The Speculative Short Fiction of Sylvia Jacobs by Sylvia Jacobs

Author:Sylvia Jacobs [Jacobs, Sylvia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: http://archive.org/details/Vortex_Science_Fiction_v01n02_1953, Science fiction, Short stories, Time travel -- Fiction, Gangsters -- Fiction
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

OLD PURPLY-PUSS

Sylvia Jacobs

Published in Vortex Science Fiction magazine, July 1953

Juggle the Chromosomes of Earth's Creatures —a sample of Arthropod, a dash of Cephalopod, an extinct Carnivorous Reptile... Shake 'Em up — And what have You Got?

***

THE interrupted beep of the tube annunciator sounded over the howling, the chittering, the yammering, whistling and barking of the fake extra-terrestrial zoo outside the laboratory window.

Sam Baldwin, journeyman life technician, interrupted his gloomy reflections on the prostitution of his skill to remove the rolled daily newspaper from the tube. Idly he opened it. A glaring ad for a trade school stared him in the face.

“LEARN TO CREATE LIFE!” the ad declared. “Learn the techniques that make men like gods! Study in your spare time! Increase your earnings! Send for our free aptitude test today! Hundreds of jobs awaiting qualified men and women! So long as people eat, food industries will need trained life technicians! Why stagnate in a rut? Prepare to enter this fascinating, uncrowded field!”

“Uncrowded, nuts!” Sam said aloud, to nobody in particular, except the embryos of imaginary extra-terrestrial creatures in his exo-genesis tanks.

The life industries, as Sam knew only too well, had somehow acquired a reputation for being glamorous. Like newspaper reporting, deep-sea diving, and movie acting, they attracted fifty starry-eyed, eager applicants for every opening. If you threw all the working life technicians in the country out of a job tomorrow, you still couldn’t place one year’s crop of trade-school graduates. It was an exacting, nerve-wracking, dirty, routine job, and still the ambitious graduates came on.

Sam turned the pages of the paper, trying to find some item sufficiently interesting to take his mind off his troubles. A few life technicians were lucky enough to get into a niche where they could retain their self-respect, feel that they were genuinely useful, creating improved food animals. But after ten years in the trade here Sam was juggling chromosomes of Earth animals, taking a characteristic of an arthropod here, a cephalopod there, an extinct carnivorous reptile perhaps, mixing them into an illogical mess of biologic hash, as specified by the screwy imagination of one W. W. Weinstein, showman extraordinary. The worst of it was that the suckers were getting wise. As more and more men came back from trips to the stars, told their friends and relatives that all the suitable planets found so far were inhabited by plain, ordinary, earth-type animals and unremarkable human beings, the suckers were staying away from Weinstein’s so-called Other Worlds Zoo in droves. And when the gate receipts dropped, Sam’s salary check was liable not to come through.

A news story momentarily captured Sam’s attention. Six people claimed to have seen a lighted spaceship crash into the ocean, at night, close to shore, and many more had seen a fiery streak descending from higher altitudes, before the submersion. Astronomers interviewed stated unequivocally that the phenomenon had unquestionably been a meteorite, if not a mass hallucination. But certain public-spirited citizens who saw what they were certain was a crash, rounded up a deep-sea diver in a bar.

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