In the Beginning by Robert Silverberg Page A

fourth story, “O Captain My Captain,” was one that I had written while still an unknown freelancer back in 1954; unable to sell it the normal way, I had eventually fobbed it off on Browne as part of my regular quota. The interesting thing here is that Browne published it under the byline of “Ivar Jorgensen”—a writer who had been one of my early favorites in the days before I knew that the Ziff-Davis magazines were entirely written by staff insiders using pseudonyms. “Jorgensen” had originally been the pen name of Paul W. Fairman, Browne’s associate editor, but now the name was being spread around to the other contributors. So after having been an Ivar Jorgensen fan in my mid-teens, I had, four or five years later, been transformed into Jorgensen myself! It would not be long before I could lay claim to “Alexander Blade” as well.
     
     
    It started very simply, with the routine note on my desk, saying that the Chief had a job for me. Since there’s generally some trouble for me to shoot ten or a dozen times a year, I wasn’t surprised. The surprises came later, when I found that this particular job was going to draw me a hundred trillion miles across space, on a fantastic quest on a distant planet. But that came later.
    It began quietly. I walked in, sat down, and the Chief, in a quick motion, dropped a diamond in front of me on his desk.
    I stared blankly at the jewel. It was healthy-sized, emerald-cut, blue-white. I looked up at him.
    “So?”
    “Take a close look at it, Les.” He shoved it across the desk at me with his stubby fingers. I reached out, picked up the diamond—it felt terribly cool to touch—and examined it.
    Right in the heart of the gem was a thin brown area of clouding, marring the otherwise flawless diamond. I nodded. “It looks—like a burnt-out fuse,” I said, puzzled.
    The Chief nodded solemnly. “Exactly.” He opened a desk drawer and reached in, and grasped what looked like a whole handful of other diamonds, “Here,” he said, “Enjoy yourself.” He sent them sprawling out on the desk; they rolled across the shiny marbled desktop. Some went skittering to the floor, others dropped into my lap, others spread out in a gleaming array in front of me. There must have been forty of them.
    The Chief’s eye met mine. “Each one of those diamonds,” he said, “represents one dead man.”
    I coughed. I’ve had some funny cases since joining the Bureau, but this was the fanciest hook the Chief had used yet. I started scooping up the diamonds that had fallen to the floor. They were of all sizes, all cuts—a million dollars’ worth, maybe. More, maybe.
    “Don’t bother,” the Chief said. “I’ll have the charwoman pick them up when I leave. They’re not worth anything, you know.”
    “Not worth anything?” I looked at the ones I had in my hand. Each was marred by the same strange brown imperfection, that fuse blowout. I closed my hand, feeling them grind together.
    “Not a cent. For one thing, they’re all flawed, as you can easily see. For another, they’re all synthetics. Paste, every one of them. Remarkably convincing paste, but paste all the same.”
    I leaned back in my chair, put my hands together, and said, “Okay. I’m hooked. Put the job on the line for me, will you?” I was thinking, This is the screwiest one yet. And I’ve had some corkers.
    “Here’s the pitch, Les.” He drew out a long sheet of crisp onionskin paper, and handed it to me. Neatly typed on it was a list of names and addresses. I ran down the list quickly without hitting any familiar ones.
    “Well? Who are they?”
    “They’re missing persons, Les. They’ve all disappeared in this city between—ah—” He took the list back—“27 November, 2261, and 11 February of this year. The list totals sixty-six names. And those are just the ones we know about.”
    “And the diamonds?”
    “That’s where this Bureau comes in,” he said. “They only send us the screwy ones, as