In the Beginning Read Free

college, twenty years old, after all. There would be time later on to consider whether I could actually earn a living this way.
    Three more months went by before my next sale: a second one to Hamling, “Yokel with Portfolio.” Looking at it now, I suppose that I wrote it with Horace Gold’s Galaxy Science Fiction in mind, or Anthony Boucher’s Fantasy & Science Fiction, since those two top-of-the-field editors were particularly fond of the sort of light, slick science fiction that I imagined “Yokel with Portfolio” to be. But the Meredith agency obviously didn’t think I was quite ready for prime time yet, for I see from the agency records that they sent it straight to Imagination in March of 1955 and that on May 8 Hamling bought it for $55. It was published in the November, 1955 issue of Imagination ’s new companion magazine, Imaginative Tales, and here it is again for the first time in half a century—my third published short story, no classic but, I think, a decent enough job for the lad of twenty that I was at the time I wrote it.
     
     
    It was just one of those coincidences that brought Kalainnen to Terra the very week that the bruug escaped from the New York Zoo. Since Kalainnen was the first Traskan to come to Terra in over a century, and since the bruug had lived peacefully in the zoo for all of the three or four hundred years or more since it had been brought there from outer space, the odds were greatly against the two events coinciding. But they did.
    Kalainnen, never having been on a world more complex than the agrarian backwater of civilization that was his native Trask, was considerably astonished at his first sight of gleaming towers of New York, and stood open-mouthed at the landing depot, battered suitcase in hand, while the other passengers from his ship (Runfoot, Procyon-Rigel-Alpha-Centauri-Sol third-rate runner) flocked past him to waiting friends and relatives. In a very short time the depot was cleared, except for Kalainnen and a tall young Terran who had been waiting for someone, and who seemed evidently troubled.
    He walked up to Kalainnen. “I’m from the Globe,” the young man said, looking down at him. “I was told there was an alien from Trask coming in on this ship, and I’m here to interview him. Sort of a feature angle—weird monster from a planet no one knows very much about. Know where I can find him?”
    The young Terran’s hair was long and green. Kalainnen felt acutely aware of his own close-cropped, undyed hair. No one had warned him about Terran fashions, and he was beginning to realize that he was going to be terribly out of style here.
    “I am from Trask,” Kalainnen said. “Can I help you?”
    “Are you the one who came in just now? Impossible!”
    Kalainnen frowned. “I assure you, sir, I am. I just arrived this very minute, from Trask.”
    “But you look perfectly ordinary,” said the reporter, consulting some scribbled notes. “I was told that Traskans were reptiles, sort of like dinosaurs but smaller. Are you sure you’re from Trask? Procyon IV, that is.”
    “So that’s it,” Kalainnen said. “You’re mistaken, young man. The inhabitants of Procyon IV are reptiles, all right, in more ways than one. But that’s Quange. Trask is Procyon of Terran descent; the Traskans are not aliens but from Terra. We were settled in—”
    “That doesn’t matter,” said the reporter, closing his notebook. “No news in you. Reptiles would be different. Hope you enjoy your stay.”
    He walked away, leaving Kalainnen alone in the depot. It had not been exactly a promising introduction to Terra, so far. And he hadn’t even had a chance to ask for anything yet.
    He checked out of the depot, passed through customs without much difficulty (the only problem was explaining where and what Trask was; the planet wasn’t listed in the Registry any more) and headed out into the busy street.
    It made him sick.
    There were shining autos buzzing by, and slick little copters,