Chapter I: Front Matter

Oh Mesmerist from Mimas!

By ROGER DEE

_This gloriously gay smiley character; this
astounding peace-pervading creature from Saturn's
inner moon, was radiating like a space beacon
in a meteor shower when it landed on Mars ...
it was madness ... gargantuan madness._

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories January 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The Cargo Declarations mart at Areopolis spaceport was humming busily when I walked in. A moment later it was as quiet as a church and twice as attentive.

The sudden hush that fell wasn't out of deference to me, though I'm pretty well known through the odd corners of the Solar System, but because of the Mimasan smiley I carried in a ten-inch tungsten wire cage under my arm. Nothing this side of Saturn's inner moon can lay down the euphoric aura of peace and brotherhood that a smiley can, and this one was doing a noble job of it. He was one of the first two ever to hit Mars, young and healthy and still unmated, and he was radiating like a space beacon in a meteor shower.

"Hey, it's Blaster Bill Bailey," I heard a trader--an Earthside homo by the sound of him--say. "What's the beautiful little item you brought back this time, Bill?"

They crowded around me, Earthies and Eetees--Extraterrestrials--alike, all trying to get closer to that lovely peace-be-on-you euphoria. I looked them over carefully, counting the house and estimating their probable bids, and for the hundredth time it struck me that the place was more like a zoo than a mart for serious business.

Cargo Declarations is a regular Mecca for Eetee traders from the outlands. I saw both kinds of Martians, the cat-whiskered, man-like, yellow city dwellers and their wilder, little, brown baboon-faced cousins from the red upland deserts; pink-and-white Venusians glistening like four-foot snails under the celloplast sheaths that kept them from dehydrating in the dry Martian air; Callistans teetering like scaly green sawhorses on their four stiff-jointed legs and walking stick tails; wooly blue tree men from Titan and ponderous Europans rolling on the little three-wheeled carts they used to carry their barrel-bellied tonnage.

"It's a smiley," I told them, holding the cage up so they could admire the soulful little brute. "From Mimas, Saturn's first moon. His name is Joey and he is very much for sale."

Everybody wanted Joey, naturally. I'd have wanted him myself if I hadn't learned from the Mimasan natives, who are as rare as smileys and a damned sight less friendly, that chewing khiff roots would immunize me against his hypnotic aura. That aura makes smileys remarkable even among Eetees, so remarkable that nobody had ever brought one in before. It's their mating call, a very practical gimmick evolved to attract each other and at the same time protect themselves from native predators while they carry on their courtship. It works on anything from swamp gnats to Syrtis Major sand snakes, and it's literally irresistible.

Joey looked something like a fist-sized marmoset shaped out of pale blue smoke, his body so insubstantial that you could see the cage wires through and behind him. It was hard to put a finger on the quality unless you had learned the hard way, but there was a weird incompleteness about him that escaped definition. Smileys are paradoxical little brutes. Unmated, they're only half material because they actually aren't complete entities. But when they mate--

"Gleef?" Joey said plaintively, yearning at the assorted faces around him and loving every one of them.

That clinched it. "How much?" somebody asked, and there was a general digging for wallets and Eetee equivalents.

I had figured my price already, allowing for dealers' profits and transferral expenses. On Earth Joey would be worth at least a hundred thousand credits to psychomedic clinics treating mental disorders ranging from simple hypertension to paranoia. He should net me twenty thousand, ten of which would go to settle a grubstake lien held by Martian Bankings against the _Annabelle_, my little eighty-foot space tug.

The other ten would leave me knee-deep in credit notes for a two week spree that would begin at the Argonaut Club, which is as far as any chunk-hopping asteroid prospector ever plans.

* * * * *

"First let me point out," I said, giving Joey's aura time to soak in properly, "that Joey is the first smiley ever captured."

Which was strictly true, though I didn't see fit to mention the second one, a female named Cora which I had left hidden in an old abandoned oxygen reduction plant I knew out in Syrtis Major. I had two good reasons for that: they'd bring higher prices if sold separately, and I wasn't taking any chances on their getting together before I disposed of them. Anything could happen if they did.

"Worth a hundred thousand on Earth," I said. "How much am I bid?"

But nobody made me an offer. I might have known it. Some days you just can't turn an honest credit.

Joey's euphoric appeal should have had the traders scrambling for him, but I had underestimated his effect. They wanted him, sure, but the brotherly love he instilled in them made every buyer, Earth homo or Eetee, ashamed to jack up the price against his neighbor.

We compromised finally by listing Joey for proxy sale, and I took him out of Cargo Declarations to clear the air. He would be safe in the _Annabelle's_ cabin because no one who got close enough to steal him would have the heart to do it, and I'd have time while the bids rolled in to sample a pitcher or two of yellow Martian skohl down at the Argonaut Club.

Joey was safe enough, but I wasn't. I hadn't walked more than forty yards from the _Annabelle_ after putting Joey away when I bumped into Captain Giles of the spaceport police.

"Wait up," the Captain said. "I'll warn you this time before it happens, Bailey. If you start another riot at the Argonaut Club--"

Captain Giles was a rail-thin six-footer with a dour hatchet face burned to leather by Martian sun and wind, a hard-boiled but conscientious patrol officer who had missed his calling. He should have been a missionary, being as chaste as a Cosmicist monk and twice as stern.

I heard variations of his ultimatum every time I put down at Areopolis. But this time I had the answer to it.

"Will you step over to the _Annabelle_ with me, Captain?" I asked. "I'd like your opinion on the cargo I brought in."

He went, glowering and suspicious. Sixty feet from the _Annabelle_ we walked into Joey's euphoric aura, and his grumbling was shut off as if somebody had turned a spigot.

"I don't understand this," the Captain said, giving me a saintly smile that would have sent his hard-boiled crew into a mass faint. "But it's really rather wonderful.... Let me beg you again, William, to shun that disreputable Argonaut Club. Some day--"

"I know," I finished for him. "Some day your patrolies will sweep me out of there in small, unidentifiable fragments. A dirty job."

I left him there with his bright new smile wearing strange creases in his hard hatchet face and walked down from the landing apron to the street. That was when I learned that I wasn't as safe as Joey.

The instant I set foot in the street a couple of professional uglies closed in on me, a sharp-faced Earth homo and a cat-whiskered yellow Martie in bright Terran clothing. The two of them were armed with bell-mouthed freeze guns, and they were bent on business.

I never had a chance. They ushered me into a waiting sand-car and took away the Quantrell blaster I wore buckled over my coveralls.

"We hear you got a smiley for sale, chunk-hopper," the sharp homo said while the Martie started the sand-car. "Well, we got you a buyer for it."

They didn't really need the car except for privacy. Our trip took us only half a block down the street where we stepped out at the last place I'd have expected to market a smiley--at the palatial office building of Solar Shipping, a billion-credit corporation headed by one Hume Shanig, space-line tycoon and crooked financier extraordinary.

* * * * *

I had heard plenty about Shanig, though I'd never done business with him. He had a finger in every financial pie on Mars from import houses to the Argonaut Club, which was directly across the street and which he owned outright. Dealing with Shanig, rumor said, was like stepping into a Venusian boghole--easier to get into than out of.

Shanig's uglies chivvied me into a reception room that was all skylights and soft rugs and shining saffa-wood furniture. A big desk stood in the center. Behind the desk sat Shanig's secretary.

It was almost worth being kidnapped to be able to stand and look at her. She was a beauty, a tall clean-lined redhead with all the curves a prodigal heredity ever promised a female of the species homo. And she had a warm red mouth and clear green eyes that matched her hair.

"Buzz the boss that we got his homo, Cheryl," the Earthie said. "And snap it up, baby. The Chief is but eager about this smiley deal."

The girl gave him a curt green glare. "Miss Trayne, to you," she snapped. But she pushed the buzzer on her desk, and a rasping voice from her audiphone said that we should come in.

I knew only one of the three men in the office beyond. He was a little blond truckler named Perry Acree who held a booking-clerk's berth at Cargo Declarations, and I didn't need to look twice at the smug complacence of his chicken-chinned face to guess who had tipped Shanig about my smiley.

The second was a fat, dignified homo with a clipped gray mustache and the deliberate look of a top-flight medic. The third was Shanig himself.

Physically, the great man had seen better days. He was small and old and wizened and bald, and the creases in his sallow face could have been carved with a kit of engraver's tools. His scrawny neck hung in slack wattles, and the hooked nose and hot black eyes of him made him look like a dissipated desert buzzard. But I wasn't tempted to sell him short for even in illness Shanig had the air about him of a baited steel trap. He was an empire builder, one of these human dynamos who pile up fortunes and then die of gastric ulcers before they can spend their loot.

"I dislike bringing you here under duress, Bailey," Shanig said. He was trying to make it smooth, but even so he barked like a Syrtis Major jackal. "Dr. Humphrey will explain my reasons for being so precipitate."

The medic harumphed reluctantly and fiddled with his mustache. Plainly he didn't like any part of it.

"Mr. Shanig," he said, "suffers from a chronic condition of extreme nervous tension, a result of the years of overstrain imposed upon him by his business enterprises. I have prescribed rest and relaxation, but at this late date Mr. Shanig is constitutionally unable to pursue that course.

"He is, in a word, incapable of relaxing; yet relax he must or collapse completely. Sedatives are unsatisfactory, impairing the mental processes. Mr. Shanig does not trust hypnotherapy.

"As a consequence we find ourselves with only one alternative--a happy chance resulting from your arrival at Areopolis with this, ah, smiley."

I got it then. At first glance it was a neat enough idea; the catch was that Shanig didn't know his smileys. He couldn't put himself under Joey's euphoric golden-rule spell and still direct a big business.

And besides that I hadn't gone through the slimy hells of those Mimasan jungles to rehabilitate a burned-out old credit-shark like Hume Shanig. Joey belonged to humanity, to the poor overwrought hypertensive homos who really needed him.

"If you want my smiley to keep this old goat from snapping his leash," I said, "the answer is no. Joey would quiet him down like a country churchyard, sure, but--"

Shanig cut me short by smacking a peremptory hand on his desk top.

"That will be all, Dr. Humphrey," he barked. "Get out."

* * * * *

When the medic had gone Shanig turned on me. "I have no time to waste in haggling, Bailey. How much do you ask for this creature?"

I thought it over and it still read the same.

More was at stake than the wasting of Joey's talents on a bad hat like Shanig. There was the inevitable blowup that must come later. When Shanig found out what being too long under a smiley's influence could do to a homo with his financial responsibilities, there would be the devil to pay for fair.

"I don't want trouble," I said, trying to be diplomatic. "But I can't sell Joey to you. If you'd let me explain--"

"You have a commitment against your prospect ship, I believe," Shanig cut in. "An obligation commonly referred to as a grubstake lien, is it not?"

"With Martian Bankings," I admitted. "It's a couple of weeks overdue at the moment but Martian is a friendly outfit. They'll wait for their credits until I sell the smiley."

I couldn't be sure whether Shanig laughed or barked.

"I anticipated your reluctance to sell so I purchased your lien from Martian Bankings two hours ago. I know your reputed fondness for your ship, and I understand too that a similar craft cannot be bought for twice the amount of your financial obligation."

He had me cold. It was a dirty trick of Martian's to sell me out, but I could see how it was when Shanig put the screws to them.

"You are in no position to bargain with me, you simple fool," Shanig said, looking more than ever like a dissipated buzzard. "I shall make you one offer before claiming forfeit--the cancellation of your debt plus five thousand credits in cash."

He shouldn't have baited me with the _Annabelle_. I love that rusty old tub the way some homos love their women. And after being sandbagged with Shanig's kind of persuasion I began to figure that selling Joey to him was as neat a revenge as I could ask. He deserved it--plus.

"All right," I said. "You've bought a smiley."

Shanig thumbed his buzzer and the redhead came in from the reception office with a legal-looking paper in her hand. She went straight to Shanig's desk, walking in a way to make any homo's pulse beat out of step, but when she passed Perry Acree the two of them exchanged a swift, secret look of complete understanding that actually made me flinch.

Sometimes I think I'll never understand women. Here was this gorgeous wench, five-feet-ten and built like a hermit's dream, and what did she pick? An egregious little idiot who--

"Sign here," Shanig grunted. He fitted the paper onto a desk pad and whipped it toward me along with a stylus.

It was a simple enough contract release giving me full title to the _Annabelle_ plus five thousand credits in exchange for uncontested ownership to one male Mimasan smiley answering to the name of Joey.

Something about the pad-and-stylus routine rang a warning bell at the back of my mind but I was too mad to listen. I wrote "William X. Bailey" in the proper blank and the deed was done.

When Perry Acree and Shanig's hired homo signed as witnesses all of us stood up but Shanig.

"That's all," Shanig snapped, pushing a check for five thousand credits at me. "Get out!"

I took the check and went out, so mad I could feel my ears crisping. Entering the reception room again, it didn't soothe my mangled ego any to get a disdainful once-over from the redhead.

"I'm taking a weekend off with this little item to see the sights," I said, snapping the check. "Like to come along for the ride? There's a little pleasure colony up on Phobos that's out of this universe, where anything goes."

"Not with you, you swamp-stained wolf," she snapped. When I waited, grinning, she bit her lip and her eyes shot green sparks. "Beat it or I'll buzz for Perry."