Collected Short Fiction, page 519
What followed was difficult and untidy work, but long years of practice had made Mr Tenneshaw’s hand skilful. With a deft flip he tossed the heavy corpse up on to the stained and bloody surface of his carving table. Taking a keen blade from a rack on the wall, he slit open Mr Thomas F. Underbill’s burlap wrappings and put them to one side, and then carefully undid his funeral vestments and laid them aside.
The late Mr Underhill had been pleasingly plump—and thanks to Mr Tenneshaw’s practice of preserving the dead on ice, there had been no deterioration of his body. Mr Tenneshaw carved swiftly and efficiently, prying the tender pale meat away from the body. He hummed a tuneless little jingle as he worked. Tomorrow the citizens of Plattville would once again have Mike Tenny’s “special cut of lamb”. It was a pale, tender, juicy meat, which tasted best when cooked rare, and the good folk of Plattville had not the faintest idea what they were actually eating. But they swore by their butcher, cheerful Mike Tenny, because his prices were reasonable and his meat was delicious.
Mike Tenny had one odd and inflexible rule: he sold only meat, never bones. At least, not with the “special cuts”. If you wanted soup-bones or ribs, you could have them with the beef, but not with the lamb.
There was a good reason for this. When Mr Tenneshaw finished his carving job on the late Thomas F. Underhill, he took good care that the skeleton was left intact. After he had placed the meat carefully in his big freezer vault, he painstakingly dressed the now-denuded skeleton in the funereal vestments once again, wrapped it in burlap, and carried it outside to place in his truck.
At eight the following morning the sign was posted in the front window of Mike Tenny’s store:
WE HAVE SPECIAL CUTS OF LAMB TODAY 45 CENTS A POUND
At eight-thirty the first customers arrived. Mr Tenneshaw was behind the counter, clad in his butcher’s clothes, and he smiled and bowed and made little quips as he measured out the meat, wrapped it, and rang up the sales.
“Nice to hear you have lamb in stock again, Mr Tenny,” the woman told him. “My family loves it so much, you know.”
“It isn’t easy to obtain. The supply isn’t as easily available as I’d like it to be.”
“That’s too bad. It’s so good with just a little dash of mint sauce!”
Mr Tenny laughed and packaged the meat. Within less than an hour, his supply of special cuts from the cadaver of Thomas F. Underhill was gone. At ten that morning, Mr Tenny’s assistant, a Plattville youth named Leverson, showed up to take over the store. Mr Tenny rarely stayed in Plattville past ten in the morning. Young Leverson handled the sales during the day as well as the purchasing of the more orthodox cuts, and he locked up the store each night at six. He knew nothing of the true nature of Mr Tenny’s “special cuts of lamb”. He was simply a young butcher’s assistant, who was allowed to run the store because the proprietor had business elsewhere every afternoon.
Mr Tenneshaw might have carried his double life on unobserved until, indeed, it was his own turn to become some other mortician’s client. But, unfortunately, an inquisitive young man spied on Mr Tenneshaw at work one night, with distressing results.
His name was Ronnie Rudbeck, he was seventeen, he lived in the quiet town of Plattville and he was as curious as a cat. One afternoon some three weeks after the funeral of Thomas F. Underhill, Ronnie Rudbeck spent the better part of an evening visiting the home of a Plattville girl named Maribeth Wheeler, who otherwise does not figure in this narrative.
It was a fine evening, lit by a full moon, and Ronnie Rudbeck was in a cheery mood as he left Maribeth’s house at half past eleven. He decided to walk the two miles to his own house, since at this hour the public transportation system in Plattville was highly irregular. His route happened to take him past the street on which was located the butcher shop of Mike Tenny.
As for Mr J. Michael Tenneshaw, this had been a long and busy and fruitful day for him. During the afternoon he had aided to his eternal sleep the mortal remains of yet another Reeseport citizen, one Gilbert Gosseyn by name. The late Mr Gosseyn had been carried off of over-exertion on the golf course at the age of fifty-three.
By the usual procedure Mr Tenneshaw had obtained the cadaver of the late Gilbert Gosseyn, and was in the process of bringing that cadaver into his butcher establishment at the moment Ronnie Rudbeck turned the corner into that street.
Mr Tenneshaw was too preoccupied with his task to notice the boy. Ronnie Rudbeck stopped short. He saw a tall, thin man whom he recognized as the butcher, engaged in the job of juggling a burlap-wrapped object into his store. To the boy’s utter amazement, the burlap wrapping parted slightly as a result of Mr Tenneshaw’s struggles with the heavy corpse.
A pale arm tumbled from the burlap shroud and dangled inches above the sidewalk.
Ronnie Rudbeck drew back into the shadows and watched in growing alarm as Mr Tenneshaw successfully manoeuvred the burlap-wrapped object into the store and closed the front door.
A body!
Murder!
A current of excitement throbbed in the boy’s heart. The butcher had no business dragging corpses about at this time of night. Ronnie grinned to himself. He felt no fear. He would investigate this strange incident. Perhaps, he thought, he might even distinguish himself heroically.
He tiptoed forward.
He nudged the door of the butcher shop. It creaked open. The boy leaped back, but no one came to investigate.
Reassured, the boy edged forward again, into the store. He saw the crack of light coming from beneath the closed door of the inner room. In there, he knew, was a man and a corpse. A murderer? He had to find out.
A full assortment of butcher’s tools hung over the counter in the outer room. Ronnie Rudbeck picked up a substantial cleaver. Thus armed, he tiptoed toward the closed door.
He placed one hand on the door.
He pushed.
The door opened.
The boy gasped. A moment later, Mr Tenneshaw looked up and gasped as well.
Ronnie Rudbeck saw a slab-jawed man of about fifty or sixty, dressed in a butcher’s outfit, bending over a bloody and dismembered corpse. Gore was spattered everywhere; a great revolting heap of intestines lay coiled like snakes at one side of the carving table. This was more than murder, the boy realized in a flash; it was some kind of ghoulish fiendishness!
As for Mr Tenneshaw, he saw in one mind-shattering glance that his long years of successful toil had ended now in damning exposure! He was caught in the act! A bulky, square-shouldered teenage boy stood in the doorway, armed with a gleaming cleaver.
“You killed him,” said the boy accusingly.
“Hardly. He died naturally. Too much golf, I’m afraid. I’m simply preparing him.”
“Preparing him for what?”
“For eating,” Mr Tenneshaw said.
He eyed the boy casually. But inside Mr Tenneshaw’s mind all was in turmoil. He had been discovered at last. All was ended. His dreadful secret was no longer his own. This blundering boy had ruined everything.
There was only one thing to do.
“Put down that cleaver,” Mr Tenneshaw said commandingly, “and tell me how much money you’ll want to keep quiet about this.”
The following morning, the sign was in Mike Tenny’s shop window once again:
WE HAVE SPECIAL CUTS OF LAMB TODAY 45 CENTS A POUND
But the first customer that morning was not one of the town’s housewives, but a member of the Plattville police, Brewster by name.
“Morning, Mr Tenny!”
“Good morning there, Officer Brewster. What’s on your mind today?”
The policeman shrugged. “Making a check-up, I’m afraid.”
“Oh?”
“It really isn’t worth bothering you about. But orders are orders. Boy named Ronald Rudbeck—you know him?”
Mr Tenneshaw remained calm. “I know the family. He a big kid with dark hair?”
“That’s the one.”
“He’s been here a couple of times, yeah. What about him?”
The policeman frowned. “Disappeared late last night. Last seen leaving the Wheeler house, a few blocks down the way, at half past eleven. He never got home last night. His parents are all het up about it.”
Mr Tenneshaw said, “So why come here about it? I haven’t seen him.”
“Just checking anyone who might have been up late in the neighbourhood. We figure the boy must have run away from home, or something.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. These kids today—” Mr Tenneshaw began, leaving the sentence unfinished. “Is that all you wanted to ask me?”
“Just about.” The policeman grinned. “Oh, and the missus asked me to have you put aside a couple of pounds of the special lamb for her. She’ll be in around nine to pick it up.”
Mr Tenneshaw grinned. “Of course. Be glad to put a little away for Mrs Brewster.”
Although, he thought, there was a particularly large supply today. Much larger than usual.
“Hope you find the boy,” he said, as the policeman sauntered toward the shop door.
“He’ll turn up,” the policeman said with confidence.
Mr Tenneshaw nodded and went to the cupboard in back to wrap some of the meat for Mrs Brewster. He gave her nice choice cuts.
He smiled to himself.
He thought of the incident of the night before. How eager the boy had been for money; how avidly he had agreed to accept the cash Mr Tenneshaw offered. But Mr Tenneshaw was no fool. He knew that a blackmailer never settled for one payoff.
He remembered how surprised the boy had looked when the mild middle-aged man had lifted the cleaver and brought it whistling through the air toward its mark. Mr Tenneshaw sighed. He was tired. He had been working nearly half the night to carve all the meat from both the bodies.
Of course, it had left him with no time to dispose of the bones in his usual manner. There hadn’t been time for a trip back to the graveyard. But Mr Tenneshaw wouldn’t have liked the idea of putting Ronnie Rudbeck’s bones in the same coffin as Gilbert Gosseyn’s in any case.
So he had taken a chance, just this once. And it wasn’t such a big chance . . .
The door opened. Mr Tenneshaw—as Mike Tenny—hustled forward, smiling broadly, rubbing his hands together. But instead of another of his favourite customers, there stood in the butcher shop doorway, looking very grim, the same policeman who had left a few moments before.
“Mike Tenny,” said Officer Brewster. It was not a greeting, or a question. It sounded more like a judgement, and a verdict.
“Yes . . . yes,” Mr Tenneshaw said, looking around in bewilderment, wondering if anything could possibly have gone wrong.
The policeman held something white in his hand. “I just found a dog in your alley,” he said. “The mutt was chewing on this. He must have found it in your garbage.
“It’s a human bone!”
Mr Tenneshaw tried hard, but he felt his air of injured innocence vanishing rapidly. He had made one careless mistake at last. The undertaker, he realized grimly, had finally come to the end of his sideline.
There’s No Place Like Space
Ed Reese loved his space assignment on Crawford IX, and didn’t want a vacation on Earth. But he had to take it, and Carol Dwyer was there to see that he had thirty-four weeks of sheer pleasure!
I GUESS the root of all my trouble was that I just didn’t like cities. Crowds. Soot-cluttered air. Noise. Neon lights. Not that I’m a country boy, you understand; I was born in Tarrytown, right in the heart of little old Metropolitan New York. But that was a long time ago—thirty five years, to be precise; it was 2612—and at the time all this happened, I hadn’t set foot on Earth in twelve years.
And that was fine with me, just fine. I was perfectly happy where I was—and everything would have kept on being fine, if some whitecollar needlehead in the home office hadn’t taken it upon himself to decide that I had some vacation time due me.
I work for Transmat, Incorporated. My official job designation is Maintenance Technician First Class, and my salary is seven thousand Terran dollars per Standard Annum, adjustable to meet local economic conditions on whatever world I might be assigned to. For half of the twelve years of my employ, I had been stationed on Crawford IX, which is a pleasant Earthsize world some six hundred light-years from Sol. It’s inhabited by about two thousand Terran colonists and by various native forms of life, the most advanced of which is a kind of small monkey with blue skin, no hair, and a bright green rump.
MY JOB was to look after the big matter transmitter, which was Crawford IX’s only link with the mother world. It would take about six hundred years, more or less, to send a message by radio from Crawford IX to Earth—assuming that any equipment on Earth was sensitive enough to make the pickup—and it would take eleven hundred years, approximately, for any conventional drive spaceship to make the trip one-way. A faster-than-light ship, naturally, could do the trip in a couple of weeks—but there’s the minor drawback that human beings can’t survive hyperspace travel. So . . . faster-than-light ships are sent out unmanned, bearing matter-transmitters, and are landed by self-guiding feedback controls. After that, travel between Earth and the colonyworld is carried on by Transmat, simply, instantaneously, and safely.
My job involved sitting around in the Transmat office on Crawford for the eight transmitting hours of each day, making sure that nothing went wrong. A minor oscillation of the wavicle amplifier and a person might arrive at his destination inside out, you see. So I ran a daily check on the Thorson tube that powers the Transmat; I took heat readings; I sent through confirmations of functioning each day, before any transmission began.
The rest of the time I was free to loaf, and Crawford IX is ideally suited for loafing, with its unspoiled lakes and virgin forests, its clear blue skies and its utterly fresh air. There isn’t any industry on Crawford IX, you see; the colonists won’t permit it. Most of them are farmers—though there are a few composers, writers, and philosophers living here and sending their output via Transmat back to Earth for consumption there (and for pretty good money, too, may I add). Life is simple, life is pure on Crawford IX. Every night there’s a meteor shower that makes even old hands gasp for the very beauty of it. There are three moons that orbit in a dazzlingly complex pattern, and so at night no shadow ever stands still.
A GOOD place to live, in other words. I liked it. I was looking forward to spending the rest of my life there, putting in my daily maintenance stint and then getting out into the fresh air with a book or a block-andtackle (no newfangled magnetic dredges for me, thank you!) or a bottle of something easy on the gullet. And then, one balmy Fourth-month morning, after I had okayed transmission for the day, I scooped out the newly arrived morning mail and found, sitting on the top of the stack, a Transmat flimsy addressed to Mr. Edwin Reese, Maintenance Division.
Ed Reese is me. And the only mail I get is my paycheck, once a month—and not due for three more weeks.
I don’t have any parents, brothers, sisters, wives, or mistresses back on Earth who might want to write to me.
I flipped the “Acknowledge Receipt” lever to show I had got the stuff; I dumped the rest of the colony mail into the basket for the postmaster to sort out later; and I slit my letter open with shaky hands.
IT WAS from the home office, New York.
It said:
A routine check of our records discloses that you have not applied for vacation leave since entering our employ in 2635. This oversight should be corrected at once. You are entitled to thirty-four Standard Weeks of accumulated leave, with full pay. Upon your acknowledgment a relief man will be sent out to handle your duties until your return from Earth.
Frowning, I switched on the vocotype and dictated an answer in my best official tones.
“I am in receipt of your communication regarding my accumulated vacation time, and wish to inform you that I have no wish to use this time on Earth. If it is possible for me to spend my vacation here on Crawford IX, send a relief man at once; otherwise, forget the whole thing and I’ll continue as before.”
I looked the flimsy over, checked it for spelling and punctuation, folded it, put the home office address on it, and deposited it in the pickup cubicle of the Transmat, along with half a dozen packages scheduled to go out in the morning mail. I yanked the lever; cool green flame filled the cubicle, and a moment later it was empty.
FORGETTING all about the interchange of notes, I got going on my morning routine of maintenance. About two hours later, though, the bell rang, signaling an arrival. In the cubicle I found three cartons addressed to locals, a set of replacement bulbs I had ordered a week back, and a new note from the home office.
Be advised that the terms of your work contract require you to take regular vacations for the sake of continued efficiency. Through a bookkeeping error you have not been reminded of this clause till now, but the situation must cease. The quality of your work may be seriously impaired if you remain on continuous duty. We must insist that you leave Crawford IX as soon as practicable and return to Earth for a period of rest and diversion.
I scowled and made angry snarling noises deep in my throat. Dammit, I didn’t want a vacation. I didn’t want to go back to Earth.
I switched on the vocotype and started mentally composing my reply. I would say something haughty, to the effect that in twelve years—six of them in continuous stay on Crawford IX—I had a 100 percent safety record; that I detested Earth and loved the bucolic beauty of Crawford IX; that vacations, anyway, were for clods. I had a host of fine arguments, but none of them coped with the minor fact that, by contract, I was required to go back to Earth once a year for a change of scene, that I had been getting away with it all these years, and that I had no way of wiggling out of that clause now.
I shrugged and dictated a brief note allowing as how I was willing to be relieved, if the company insisted. And that was how I came to make my visit to Earth.
MY RELIEF man popped out of the Transmat about a week later. By that time, I had tidied up all my loose ends, paid my outstanding bills in town, and generally fortified myself for the departure.
