, and something past middle-age. He had white hair, a small white beard, a fine straight nose.

Rogge darted a glance at Captain Julic who returned him a humorous shrug. Rogge turned back to the old man, now gazing leisurely up and down the glistening gray beach, out over the lambent white ocean.

Rogge pulled his head between his bony shoulders, stepped forward. “Ah—I’m James Rogge, Superintendent,” he rasped. The old man turned, and Rogge found himself looking into wide, blue eyes, clear and guileless.

“My name is Magnus Ridolph,” said the old man. “I understand that you’re having difficulty?”

“Yes,” said Rogge. He stood back, looking Magnus Ridolph up and down. “I was expecting a man from the Intelligence Corps.”

Magnus Ridolph nodded. “I happened to be passing through Starport and the Commander asked me to visit you. At the moment I’m not officially connected with the Corps, but I’ll do all I can to help you.”

Rogge clamped his teeth, glared out to sea. At last he turned back to Ridolph. “Here’s the situation. Men are being murdered, I don’t know by whom. The whole camp is demoralized. I’ve ordered the entire personnel to go everywhere in couples—and still they’re killed!”

Magnus Ridolph looked across the beach to the hills, low rounded masses covered with glistening vegetation in all shades of black, gray and white.

“Suppose you show me around the camp.”

Rogge hesitated. “Are you ready—right now? Sure you don’t want to rest first?”

“I’m ready.”

Rogge turned to the captain. “See you at dinner, Julic—unless you want to come around with us?”

Captain Julic hesitated. “Just a minute, till I tell the mate I’m ashore.” He clambered up the ladder.

Magnus Ridolph was gazing out at the slow-heaving, milk-white ocean that glowed as if illuminated from beneath.

“Plankton?”

Rogge nodded. “Intensely luminescent. At night the ocean shines like molten metal.”

Magnus Ridolph nodded. “This is a very beautiful planet. So Earthlike and yet so strangely different in its coloring.”

“That’s right,” said Rogge. “Whenever I look up on the hill I think of an extremely complicated steel engraving…the different tones of gray in the leaves.”

“What, if any, is the fauna of the planet?”

“So far we’ve found creatures that resemble panthers, quite a few four-armed apes, and any number of rodents,” Rogge said.

“No intelligent aborigines?”

Rogge shook his head. “So far as we know—no. And we’ve surveyed a good deal of the planet.”

“How many men in the camp?”

“Eleven hundred, thereabouts,” said Rogge. “Eight hundred at Diggings A, three hundred at B. It’s at B where the murders occur. I’m thinking of closing down the diggings for a while.”

Magnus Ridolph tugged at his beard. “Murders only at Diggings B? Have you shifted the personnel?”

Rogge nodded, glared at the massive column of ore that was Diggings B. “I’ve changed every man-jack
in the camp. And still the killings go on—in locked rooms, in the showers, the toilets, anywhere a man happens to be alone for a minute or two.”

“It sounds almost as if you’ve disturbed an invisible
genius loci
,” said Magnus Ridolph.

Rogge snorted. “If that means ‘ghost’, I’ll agree with you. ‘Ghost’ is about the only explanation I got left. Four times, now, a man has been killed in a locked room with no opening larger than a barred four-inch ventilator. We’ve slipped into the room with nets, screened every cubic foot. Nothing.”

Captain Julic came down the ladder, joined Rogge and Magnus Ridolph. They turned up the hard-packed gray beach toward Diggings
A, a jut of rock breaking sharply out of the gently rolling hills.

“The ore,” Rogge explained, “lies in a layer at about ground level. We’re bull-dozing
the top-surface off onto the beach. When we’re all done, that big crag will be leveled flat to the ground, and the little bay will be entirely filled.”

“And Diggings B is the same proposition?” asked Magnus Ridolph. “It looks about the same formation from here.”

“Yes, it’s about the same. They’re old volcanic necks, both of them. At B, we’re pushing the fill into a low canyon in back. When we’re done at B—if we ever get done—the canyon will be level full a mile back, and we’ll use it for a town-site.”