Anyway, as you perhaps already know, I'm slowly making my way through the list of Honorable Mentions in the back of Judith Merril's 1959 SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume, cherry-picking stories that sound interesting or give me an excuse to look through old issues of men's magazines, and today we hit letter "N" and find that two stories by Nourse are on the menu. Dare we hope they are less forgettable than the last three stories by Nourse we have talked about?
"Hard Bargain"
Arrgh, this is a stupid joke story about a guy making a deal with the Devil. Why do people keep writing these stories? Why do people like Merril keep encouraging them to do so?
A guy has sold his soul to the Devil in return for ten years of wealth and hot chicks. Three years in, he is bored because it is no longer any fun banging an endless supply of easy and experienced sluts--he wants to bang an innocent girl. So he and Satan renegotiate--if the Devil can provide an innocent lover, one "never touched by a man," the protagonist will waive his right to the remaining seven years, but if the Devil can't procure such an innocent girl the deal is off.
A few days later our hero meets and seduces a sweet charming girl, but it turns out she is not quite innocent. He thinks he has squirmed out of his deal with the Devil because she wasn't a virgin, but it turns out the girl's virginity was taken not by a man, but by Satan himself, so our guy is ushered into Hell.
Lame filler that I guess makes sense for Playboy because of its erotic and wish-fulfillment aspects but why is Merril promoting it? Because she loves to point out that SF is prevalent in mainstream publications as part of her quest to bust down the artificial barrier between genre and the mainstream? This is a legit enterprise, but we'd be better served if Merril promoted good SF that appears in the slicks and the men's magazines, not banal crud.
Thumbs down! (Do check out those pictures of Ferrer if you are a fan of his or of portrait photography, though.)
"The Gift of Numbers"
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This is an OK joke story with a plot gimmick that I wish was the basis of a horror story, not a humor piece. We'll call this thing acceptable.
Avery is a timid little bookkeeper with a weak heart who isn't even very good at his bookkeeping; he has fallen behind and is full of anxiety about his deadlines. At the bar he meets a fancily-dressed con man who has various special abilities. For one thing he is a math whiz, perhaps the greatest man in the world when it comes to practical manipulations of numbers. Even more impressively, he knows how to transfer patterns of atomic particles between brains, so that he can give Avery his math skill. He charges 20 dollars for this service, and attains an additional benefit from Avery--you see, the conman has a painful ulcer that prevents him from drinking booze or eating tasty foods, and now Avery is a genius with figures but he also has the ulcer, while the con man can now booze it up to his heart's content!
And it gets worse! Avery not only has the con man's ulcer, but his greed and his compulsions and his contempt for the rights of others! He starts picking people's pockets unconsciously. When he balances accounts and prepares taxes he cooks the books to embezzle funds into his own account. He is now addicted to gambling, and loses all the money he steals. His life is a disaster!
The twist ending is that eventually the con man wants his skills back and sets a meeting with Avery to switch back their molecule patterns or whatever, but minutes before the meeting the crook dies of a heart attack because he has Avery's heart trouble.
Acceptable filler.
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Hopefully nobody will ask me about these Nourse stories next week, because by then I will probably have forgotten about them. Nourse was Merril's only "N" for 1958, so when next we meet we'll tackle some "O"s.
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