A. E. van Vogt Read online

  THE MAN WITH A THOUSAND NAMES

  by

  A. E. van Vogt

  A Daw Book

  Copyright © 1974 by A. E. Van Vogt

  Originally published in the U.S.A. by Daw Books Inc

  First published in Great Britain 1975

  Published in this edition in 1975

  by Sidgwick and Jackson Limited

  ISBN 0 283 98229 2

  Printed in Great Britain by Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd.,

  Aylesbury, Bucks for Sidgwick and Jackson Limited

  1 Tavistock Chambers,

  Bloomsbury Way,

  London WC1A 2SG

  Contents :-

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY ONE

  TWENTY TWO

  TWENTY THREE

  TWENTY FOUR

  ONE

  Steven Masters climbed down the ladder to the surface of the planet, wondering how he should feel. It seemed degrading that he had first to ease himself backward out of the airlock, just like an ordinary member of the crew, and then gingerly edge down the slats of the ladder.

  Were films being taken? How would he look from the rear? He had a sense of moving awkwardly. He cringed with that awareness. And yet - a mixed reaction…. If people on Earth were really viewing this, then someone would be naming him as being the person on the ladder at this moment.

  That possibility had its own stimulation. They’re looking at me. They’re seeing me

  His thought was: I’ll go over and climb that hill, and see what this stupid place looks like.

  As his feet touched the soil, Steven tried for a moment to imagine that, really, his contact with the new planet was the one that counted. As he had that thought, he let go of the ladder and braced himself within the frame qf his spacesuit and all its paraphernalia.

  Almost fell. Staggered, stumbled, fought a terrible unbalance. Good God, he was disgracing himself.

  A full, perspiring minute later, he had himself braced in a leaning-back posture. And now he discovered what it was that had overbalanced him. One of the two hooks hanging down over his shoulder had caught in the handle of a canister, which had been left at the foot of the ladder. The sudden pull of the heavy object had flung him off center. Whereupon his need to keep going and the continuing weight of the object had acted one against the other, and the tough material of the spacesuit had prevented him from feeling what it was.

  Steven released the hook. And stood there in such a rage that he could scarcely see.

  But he realized presently that apparently none of the other crew members had noticed his wild antic.

  The overstimulated feeling remained. But his anger dimmed, yielded to a partial confusion. It was a moment of stress, and an ever so tiny sliver of truth poked up through his normal condition of self-delusion. The minuscule message from somewhere inside him whispered that his aloofness during the trip had not endeared him to his fellow travelers. The realization roused in him a progression of increasing irritation that ended up as outrage. But, even so, a restraining thought remained. Better not complain.

  He was walking hurriedly now in the direction of the nearest of a series of low hills. Noticing, as he approached - not volcanic. It had a steep slope, a lot of brush, mostly yellowish in color, but some green, with a hint of blue here and there. Pretty leaves, L-shaped, of all things. Nothing like that on Earth, or other discovered planets. Well (tolerantly), they did get a little education into me, in spite of all my resistance.

  Yet (he couldn’t help realizing) I’m already bored. The feeling: So there would be many new plants and animals. But such details really didn’t matter to the son of the world’s richest man.

  Images of comfort flashed through his mind, as he had that thought. Fleeting pictures of fancy cars, glittering, available aircraft, well-dressed girls overly anxious to please the handsome heir. Elegant interiors, great homes, magnificent hotels, kowtowing servants - (‘Yes, Mr Masters? Anything else, Mr Masters? Shall I bring the car out, Mr Masters?’ His own response: A shrug and a don’t-bother-me attitude. Til call you when I need you.’ But if they weren’t there: ‘Where the hell have you been all this time?’)

  On the trip to Mittend, he had discovered that there were things that money could not buy. His father’s position had secured him a berth on the spaceship. It could not, once the craft was en route, take him off it, or turn it back. Such brazen use of money influence, the world did not openly tolerate.

  He’d tried, by God! - and alienated everybody aboard.

  Not that their reactions had mattered. In certain emotional states, he was a super-communicator of negation.

  Okay, so I’m bored. So you poor little creatures are looking forward to another green planet. Waiting breathlessly to see all the little birdies and the real estate. My God, it kills me just to think of spending three weeks more in space, and then a month there, and then all that endless six weeks going back.

  As he strode along, bored, kind of angry, even making small movements of impatience with each step, he looked at the yellow-green world that was beginning to be slightly below him, now that he was climbing. Because the oxygen content of the air was Earth-level, he had taken his helmet off, and dropped it casually. So he could see with his naked eyes a distant forest of trees, glints of a winding river. He despised the beauty that greeted his gaze from every direction, and grimaced at the scent of the growing things around him.

  A tiny, oh, ever so tiny, portion of the impatience was with himself. Steven Masters going to Mittend with the first landing party. His first expressed wish, spoken while drunk, had brought those wonderful headlines, Reading them, and the long columns about himself and his father, had done that stupid ego business. And, also, he saw now, the newspaper accounts had expanded into total purpose what had originally been a minor boastful remark at a party, and - in fact - had no purpose at all.

  He mentally looked back at that asininity, pictured the dreary consequence. The conviction came suddenly: I can’t survive this. It’s too much.

  A sense of disaster, and of how meaningless exploration really was, was like a weight upon him, as he stood finally on the crest of the hill, and gazed at all the horizons that he could see.

  An odd thought-feeling passed through his mind at that instant: ‘‘Mother, we pass on to you an image of the intruder. Have we your permission, and your power, to deal with it!”

  Steven was occasionally startled by his own stream of consciousness. But not very often, and not this time. This utterly insane meaningness flicked through his awareness’ and was gone. What dominated him was irritation. There was a long ridge ahead of him, higher than all the little hills, on one of which he stood now. The ridge barred most of his view toward the, well, west.

  All right, all right, he thought, resigned, I’ll go over there. After all, the one thing I’ve always had is a kind of stubbornness. Mostly, that had been in connection with girls. It had always enraged him when some pretty little thing, instead of lying down when he pointed at the nearest bed, started the stereotyped nonsense, and made it necessary for him to grab her, and personally undress her. Whereupon, she would sigh, and relax, evidently satisfied that now it really meant something.

  The way to the ridge was down into a hollow, and then up a long, shallow but jagged slope. As Steven reached the low point of
the hollow, he came unexpectedly on a narrow stream, almost hidden in a shaggy, grasslike overhang. The water bubbled, and made those small sounds, and gave off a damp odor. There were little dark creatures in it. And, because he was surprised, he was, for instants only, reminded of a vacation when he was a boy, on one of his father’s ranch properties - a narrow stream like this, also half-hidden, and discovered suddenly by an eight-year-old. What a joy then, what a sense of discovery, what -

  His mind figuratively clamped down on that pure memory. Fifteen years of progressively more saturnine ‘maturity’ - he called it - in instants moved massively into the time spaces between then and now.

  Maturity? … How can you both despise being the son of a super-rich man, and take advantage of it every chance you get ? Steven had worked it out easily. Have total contempt for all mankind. Take the attitude that money means nothing. Have a sneer for the old stupe, your father, for having wasted his life accumulating the worthless stuff. And, because you don’t care, spend his money with a cynical profligacy.

  Steven jumped the little creek, and he did two automatic positive things, then. First, he began the climb up toward the ridge, and, second, he estimated the distance to the top of the ridge at a quarter of a mile. In a way they were his two assets: to keep going forward, not just sitting, or lying down for long, or getting involved in some unchanging situation. His second asset was his locational awareness. Like a homing pigeon, he could judge directions and distances. It was not an area where he had dark thoughts, or twisted memories, or those sequential images which, in hallucinatory fashion, paraded through his mind like daytime dreams, providing him with an endless stream of fantasies by which he justified his behavior. In his time he had awakened from drunken stupors in strange beds, and yet had always known quickly where he was. ‘

  He was still striding toward the ridge, and about a hundred feet from what seemed to be a high point… when he saw the naked people.

  ‘Mother, it sees us! Give us more power!’

  Masters stopped. Then he did a half-twisting thing with his body. It was an unrehearsed movement, not entirely new or entirely different from anything he had ever done. There was the time he had stepped off a curb - and stepped back again with an unrehearsed rapidity, when a steam car, silent as a dark night in the country, hissed toward and then through the space where he had been a moment earlier.

  In his fashion, he had been quick, then. He spun in the direction the car was going, and he registered the license number imperishably in his vindictive mind. And so began a three-year court battle, backed by the Masters money, while Steven fabricated a more and more elaborate charge against the unfortunate owner of the steam car, early getting a judgment for a million dollars, based on the totally false claim that he knew the man, and that it had been an attempt at murder. It took the Supreme Court to overthrow the judgment. That was about $84,000 in legal fees later for the belatedly successful defendant.

  By then Steven believed every word of his own lies. He talked a lot after that, cynically, about how difficult it was for wealthy people to secure justice.

  On several other occasions, he had responded to sudden threat with a jump, or a twist of his body, or a quick confusion of mind and muscles. Quick, because such things never lasted long for him. Even now, as he poised in awful premonition, the memories of other threats passed swiftly through his mind. And then he had the awareness that the dozen people off there to his left were not as nude as he had believed in that first look. They wore halters of some kind, which covered small portions of the mid-torso of each individual. - A second, incredibly sharp realization came. It was so sharp it hurt his insides, so intense it could be compared only to those moments of passionate hatred that he had experienced so many times in his easily offended past: the realization that this was not, not, NOT going to be an occasion when a court action would later win him the kind of satisfaction that always came to him when he finally got even with some - his own term - S.O.B.

  Belatedly, after so many thoughts, some of them brand-new, after at least thirty seconds of half crouching and half cringing, he started hesitantly in a direction that would take him away from the strange men.

  What he did was only partly running, and even then only slowly. He felt within himself a strong resistance to retreating, and a reluctance to move in the wrong direction. Almost, it was as if some barrier inside him interfered with each step. After less than a minute, when he saw that the men were not hurrying either, he slowed to a walk.

  Steven continued striding rapidly but unhappily. His course was taking him roughly parallel to the ridge. Already, there was a patch of uneven ground between him and the hill, over which he had originally come. And it was apparent that he would have to get back to the ship by way of a second Mil, since the group of savages - he had by now noticed that they were carrying what seemed to be short spears, and so their low cultural status was obvious - could head him off if he tried going back the way he had come.

  For some reason his discovery that they were in the spear-weapon stage of development made what was happening less dangerous. The whole episode seemed peaceful, somehow. Around him was a silent wilderness; the only sound, his own heavy boots, and the noise made by his spacesuit, as its various parts stroked each other. It was the suit, suddenly, that seemed to be the principal hindrance to his movements.

  The moment he had that thought, he began to unscrew and unbolt, and to ease tightening levers. It was a superbly designed construction. In those final moments of undressing himself out of the spacesuit, he did have to stop, and standing first on one leg and then on the other, rid himself of the lower section.

  It was as he straightened from that task, free of the awkward mass, that he saw a second group of the semi-naked people had come up from a gully less than a hundred yards away. This group also carried spears, and - also - headed toward him.

  Steven broke into a run, heading now, since he was cut off from the second hill, toward the rough ground which he had been trying to avoid. He was thinking: This is ridiculous.

  He came abruptly to the little creek. But it was not quite that little here, nor quite so shallow. After only a moment’s hesitation, he plunged in, went down to his hips on the first step, and down to his neck on the second; and then, furious, he was climbing up a steep underwater embankment. He emerged soaking wet, sank up to his knees in mud, and then he was out of the water, and in among the rocks and other debris. Once more running.

  Almost at once he stumbled and fell. Got up. Stepped into a hole and wrenched his ankle getting out. His impulse was to limp. But when he looked at his pursuers, the two groups of spearmen had somehow made better progress than he had -and were now dangerously close to inserting themselves between him and the top of the hill toward which lay whatever escape was available to him. The nearest group was only an electrifying twenty-five yards or so from him, and he could see their human faces.

  It was one of those moments when time seems to stand still (but really doesn’t). A moment in which everybody seems frozen in space (but only Steven actually was).

  As he saw their faces unmistakably, their identity hit him for the first time.

  Human beings!

  It didn’t hit him very hard. A strictly scientific anthropologist would have been more stimulated than he was. An emotional anthropologist would have just about fallen apart with excitement; that was an inner condition unknown to sophisticates like Steven. Steven had no specialist convictions. But he had been present, because he couldn’t avoid it, when the subject of other races on other planets had been discussed by experts. And so the reality did impinge, and did hold him unmoving while he looked, and looked, for several seconds.

  What he saw was that the natives of Mittend were not exactly white. There was some mix in them. That was the way he thought of it, because he was a little bit of a mix himself, and had on occasion referred to Steven Masters as being a citizen of the world - laughingly, of course. His great-grandmother had been a mixture of
Indian and white; nobody knew exactly which quantities of which. Nor did they care, because she was a fabulous beauty. His grandfather had married a very pretty woman who had a touch of Chinese and Hawaiian in her, Steven’s father had married a girl of Gerrnan-Russian origin with black hair and a Spanish look to her. (Those Spaniards have been everywhere.)

  What particularly fascinated Steven - and froze him - was not so much that the … Mittendians … were human, but that they all looked a little bit like Steven, seen close up. By the time he had savored that awareness, they were close, indeed.

  His next realization was that he was running furiously, panting as he ran, sounding, and feeling, out of condition. He was climbing now; the hill seemed much steeper going up it from this side than it had seemed coming down.

  Incredibly, at this late instant of time, it dawned on him that he had been foolish in venturing off by himself; such thoughts simply did not occur to him, normally. He did what he did when he wanted it, and to hell with it. But, now, for the first time a thought came: You madman, call for help!

  He parted his lips a little wider; they were already open from each exhausted gasp. Through that enlarged opening, he emitted a small sound.

  It was so small. It made an almost infinitesimal impact on the air. But what it did do was stir up a memory of a time when he had locked himself in the upper floor of the Masters five-story New York mansion; mostly used for storage, it had rooms for a couple of the younger male servants.

  No one ever did quite succeed in understanding how he had got locked into the storage side. It took a key that you had to turn; and at fifteen, presumably, a boy should be smart enough to observe that it was unwise to lock a door from the inside, and then lose the key. (He had thrown it out the window, and pretended to himself that it had slipped from his fingers.)