John D. MacDonald
Like a Keepsake
New Mexport
10 Sept. 1998
Dear Zilclass="underline"
I guess you thought that all those things I told you the night before we blasted off for Earth were the same old talky handed to you Venusian women by every space-scarred, horney-handed guy on Interplanet.
I guess you’ll be surprised to get this letter from me, too. Remember how I told you I thought your name was funny? Well, on the long trip back here to Earth I guess I said it to myself so many times, that it doesn’t sound funny any more. So please forgive me. It’s a wonderful name!
Another thing I ought to tell you about, Zill. Remember how I made out that I had been around the route a few times. That was a lie. I know, I told you that I was an old hand. And I even told you that maybe next trip I’d be in a co-pilot’s slot. That was so much bunk, Zill. I just got out of space school two weeks before that last trip, and it was my first one. Maybe you guessed, but you were too much a lady to let on. As far as my job goes, I’m on damage-control and spend most all my time in a big mask looking at a welding torch flame. Some job, hey?
Well, the fellows told me what you Venusian women are like, and they told me that except for being pretty white on account of no sunshine, you all look the kind of women that here on earth we make actresses of. And then, they told me some other stuff.
Honest, Zill, you’re the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen, and you were certainly right to smack me the way you did. I believed that stuff the fellows told me. I should have known what kind of a girl you are. I hope you’re not still mad. I’m not really that sort of a guy. Something about the soft night air there did things to me. Someday I’ll bring you here so I can show you what a moon and stars look like. After you walked off in a huff I wandered around for hours before I went back and hit the sack.
Here I am in the big barracks near New Mexport, and I can tell you that after all that purple-and-green brush there on Venus it would look like a. pretty rough place to a girl like you. The sun glares down and it would burn you to one big blister in five minutes. All rock and sand and hot wind.
I hope I’ll be coming back soon, because we certainly got an awful lot to talk about, Zill, and I won’t make a fool of myself like I did near the end of our evening last time I saw you.
I’m due to go back out again in three months, so that means it will be nearly a year before I see you again. The next time, I think I’ll get sick at Venusport and get myself grounded for about a month.
The papers are all full of some sort of trouble in London. Tonight on the telescreen they gave us a quick look at it. I couldn’t make head or tail of it — a black line that, goes right up from a rooftop straight up into the air. The big scientists have given out with a lot of fancy language but nobody seems to know anything about it except that it’s growing.
They make me go to classes all the time and learn more stuff about space, and so I will have to stop this now as I have a class coming up. I’ll write again soon.
Best regards,
Bill Wheeland
Bristolport
20 Sept. 1998
Dearest Zilclass="underline"
I guess you maybe are wondering what the dickens I am doing over here in England instead of staying at New Mexport and studying a lot of math and physics and stuff.
Well, it’s like this. In the last letter I sent you, which you won’t get yet for another three months probably, I told about this trouble in London.
Right now, it is two miles thick. I saw it three days ago. Looking at it is sort of like standing in the sunlight and looking into a place where it is black night. Velvety like. It is like looking at a wheel which is spinning so fast you can’t see it move. And is it ever dark!
They found out about it when it was about the size of a pencil. The way they found out, some guy walked through it and it cut him right in half. It stops at the Heaviside Layer. When it was little — about as big around as your pretty arm — the scientists messed with it a lot, shoving steel bars into it and so on. Every time, the black stuff eats off the steel in a flash without even joggling the arm of the guy that holds it.
They don’t know what it is yet. The newspapers are full of fancy talk. One old bug calls it a “crack in infinity.” Imagine that? Others think it’s extradimensional, or a vortex of pure force, or some such crackpot thing. All they really know is that it’s black and it’s really growing fast.
It doesn’t suck stuff up, though. The way it baffles them the most is that when you take a tub of water and shove it up close to the thing, it eats a hole in the side of the tub but the water doesn’t run out the hole. Beats me.
Lots of crazy people have sneaked by the police lines and jumped into it. They don’t even yelp, I hear. Crazy religions have popped up all over and people are yammering about the end of the world. All I can say is, if this is the end of the world, it’s a real black color, you bet!
Yesterday we watched the big artillery firing into it. Even though it’s only two miles thick, the shells don’t come out the other side. There isn’t any explosion, even. Except, of course, when the shells go bam before they hit it.
They’ve tried flame-throwers and big jolts of electricity and fire hoses and everything, and nothing makes a dent on it. It just keeps expanding a little faster each day. Geometric rate of expansion, they say.
People are awful excited, Zill. Lots of them are getting drunk, and people in the parts of London that aren’t touched yet are killing each other and raising the dickens in general.
The political boys are saying that this is the end of Great Britain at last, and there will have to be some new balance of power. You people on Venus know all about that, with both British and Russky bases not too darn far from where you live.
Right now, Parliament is arguing about using an atomic bomb to break this black thing up. Some of them say too much property is going to be destroyed and if they pay no attention to it, it will go away all by itself.
Hundreds of years ago they had something in London called the Black Death. You probably read about it in missionary school. Anyway, they’re calling this black pillar the Black Death. It fits somehow, and I guess it will catch on.
On the telescreen this morning some U.S. politician from the Midwest made a short speech. He said that it was all a fake and that the British were making it up for some ulterior motive. If that thing is a fake, so is that congressman. And the British are beginning to think the Russkies put it in their back yard.
Anyway, it looks like in a few days they’ll bomb it and then it’ll be all over. I’ll let you know.
Zill, I’ve been thinking over all the things I want to say to you, and I bet anything that when I see you again I won’t be able to say a darn word. Already I feel shy and funny about seeing you again. I’m glad that two years ago they finally approved Venus-Earth marriages, if you know what I mean!
Affectionately,
Bill
Parisport
29 Sept. 1998
Zill, darling:
London is gone. I know that isn’t as much a shock to you as it is to me, because you’ve never seen it. Well, it looks like you never will.
The Black Death is ten miles in diameter now. It started a block from the East India Dock Road near where the River Thames makes that big loop you may have seen on maps. The west edge of it has gobbled up Kensington Gardens, the south end is down to Crystal Palace and on the north there isn’t any such place as Walthamstow any more. The east part of it is out in the Plumstead Marshes.