I had not expected Betsy to make so quick a connection. But outside the door the guard was paying no attention to us. He was listening to the ship's intercom, his scarred, mean face envious as he heard the challenges to the Russian VTOL. The Russian was earning his pay, for he knew as well as I that the boat's surface-to-air missiles were homing in on him at that very second. I opened my mouth to answer Jimmy Rex, but May caught my arm.
"Can't we take him, Jason? she begged.
"We can not, I cried. "And we have no time to argue! For if Betsy was suspicious enough to send him here, we had minutes, maybe seconds, and the diversion of the aircraft would not puzzle her for long.
There was no weakness in May's brain. She understood me well. She knew I spoke the truth. But she was also a mother, whose only child had been lost to her. She gazed on him one moment more before she sobbed and turned to the port.
That was one moment too many. "No! shrilled little Jimmy Rex, and did the only thing he could do to stop her. He darted out into the corridor and jerked the handle that would seal May's cabins off and keep her from getting through.
He did not keep all of her inside.
The door slammed.., and the terrible strong shutters slashed closed upon my May.
There I was, alone with what was left of May. And minutes later the steel outer door grudgingly slid open again, and there was Betsy storming in, with Jimmy Rex crowding behind her. Betsy looked furious and triumphant and outraged all at once. . . and then, when she saw that it was only May's headless body that lay bleeding in my arms, more than anything else, relieved.
For Jimmy Rex I will say this much. He wept beside his mother's decapitated corpse. He screamed and sorrowed, and I believe he truly grieved-for ten minutes or so.
Even Betsy was shaken, though not as long as that, for he was still shrieking when she turned to me with an expression of awe and delight. "You old fool, she said admiringly, "I knew you'd do something dashing and stupid to solve all my problems. I ought to thank you. "if you do, I said as steadily as I could, "there'll be two dead women in this room. And there would have, though by then her goons were holding me fast.
The room was mad, with medics covering May's poor body and a guard leading Jimmy Rex away and blood everywhere-everywhere! But Betsy looked only at me, and this time I could not read her expression at all. If I had not known her so well, I would have thought there was pity in it.
At last she sighed and shook her head. "Old man, she said roughly, "keep your lonely illusions. Get off my boat."
She nodded to the guards, and twenty minutes later the great OT was disappearing behind me as the scoutship that should have carried May to freedom instead carried only me to-I am not sure what.
And so the queen she met her end. The axe was raised by her dearest friend. Her son, no son, made the blade descend To finish the queen of the isles. The fair, sweet queen, the sorrowful queen, Oh, pity the queen of the isles!
For more than a year after that I woke shaking every night from a dream of the great steel shutter chopping May's dear head off. It was bad, and what I woke to was perhaps even worse. What "illusions made nasty Betsy pity me?
I never found an answer to that question. Perhaps I did not want one.
THE HIGH TEST
Of all the science-fiction writers who inspired and delighted my youth, the one who most completely saturated the pleasure centers of my brain was the late Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D. I wasn't the only one who felt that. Doc Smith invented the "space opera, the high-tech deep-space adventuring that set the style for everything from John Campbell's first stories to Star Wars and beyond. It's a crying shame that Doc's The Skylark of Space has never been made into a movie; it's as thrilling and colorful as the best of them, and a lot more intelligently imagined. One of the joys of growing up to be an editor was that I was able to get Doc to write new stories for me ("Skylark DuQuesne was the most important of them), so that I could carry on into middle age the joys of my youth. When Doc died, I mourned deeply. His daughter and son-in-law, Verna and Albert Trestrail, are long-term and well-loved friends and when, a summer or two ago, I stayed for a few days at their comfortable home in central Indiana, I was enchanted to find that Verna still owned Doc's own personal typewriter, a four-square old Woodstock as big as a breadbasket. Could I write a story on it? I begged. Of course, Verna answered, and kindly kept my coffee cup filled and fresh ashtrays within reach as, over two long days, I wrote the first draft of "The High Test. The former cabin boy had grown to command the Q.E. 2! Of course, "The High Test is not exactly a Doe Smith story. But it's not exactly a typical Fred Pohl story, either, and I expect the reason is that I was thinking of Doc all the time I was writing it.
2213 12 22 1900 UGT
Dear Mom:
As they say, there's good news and there's bad news here on Cassiopeia 43-G. The bad news is that there aren't any openings for people with degrees in quantum- mechanical astrophysics. The good news is that I've got a job. I started yesterday. I work for a driving school, and I'm an instructor.
I know you'll say that's not much of a career for a twenty-six-year-old man with a doctorate, but it pays the rent. Also it's a lot better than I'd have if I'd stayed on Earth. Is it true that the unemployment rate in Chicago is up to eighty percent? Wow! As soon as I get a few megabucks ahead I'm going to invite you all to come out here and visit me in the sticks so you can see how we live here-you may not want to go back!
Now, I don't want you to worry when I tell you that I get hazardous duty pay. That's just a technicality. We driving instructors have it in our contracts, but we don't really earn it. At least, usually we don't-although there are times like yesterday. The first student I had was this young girl, right from Earth. Spoiled rotten! You know the kind. rich, and I guess you'd say beautiful, and really used to having her own way. Her name's Tonda Aguilar- you've heard of the Evanston Aguilars? In the recombinant foodstuff business? They're really rich, I guess. This one had her own speedster, and she was really sulked that she couldn't drive it on an Earth license. See, they have this suppressor field; as soon as any vehicle comes into the system, zap, it's off, and it just floats until some licensed pilot comes out to fly it in. So I took her up, and right away she started giving me ablation: "Not so much takeoff boost! You'll burn out the tubes! and "Don't ride the reverter in hyperdrive! and "Get out of low orbit- you want to rack us up?
Well, I can take just so much of that. An instructor is almost like the captain of a ship, you know. He's the boss! So I explained to her that my name wasn't "Chowderhead or "Dullwit! but James Paul Madigan, and it was the instructors who were supposed to yell at the students, not the other way around. Well, it was her own speedster, and a really neat one at that. Maybe I couldn't blame her for being nervous about somebody else driving it. So I decided to give her a real easy lesson. Practicing parking orbits-if you can't do that, you don't deserve a license! And she was really rotten at it. It looks easy, but there's an art to cutting the hyperdrive with just the right residual velocity, so that you slide right into your assigned coordinates. The more she tried, the farther off she got. Finally she demanded that I take her back to the spaceport. She said I was making her nervous. She said she'd get a different instructor for tomorrow or she'd just move on to some other system where they didn't have benefacted chimpanzees giving driving lessons.