THE FINEST WRITERS OF TODAY —IN THE MOST
EXCITING WORLDS OF TOMORROW . . .
Possibilities
at which you have never guessed, excitement you never before have
experienced—all this is to be found in these, the finest tales of fantasy and
science fiction ever to appear on the distinguished pages of The Saturday Evening Post.
Opening
up new vistas of the imagination, filled with brilliant speculation and fascinating
surmise, these stories are the best of the best, written by some of the most
noted authors of our day. Here is a collection that is must reading for every
science fiction fan . . .
SATURDAY
EVENING POST
READER OF FANTASY and SCIENCE FICTION
Selected by The
Editors of The
Saturday Evening Post
POPULAR
LIBRARY - TORONTO
ALL
POPULAR LIBRARY books are carefully selected by the POPULAR LIBRARY Editorial
Board and represent titles by the world's greatest authors.
POPULAR
LIBRARY EDITION
Copyright
© 1937, 1947, 1949, 1950, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962,
1964 by The Curtis Publishing Company
Library
of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-11293
Published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Doubleday
edition published in January, 1964 First printing:
October, 1963
All
of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Printed
in Canada
All
Rights Reserved
CONTENTS
DOCTOR HANRAY'S SECOND CHANCE
BY
CONRAD RICHTER 7
FALLOUT ISLAND BY
ROBERT MURPHY 19
THE GREEN HILLS OF EARTH
BY
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN 29
DOOMSDAY DEFERRED BY WILL F. JENKINS 39
TEST-TUBE TERROR BY ROBERT STAN DISH 49
ISLAND OF FEAR BY WILLIAM SAMBROT 61
SINISTER JOURNEY BY
CONRAD RICHTER 70
THE PLACE OF THE GODS
BY STEPHEN VINCENT BENET 84
THE PHANTOM SETTER
BY
ROBERT MURPHY 96
THE BIG WHEEL BY FRED MCMORROW 110
THE DEATH DUST BY
FRANK HARVEY 117
THE LOST CONTINENT
BY
GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD 128
THE TRAP BY KEM BENNETT 139
SPACE SECRET BY
WILLIAM SAMBROT 150
THE UNSAFE DEPOSIT BOX
BY GERALD KERSH 155
THE SECOND TRIP TO MARS
BY WARD MOORE 165
THE VOICE IN THE EARPHONES
BY
WILBUR SCHRAMM Ml
MOON CRAZY BY WILLIAM ROY SHELTON 186
THE
LITTLE TERROR BY
WILL F. JENKINS 199
NOVELETTE
THE ANSWER BY PHILIP WYLIE 213
DOCTOR HANRAY'S SECOND CHANCE
by
Conrad Richter
If
he had known it would be like this, he wouldn't have come, he told himself.
Here he was, back in his native valley at last. He had driven more than a
thousand miles to see it again, this triangle of river and long blue mountains that shut in the rich brown farming land.
This was where he had been born and bred. Why, he used to know every field and
patch of woods. Here if anywhere, he felt, he could find himself again.
And
yet, now that he had come, it didn't mean anything. It seemed hollow and dead,
like every other place he had been since these spells had come over him. It was
true then, he told himself. Something must be seriously wrong with him, something
different perhaps and yet quite as deadly in its way as the burns of atomic
radiation he had at first suspected. But exactly what it could be, neither the
doctors nor himself had as yet been able to find out.
He
drove slowly along the black-top road. A large board announced: Rose
Valley Military Reservation. U. S. Army. No Admission. Ahead to the right and left he could see
the high steel fence topped with strands of barbed wire. At the little house in
the center of the road, he obeyed the sign that said, Stop!
"I
would like permission to go into Stone Church," he requested.
"What for?" the
guard wanted to know.
"Just
to look around. I
was raised here."
"You
can't do that. It's too late in the day. Besides, no civilians allowed. This is
a restricted area. Very secret and highly dangerous."
"I
know about that," the man in the car said. Then, after a moment, "I
believe I have a right to visit the graves of my parents."
"You'll
have to prove who you are." The guard went in for a moment and came back
with a sheaf of dirty papers, evi-
dently a
list of the dead in the reservation. "What's the name?"
"My
father's name was Doctor John Hanray. My name is Peter Hanray. Here are some
identification papers."
The
guard stared. His tanned face flushed. His lean, hard features altered with
respect.
"I'm
sorry I didn't know you, Doctor Hanray. I can see it's you now, sir, from your
pictures. I'll phone Colonel Hollen-beck you're here. You'll find him in his
office. He's in Building A."
"I
didn't come to see Colonel Hollenbeck," Hanray declared quietly. "I
just want permission to go in and look around. By
myself."
The
guard stirred uneasily. "Yes, sir. I'll speak to
the colonel, sir." He hurried back into the little house, and the visitor
thought he could make out an occasional phrase: "Yes, sir; it's him, sir .
. . the one who made the A-bomb. . . . He don't want
to come up. . . . No, alone; all alone! . . . Yes, sir, I'll tell him." The
guard appeared. "The colonel's coming down," he said with
satisfaction, as of a victory he had part in, and went on talking eagerly of
the valley, as if his job in the reservation had made them fellow natives.
Outside
a distant building, a flurry of dust suddenly rose and died. After a moment an
olive-colored military car came flying up, and a tall,
gentlemanly colonel got out.
"I'm
sorry to keep you waiting, Doctor Hanray," he said, shaking hands.
"If you had let us know you were coming, we'd have been all ready for you.
Just the same, if you can give me a few minutes, I'll take you around."
"Thank
you," the scientist said bleakly, "but it's not an official visit. Just a personal one. I'm not working right now. In fact, I
have been laid up a bit. You may know that I was raised here at Stone Church.
I'd like to visit my parents' graves and look around. By
myself. I'm sure you'll understand."
The
colonel's face fell a little. "Certainly. If
that's what you want, sir, I'll have my chauffeur drive you around."
"If you don't mind, I'd like to go in
alone."
The colonel's face looked gravely unhappy.
"I understand,
sir. Unfortunately, the regulations are very strict, as you
know. Visitors are required to have guides, even the most
distinguished ones. Something might blow up or you might
get lost. Even men who lived in the valley all their lives come
back to work here and get confused. Everything's been
changed around. I'm sure, though, that if I phoned Washing-
ton------ "
"No, that's all right," the
physicist said wearily. "I'll take a guide. But ask him to stay as far
behind me as he can. If I can't go in that way, I don't want to go in at all.
When I stop, tell him to stop behind me and wait. I hope you have a patient
man. I may stand looking at nothing, so far as he's concerned, for a long
time."
Well,
he told himself, as he drove quietly through the steel fence, the valley had
certainly changed. As the colonel had warned him, he hardly knew where he was
any more. The rambling Army buildings, the absence of familiar landmarks
confused him. Now whose barn had stood here at this pile of stones, and where
was the house? A few of the old houses could still be seen, but surely that
paintless, boarded-up box couldn't be the Foster house, where he had once
enjoyed such good times.
He
stopped, motioning for the jeep behind him to drive abreast of his car.
"I'm
trying to find out where I am. Where's the road that used to come down over
Penny Hill?"
"Oh, there's no road up there any more.
The Government didn't want it. They bulldozed it out."
Hanray
felt a sense of loss and bereavement. He had loved that Penny Hill road, used
to walk it as a boy.
"Well,"
he said, "perhaps you can tell me whose house this used to be over
here?"
But
the guard did not know who had lived there. "Whoever they were," he
added, "they kicked about getting out. You can bet on that."
"What did they kick about?"
"Anything and everything. First they said they didn't have enough
time."
"How much time did
they have?"
"Everybody
on the reservation had the same notice. Three days to get their money from the
Government and move out. But they weren't satisfied. They came back afterward
and tried to buy back some of the stuff they'd sold with their property. Like
their bathtubs, those that had them. Their sinks and corncribs
and sheds. They claimed the new places they bought didn't have them and
they couldn't buy any new plumbing or lumber on account of priorities."
"Well,
the Government didn't need their old bathtubs and comcribs."
"No,
they had to bum up the old lumber and throw the sinks and bathtubs on the junk
pile. The colonel said it would cost twenty-five to fifty dollars in red tape
to get every sink or bathtub through Washington. And it would take
weeks be sides. The colonel told them to forget it. They were just casualties
of the war."
The scientist winced.
"Here too," he murmured to himself.
"Oh,
four or five of your neighbors here were tough babies. They stuck on their
places and wouldn't get off. The last one to give up was an old woman. She
stopped by the gate with her house goods and told the guard all her troubles,
how her father and grandfather farmed the farm before her, and their folks
before that, way back to the Revolution. The guard listened till he was tired.
Then he said, 'Well, now you know how the Indians felt when you ran them off.' " The uniformed man in the jeep laughed, but the
physicist didn't laugh.
"I'm
afraid that old lady didn't run off any Indians," he said, very low.
"Well, maybe not. But the contractors
had to come in. We had to start getting out things for the men at the front to
fight with. Like your A-bomb. They made plenty stuff for it right here. I guess
you know that."
The scientist winced again.
The
guard went on admiringly, "I guess that was the greatest thing ever
invented. Just think, something that wiped out a whole
city and a hundred thousand of those rats at one crack. And I hear that's
nothing to what you can do now."
Hanray
sat at the wheel, very still. He felt the old nausea and shell-like feeling
coming over him. Then he drove slowly on.
Well, he told himself after a little, they
hadn't destroyed the road that ran down by Jarretts' farm anyway. This must be
it he was passing, looking strangely narrower and shorter than it used to. How
many times had he walked that road with one of the Jarrett girls after church
or choir practice! But where were Jarretts' woods in which the preacher's boys
had hidden one night to scare him?
How
much faster you went in a car than he used to in a buggy. This was Stone Church
already, or Deckertown as some called it, with half the houses gone and the
rest reduced to windowless boxes. Tillbury's store had vanished, as had
Hulsizer's blacksmith shop and red stable. And now suddenly, as he reached the
corner where one road used to turn off to Maple Hill and the other to Alvira,
he saw the old stone church before him, the doors, windows and belfry all
blinded with boards.
Beyond
this, he knew, lay his father's house. He got out of the car slowly and walked
over. Sight of the place shook him a little. Could this be his boyhood home
whose idyllic picture he had carried in his mind all these years? The paint was
gone, the porches tom away, the picket fence vanished, the great sugar maples
cut down. It was just a bare box, a two-and-a-half-story shack stripped of
every vestige of ornament and comfort. The doors and windows he so well knew
had been closed with rough lumber. Not a splinter was left of stable or
orchard. From where he used to pick up Baldwin and Smokehouse apples, he could
see the raw industrial strip of buildings of the XYT explosive line, and
beyond, the reach of ugly stacks and tanks against the autumn-sunset sky.
He
couldn't stand looking at it long, but retreated to the cemetery. Only here was
it as it had always been; a few more graves perhaps, but otherwise as he
remembered. He had heard reports how well the Army had taken care of the dead
left in its reservations. The graves looked even better kept than formerly, the
grass clipped, the black iron fence intact, the white stones erect arid
recently cleaned. He read again the line Faithful
Physician carved
on his father's stone—and in fine italics at the bottom, He went about doing good.
His mother had done that.
As a young scientist he had disliked to see it the next time he came home. But
today the simple words filled him with emotion and curious envy. He had once
thought, he told himself, that he had far outdistanced his father, but now he
knew it was his father's life that had outdistanced his. Standing here by his
parents' graves, his back turned on the boarded-up houses and church, on the
scarred earth and ugly munitions buildings, he could
almost believe that it was all a dream. The air blew from over South Mountain
as it always had. Crows cawed in the old unused fields up on Penny Hill, whose
huge rounded head looked golden in the setting sun.
It
was as if vestiges of the peaceful life he knew as a boy still remained up
there, and he found himself seeking them, stepping over the iron fence, passing
through Kellys' little woods and climbing the strong flanks of Penny Hill.
Presently
he came to a halt. In a little hollow high up on the slope, he had come on a
vestige of the old Penny Hill road. Farther down around the bend, he knew, it
had been completely destroyed. Farther up around the next bend or two, it must
run futilely into the steel fence. But here for a short distance it lay
untouched and utterly unchanged, the same yellow shale and curious narrowness,
the same weathered rail fence and dried grasses. It even smelled as it used
to. Since leaving here he had been over the entire country and most of the
world besides. He had found no place with that certain sweet smell of Rose
Valley. The three black cherry trees, now older and fatter, still stood by the
fence, and he was glad to lean against one of them in the faintness that had
come over him since the climb.
The
longer he stood there in the growing dusk, the less it seemed that he had ever
been away. Nothing here had changed. He could almost believe that he was still
a boy and that the valley behind him still lay intact and unharmed. Why, this
had been his favorite route from school in town. So often had he passed this
spot, he thought there must remain in the road some faint impress of his feet.
Just at this season, with darkness coming on, he used to tramp along here from
town with his schoolbooks under his arm, the scent of life in his nostrils and
the world his oyster. Standing here now, peering through the growing dusk, he
could almost feel himself as a boy swinging along the road bound for the
lamplit window at home.
His
nerves tautened. Did he only imagine it or was something actually coming up
there in the dusk? Yes, it was moving down the road. He could make it out now,
straining his eyes through the early obscurity, a figure rounding the shale
banks, a shadowy boy in knee breeches carrying a book satchel. The strangest
feeling ran over him. He must be really ill, he told himself, for there was no
road above for the boy to have come from and none below for him to pass over.
Besides, boys today did not wear knee pants. Yet he could plainly hear the
sound of the boy's shoes on the road. He told himself now that it must be a
real boy, someone who lived today on the reservation, who knew this short cut
and whom the guards let through. Then, as the boy came almost abreast, he
recognized, with a feeling that made all adult sensations seem tame, the
familiar red-ribbed sweater that had been his own, the certain look of its
stout coarse weave. He even remembered the peculiar smell of warm dye when he
used to pull it over his head.
The
boy was shying to the farther side of the road at sight of a stranger. Speak to him—speak to him before he is gone, the man cried to himself. But when he did so,
his voice sounded harsh and croaking, "Are you acquainted around here,
boy?"
"Why,
yes," the boy said, stopping, but he did not come any closer.
"Is there a doctor
around?"
"There's
two in town and one at the Stone Church." "Do you know the doctor's
name at the Stone Church?" "It's Hanray—Dr. John Hanray."
"And your name?" he asked.
"Peter Hanray," the boy told him
shortly, and started away.
"Wait,
I want to go with you!" the man said, as soon as he was able.
They
made a curious pair going down the shale road in the dimness, the boy hurrying
tirelessly ahead, the man following heavily after. At every moment the latter
looked for the road to peter out, expected to see, below, the cold hard
electric lights of the Army barracks and XYT-line buildings. But all that lay
around them was the soft dim blur of the unwired country dusk. There were the faint glow of a lantern in Bomboys' red bam as they
passed, and early lights in the Peysher house and Hauser log cabin. At
Shaffers' yellow house and Klines' unpainted one, children played and shouted
in the yard. Here the Penny Hill road joined the other road as it always had,
while ahead Jarretts' woods loomed up in its old, dark
and mysterious way. Tramping down the village road he could smell the old-time
aroma of wood smoke, raw-fried potatoes and valley-cured ham. Hulsizer's
blacksmith shop still stood open. A flame of red fire glowed in the darkness,
and a great hulking beast waited in the gloom outside.
And
now the scientist breathed faster, for they were rounding the comer. He could
glimpse late sky shining as usual through the open belfry and the white paling
fence standing unbroken around his father's house. Soft golden lamplight came
from a side window. That was the kitchen window, he knew, and a sudden fear
touched him that those two he wanted most to see wouldn't be there.
The
boy ran ahead of him through the side gate and up the steps. He burst in
through the door, and the man behind him saw the kitchen as he had always
remembered it, with the water bucket on the stand, the wood stove steaming with
pots and pans, and hurrying in from the pump on the back porch his mother, more
real than he had imagined her, in dress and apron that were part and parcel of
his youth. Something in him wanted to run to her, but her smile and anxious
scrutiny were all for the boy.
"He
was up on Penny Hill," the boy said. "He wants to see papa."
His
mother's smile left, and she put on the grave face she
showed to the outside world. "Will you come in?" she bade him
politely, as to a stranger.
Hardly
could he control his emotion as he stepped into that well-known room. The table
was set as always when he used to come home from town: the dishes he had long
since forgotten, with pink flowers and which had come in cereal packages, the
blue glass butter dish and the plated silverware worn softly black along the
edges. He could smell the savor of baked beans from the oven, shot through with
the scent of the stove.
He
noticed that his mother watched him intently. For a moment his heart stood
still, thinking she must know him. But she still spoke as to a visitor.
"Do you want to come in the office? Or you can wait in the parlor if you'd
rather. Peter will light the lamp for you. The doctor said he'd be back right
away. He's just over on the ridge road."
Hanray
dared not speak. He let himself be led into the parlor. He would get hold of
himself in here, he told himself, once he was left alone. Why, he knew all
these poor shabby furnishings better than any of the rich things in his fine
Midwest home. The old green tassels still hung from the table cover; the
haircloth sofa stood by the door; faded blue flowers bloomed in the wallpaper,
and the same spots were still worn in the ingrain carpet. His Grandfather and
Grandmother Ainsley hung on the wall, and a few photographs stood on organ and
table, but none of his father, mother or self. That would have been
unforgivable vanity or pride, to flaunt one of your immediate family in your own parlor. He heard the same old rings on
the telephone from the exchange at Maple Hill. All that was missing now,
besides his father, was Doxy, the stem, black-and-brown, long-haired shepherd
dog.
He
sat very still. The rattle of buggy wheels came around the house, the steps of
the boy sent out to unhitch, then the unmistakable sound of his father coming
up to the side door. A minute more and he came forward, a man in a brown beard
and clothes like a farmer, with a doctor's worn bag in his hand. He looked
tired. Likely he had been up all last night with some shiftless mountain
patient. Sight of him brought back the feeling he had had as a boy for his
father, a kind of shame that he wasn't rich and successful like Doctors Grove
and Hereward in town; that he seldom charged enough or collected what he did
charge; and especially that he never carried himself with the professional
dignity of the town doctors. They were men of science above such inferior
things as humility and religion. His father, on the other hand, attended
church like some simple, unlearned countryman, even acted as superintendent of
the Sunday school when he could, greeting perfect strangers with the brotherly
and overfriendly way of a preacher. That, as a boy, he used to resent the
most—that his father showed the same warmth and affection for a stranger as
for his own family. But today, now that he was only a stranger himself, an
unspeakable gratitude welled up in him for his father's warm greeting and for
the kind brown eyes that searched his face.
"How
are you?" he said, grasping his hand and holding it in the manner he
always did when he tried to recall a name. "I feel I should know you. I
know your face, but I can't call your name. Do you live around here?"
"I used to," the
visitor said.
"Has it been a long
time?"
"A
very long time."
"You have come far
perhaps?"
"Farther than I can
tell you."
"I'd have been here before," his
father apologized, "but I was over at Berrys' on the ridge road. Maybe you
remember them. Old Mr. Berry is pretty feeble. There is little a doctor can do
for him any more except pray."
Into
the scientist's mind came the memory of his father's prayers, so unlike a man
of medicine and science, his friendly, hopeful voice, a voice that now seemed
very near God. Oh,
father, he
thought, if
only you would pray for me. But he said nothing of that, just followed his father into the familiar
bare office, smelling of carbolic acid and iodoform.
His
father closed the door. "Now you can sit down and tell me your
trouble," he said kindly.
The
scientist thought he would give a great deal if he could feel his father's
gentle and skillful hands go over him. But what he had to say was something
else.
"I've come to see you
about your boy."
"About
Peter!" His
father was surprised.
"About him and his future. I understand he's only fourteen, he's
already well along in high school and he's thinking of taking up physics and
chemistry in college. I've come to you to beg him to change his mind. What he
must do is prepare for a life like yours."
He saw that his father was
staring at him.
"I
don't know how you know this or who told you. I can talk to him again, but I'm
afraid there isn't much use. I don't think I've been much of an example to him.
He says he's seen too much doctoring from the inside. He doesn't want to starve
and he doesn't want to have anything to do with death and dying."
The scientist shrank.
His
father went on, "Peter's more interested in science. All he talks about is
the great opportunity for public service in being a scientist. He says that he
wants to do only good in the world."
The scientist winced again.
He leaned forward desperately.
"You
must change his mind for him then!" he begged. "Make him see the
great opportunity in medicine, the salvation of going around doing good like you."
"Like me!" his
father said in surprise. He looked up.
His
wife was standing in the doorway. "Supper's ready, John. You better eat
before more patients come. I don't have very much, but if the gentleman would
care to sit down with us, he'll be welcome. Did you notice, John? He looks like
someone we know." She turned. . . . "Are you by any chance related to
the Ainsleys?"
"I am," he said
unsteadily, "but please don't ask me how."
"I
knew it," she said. "You remind me of my Uncle Harry."
His father turned to him as they went out for
supper. "If you would only talk to him?" he asked. "We're just
his parents, but perhaps he will listen to you!"
It
was strange how the scientist felt an uneasiness to face the boy again. Young
Peter was standing by his chair, impatient to sit down. He welcomed the supper
guest coolly, looking the other way. They sat down at the familiar table. His
father bent his forehead to his hand, resting the elbow on the table, gave the
usual sign and started to pray. How often, the scientist thought, had he heard
those familiar words, "The summer is over, the harvest is ended and we are
not saved." But never had the words held such a new and terrible meaning
as today.
All through the meal he could scarcely
refrain from stealing glances at the boy across the table. Was it possible that
he had once been as slender, light-hearted and fair-skinned as that, his blood
vessels so new and pliable, his eyes clear as spring
water? Could he ever have been so young, innocent and idealistic? Why, the
boy's face was fresh as a girl's. Once when his mother wanted a clean
handkerchief, he rose reluctantly enough, but, once up, bounded up the stairs
so effortlessly on his long legs that the visitor felt a sudden awe, mingled
with despair, for the boy he had once been.
Vainly
he tried to win him. When he spoke, the boy listened unwillingly and, if pressed,
with veiled hostility. He made only short inscrutable replies, then looked the other way. It was plain,
the man told himself, that the boy did not approve of him. Why, he was famous
throughout the world, but the boy rejected him. There was something about him
the boy did not relish. Yet this was the one he must make peace with, he knew.
There was no mistaking that. All through the meal he talked, argued and begged,
until he felt the sweat stand on his face. His father and mother had begun to
look at him queerly. The boy resisted as hard as ever, until the man knew he
was foiled and defeated; that never could he dissuade the boy from his dream.
It
was when hope was at its lowest ebb that a scratching sound was heard at the
door. The boy answered it, and a black-and-brown shepherd dog burst in. It was
Doxy, keen and shaggy old Doxy. He jumped up at the boy in greeting; then, smelling on the floor, ran straight to
the visitor, jumped up, barked and licked him. For a little while he ran back
and forth between boy and man, smelling eagerly at one and then at the other,
as if something puzzled him.
"That's
singular," his father said. "Doxy doesn't go to many people. But he
acts as though he knows you."
"And
likes you," his mother added. She was always the one to encourage.
The
scientist saw that now for the first time the boy was regarding him intently,
with a kind of respect, as if his hostility was broken and he saw in him
something he hadn't seen before. The man sat very still. He had received honors
from a dozen sources, including the President of the United States, but never
had he felt quite the gratitude as for this. Some inexplicable thing inside of
him was released and began to melt, like that time long ago when, as a child,
he had gone to Fourth Gap and later found himself back in the blessed peace and
warmth of home.
"If
you don't mind," he asked his mother, "may I stay here for a while
this evening?"
That
was his mistake, he knew. Hardly was it said and permission given before the
dog began to growl. His hair bristled. Then a sudden knock rang from the door.
The boy went to answer.
"It's somebody for you," he
stammered.
"Is it the guard?" the visitor
asked, and the boy nodded.
The
scientist sat very quiet. It shook him a little. It had come sooner than he
expected. But he should have known he couldn't stay in this blessed place
forever.
"I'll have to go now," he said, and
got to his feet. He saw that his parents looked frightened. He kissed his
trembling mother and then his father's bearded mouth as he used to do when he
was small. Last he shook the cold hand of the boy.
The
rap came once more, demandingly. Again the dog growled deep in his throat.
"I'm
coming!" the scientist called. Then to the others,
"Good-by."
"Good-by," his father answered.
"I'll pray for you."
"Remember
you're an Ainsley. We'll both pray for you," his mother told him.
"God bless you,"
he said, and opened the door.
Not
until he was clear of the house, with his foot reaching for the steps, did he
remember there were no steps there.
When
he came to himself he was lying on the ground. As his eyes grew accustomed to
the darkness, he saw that the sugar maples and picket fence were gone. He
picked himself up painfully. The house was dark. The door looked as if it had
been boarded up for a long time. So did the windows. And yet
so real and strong remained the memory of his father and mother and the lamplit
table that he pounded on the boards.
"Papa!" he
called.
Only
silence from the decayed shell of a house answered him. Below he could see the
cold glitter of electric lights on the tanks and buildings of the secret XYT
explosive line. Nearer at hand were the cemetery and the guard waiting. Well,
he told himself, he could face things a little better now. His father and
mother had said they would pray for him. And the boy inside of him had made his
first sign of peace to the man he had become.
FALLOUT
ISLAND:
WHAT
PREHISTORIC CREATURE RULED HERE?
by
Robert Murphy
They
had raised the island just after dawn, and now, several hours later, were standing
off the opening through the encircling coral reef until the tide was high
enough to float them through. The indigo of the sea about them shattered to
white on the reef, and beyond it the shallower waters of the atoll ran through
the lovely shades of jade to emerald to aquamarine to another line of spray
and the gleaming sands of the beach beneath a background of palms. The island,
eight or Icn miles long, higher in the south where an ancient, badly weathered
dead volcanic cone thrust up above the jungle, looked undisturbed and serene
beneath the clear sky.
There
were five men on the schooner: the two Fijian sailors sitting quietly together
before the foremast and the Ihree white men standing together in the stern.
Erickson, the schooner's owner, had the wheel; the two Americans, John
Ciilfillan and Alan Bransom, both taller and considerably less weathered than
he, stood one on each side of him.
It
was Bransom who had hired the schooner; Gilfillan had come along on his
invitation, paying his own way to Hawaii, where they had picked up the
schooner. Although Gilfillan had known Bransom for several years in San
Francisco, where they both lived at the same club, the man was still rather
mysterious to him. Bransom apparently had a business of some sort which paid
him well and didn't make too great demands upon his time; and when he had asked
Gilfillan to lake a holiday with him, a sort of sentimental journey to one of
the little-known Pacific islands, Gilfillan decided to go. He had inherited
enough money to do what he liked and spent most of his time fishing, shooting,
skiing and writing an occasional magazine piece. He had never been in that
part of the world and had been at a loose end at the moment.
He
looked at the island they had come so far to visit and then looked
questioningly at Bransom, for he didn't believe now that it was a sentimental
journey; he had decided during the long trip that Bransom hadn't any
sentimentality whatever in his makeup.
"Like it?"
Bransom asked.
"It looks like a
paradise," Gilfillan said.
"It
was, almost," Bransom said. . . . "Didn't you think so, Cap?"
"Yah, I fought so," Erickson said. "Fine people, pretty girls. I have fern almost to
myself, no ot'er trader come by much." He grinned.
"And they never
brought them back for you?"
"No,"
Erickson said and pointed off over the sea to the southeast. "Americans
took t'em all down t'ere. Made t'em stay t'ere. Was
said, wind is bad for here, fallout came down."
"You must have missed
them."
"Yah,
I miss t'em. I have not been here for twenty year, maybe more. Now I am here
again, I miss t'em more."
"Well,"
Gilfillan said, "it must have cooled off by now. . . . Don't you think so,
Alan?"
"Hope so," Bransom said. "As
Cap pointed out, there was an odd condition here. Wind seemed to be funneled in
from all over, and with all the testing, the fallout just kept dropping in. We
had to get out."
"Quick,
huh?"
Gilfillan said.
"Yes, quick," Bransom said and
looked at Gilfillan. "You're beginning to put two and two together, I take
it."
"I believe I am,"
Gilfillan said and grinned.
"Now that I think of it—not that I haven't thought of it before—it
does seem that a trip here sounds like an expensive whim."
"I've
enjoyed watching you trying to figure it out," Bransom said. "I'll
tell you when we get ashore. . . . How much longer, Cap?"
"Soon,
now," Erickson said and raised his voice. "Tommy, watch by the
channel when we pass, yah?"
One
of the Fijians stood up and moved closer to the bow. Erickson swung the
schooner closer to the reef and ran parallel to it. The water shoaled and
paled to starboard, showing the submerged coral heads rising from the depths
and the brilliant colors of the life that grew upon it and swam about. The
other Fijian came aft and climbed up on the cabin roof to get a little height.
They passed the opening, in which the water deepened in color, and Erickson
swung out again. The two Fijians joined him; the one who had been on the roof
made a gesture showing an angle, and Erickson and Tommy nodded. "Been long
time since I was here," Erickson said to Bransom. "Coral grow up, but
Americans blast when t'ey come, make pretty deep. All right,
I t'ink." He looked at the Fijians and jerked a thumb at the sails.
They lowered and lashed them, Erickson started the engine, and with Tommy in
the bow again and the other Fijian back on the cabin roof giving hand signals
they eased their way slowly through the opening and dropped anchor a few
hundred yards off the beach. Erickson stopped the engine.
"Back
again," he said and then frowned slightly at Bransom. "Not many
birds," he said in a rather surprised tone. "Not many birds, like
before."
"No,"
Bransom said. "I didn't think there would be. I'll get the radiation
meter, and we'll try a trip ashore."
Neither Erickson nor the Fijians were very enthusiastic
about going ashore, so Bransom and Gilfillan went in in the dinghy, tied up to
the wreck of an old wharf and managed to get ashore on it without having to go
in through the surf. Bransom, with Gilfillan following, walked about on the
beach with the radiation meter and went a little way into the palms before
deciding to turn back. It was very quiet, except for the dry rattle of the
palms in the light wind.
"Spotty,"
Bransom said. "Still a bit above industrial levels here and there, but
that's all right. We're not going to spend a long vacation here anyhow."
"What
was that bit about the birds?" Gilfillan asked. "Remember you told
Cap when we anchored that you hadn't thought many of them would be here."
"An informed guess. Birds take radiation badly, not so well as insects and animals. The
ones that were native here would have been wiped out, probably, and not many
more would have come in. Even if they did, it must have been too high for them
for a long time."
"Well,
wouldn't they have—ah—mutations, or something? Or go back to what they were
long ago? I've read a lot of stuff, speculation, maybe. . . ." His voice
died away, and he made a gesture with one hand.
"They all died," Bransom said.
"As for going back, they couldn't have done that. Nature
never goes back, never repeats itself. It just progresses in one
direction. Now that I think of it, there used to be lizards here, too, a couple
of feet long. They ran all about. We used to eat one once in a while."
"The world's different nowadays,"
Gilfillan said. "These
mutations, now-------- "
"We've always had mutations,"
Bransom said a little senten-tiously. "Radiation just speeds the mutations
up, or perhaps increases the number of them. Well, let's get back. We've missed
lunch, and I don't want to miss dinner too." He started to walk, and
Gilfillan fell in beside him.
"Didn't
you have a house here when you were watching for Japanese?" Gilfillan
asked after a moment. "Don't you want to see it again?"
"No," Bransom said. "It was
never much to look at, and there will be little of it left by now. It was
south, on the old peak; anyhow, high enough to see something. I haven't any
sentimental attachment to it."
"Then------- "
Gilfillan began and stopped. He looked a bit
embarrassed.
"Then
why did I come back—at great expense?" Bransom asked. "That was going
to be your question, wasn't it? I'll tell you; I should have told you when I
asked you to come along for company. It amused me to be mysterious, and I
carried it too far. I was in the diamond business before I was called back into
the service and sent out here. There was a man named Wolfe in Maiden Lane in
New York who owed me about eighty thousand dollars' worth of stones. He got
into trouble, and the cops were after him. But he'd always been honest with me;
he heard that I'd been sent out here, and he wouldn't send the stones to
anybody else, so he sent them to me."
He
gave Gilfillan an oddly calculating look, for the story wasn't true. He had
stolen the diamonds in Antwerp during the Nazi invasion, got them back to the
States, been called into the Army and sent to the island as a coast watcher. He
had hid the stones, deciding to leave them until he was sure all inquiry about
them had ended. When the island had become radioactive, he had felt doubly
sure of their safety; and now, having found out that the insurance companies
had given them up, he was back to get them again.
Gilfillan
noticed the look but thought little about it; he was rather fetched by the
romantic tale. "Here?" he asked. "He sent them here? Good Lord,
was he crazy?"
"Could
be," Bransom said. "But he'd always been on the level before, and
maybe everybody gets a little crazy the first time his foot slips and the
heat's on."
Gilfillan stared. "And you got
them?"
"Yes," Bransom
said. "Wolfe managed to get them into the hands of an Air Force guy I
knew, and he got them here eventually."
Gilfillan
stopped. "I'll be damned," he said. "And they're still
here?"
"They're
still here. I couldn't keep them around camp. There were two other men here,
fairly honest types, but you
can see-------
I hid them on the edge of a swamp half way
between
here and the peak."
"And didn't have time
to get them back," Gilfillan said.
"That's right."
"Well,
I'll be damned all over again," Gilfillan said. "Did you ever tell
this Wolfe this weird tale?"
"No,"
Bransom said. "Somebody talked too much, later, or something happened.
They put him away, and he's still there," he said and started to walk.
They
didn't speak further until they were back at the schooner, where Erickson gave
them a hand over the rail.
"I
am glad you come back so soon," he said. "You have been here, now we
can go, yah?"
"Already?" Bransom asked. "You don't like it
here?"
"No," Erickson said. "I do not
like t'is fallout, t'is stuff I cannot see. I t'ink of t'ose
Japanese fishermen in t'eir boat. I tell t'e boys, not catch fish here.
No, I do not like it." He made a wide gesture toward the island, behind
which the sun was setting now. "I do not know what is
t'ere. It does not feel good to me any more."
"I
want to go ashore for a couple of hours in the morning," Bransom said.
"After that we can leave. Is that all right with you?"
Erickson
shrugged. "You hire t'e schooner. I stay t'at long, t'cn we go." He
looked toward the island again, where the palms and the old peak looked flat and
stiff against the evening sky as though they were hammered out of black iron.
"What we have done to ourselves," he said and shook his head.
The Fijian sailor Tommy stuck his head out of
the corn-pan ionway hatch. "Chow," he said and ducked down again.
"You don't have to go, John,"
Bransom said as they started across the deck. "It's not your party. Why
don't you wait on board here and be comfortable?"
"I'll
go," Gilfillan said. "I've never been on one of these islands before,
and you may need some help to find the stones."
Immediately
after breakfast they went ashore in the dinghy n;:ain,
Bransom carrying the radiation meter and Gilfillan a double-barreled shotgun
they'd borrowed from Erickson. They walked south on the beach for a mile or so.
The palms at the back of the beach began to give way to brush and pandanus and
mangrove as the island grew lower and swampy, and a quarter of a mile ahead
they could see the beach narrow; the sea came closer in, almost touching the
jungle, and where it did this a stream apparently came out to meet it, and the
beach was choked with vegetation.
"We'd
better cut in here," Bransom said. "We couldn't get through that
stuff up ahead, and there's a low ridge that runs along behind the beach and
roughly parallel to it."
He
changed course and consequently didn't see what Gilfillan, who was still
looking down the beach, saw: a strange kangaroolike creature several feet high
break out of the beach thicket and with several hops disappear into the jungle.
"Alan!"
Gilfillan exclaimed. "Alan! What the devil was that?"
Bransom stopped. "What
was what? What did you see?"
"It looked like a
kangaroo. It hopped like one."
"We're
a long way from kangaroos here," Bransom said. "A bird, maybe."
"No,"
Gilfillan said. "It was too far away to see well, and it vanished too
fast, but it wasn't a bird."
"So. What color was it?"
"It looked gray
against the thicket," Gilfillan said. "I
couldn't be sure. It------------
Damn it, it was a queer-looking
thing."
Bransom
obviously wanted to get on, but controlled his impatience. "Well," he
said reasonably, "if it was too far away to see well, how can you be sure?
Maybe it was a rat, then."
"A rat two or three feet high?" Gilfillan asked. "It seemed that big to
me."
"Keep
a watch when we get into the brush," Bransom said, starting to walk again.
"Maybe you'll see it again."
They
entered the jungle. After the open beach it very quickly became gloomy and
dense and difficult to get through. Pandanus sent down its snaky bunches of
roots in all directions from a foot or two in the air, and the trunks twisted
about; it was wet underfoot and, despite the thick carpet of fallen pandanus
leaves, the mangroves- had managed to grow and writhed about above
their stiltlike roots. They were soon wet to the knees and sweating, for there
was no breeze; they couldn't hear the surf any longer, and the silence soon
became as oppressive as the heat. Gilfillan had never been in such a place
before, and he didn't like it. He felt half suffocated.
Bransom
seemed to know where he was going, and Gilfillan, who had lost his sense of
direction completely, followed him. In places the stagnant water was above
their knees now, and the bottom was slimy muck; as they slipped and cursed and
splashed about, Gilfillan began to worry about what would happen if they both
stepped into a hole where the water was above their heads. He was about to move
up and tap Bransom on the shoulder and ask him about this when Bransom came
upon the low ridge he had mentioned and scrambled onto it and stopped. The
ridge was a foot or so above the water and two or three feet wide. Brush grew
upon it, and it was crisscrossed by creepers and the trunks of leaning trees;
they couldn't see very far ahead and would have to work their way along it
through the cluttering growth, but at least the footing seemed solid. They
stood together for a moment to get their breaths, muddy, sweating and
scratched.
"Sorry
I let you in for this," Bransom said. "I forgot it was this bad. Not
too far to go now."
"What?"
Gilfillan asked. He had heard the words, and in one part of his mind they made
sense to him, but his attention was divided; he thought that he had also
heard, somewhere ahead, in the steamy riot of greenery that was closing them
in and holding off the air and the sky, a grunting, bubbling sigh, a stirring
of water, an indefinable sound that was frightening and inimical.
"Not too far to------------ " Bransom began again and saw
Gilfillan's expression. "What's the trouble?"
"A noise," Gilfillan said.
Bransom stared at him, and they both stood
listening for several minutes, but the silence was profound and unbroken.
"It's
certainly a place to give you the willies," Bransom said. "I don't
think it was anything. You must still be thinking of that thing you saw on the
beach. Let's go and get it over with."
They
started their slow progress again, squirming around and through the vegetation,
but now Gilfillan's mind was oppressed by a feeling of apprehension. He was
sure that he had heard the noise and was on the alert to catch it again. The
shotgun had been a nuisance, heavy and clumsy and always getting tangled in the
brush, but now it was very important to him; he took pains to keep its muzzle
forward and ready for instant use.
This readiness was probably what saved them,
for they hadn't gone more than seventy-five yards when there was a great flurry
of water, and from behind an eight-foot mangrove a little to the right of the
ridge a huge reptilian head reared up into the air like something in an evil
nightmare. The head hung above them, longer than a man, narrow and flat; its
long, half-open jaws were lined with great gleaming teeth; the cold and lidless
eyes fixed on them. As Gilfillan stared shocked and unbelieving at it, thinking
that it couldn't be there, that it came from the dark beginning of the world
before man could have survived, the terrible head slid back for the strike, and
Gilfillan stopped thinking. He thrust the muzzle of the shotgun over Bransom's
shoulder and pulled both triggers.
The
recoil of the loosely held gun knocked him off the ridge and, as he fell, the
heavens seemed to open and inundate him with sound. The shotgun's blast was
followed immediately by a tremendous roaring and thrashing, the world seemed
to be heaving under him, and foul water filled his nose and mouth. He struggled,
half stunned in the slime; he was being thumped and pulled and yanked about and
dimly realized that Bransom was shouting at him.
"Come
on! Come on!" Bransom was shouting, dragging him up the side of the ridge.
"There's another one coming!"
He
staggered to his feet, and then Bransom was desperately shoving him along the
ridge.
Exhausted, battered and in rage, they had
been near collapse when they finally fell down on the sand near the old ruined
wharf. After a long time Bransom sat up. His face was haggard, his eyes had
sunk back into his skull, and his body was laced with lines of dried blood to
which the sand adhered. He stared at the prostrate Gilfillan.
"You saved us
both," he said. "You all right?"
"Ah,"
Gilfillan said, "I'll manage." The cold horror that had been with him
ever since the monstrous beast had appeared above him was leaving him now
beneath the calm and open sky.
"What was it?" Bransom asked.
"Good Lord, even in my
worst nightmares-------- What was it?"
"Some
sort of marine lizard, I think," Gilfillan said. "A
seagoing dinosaur. A branch of the dinosaur family went back to the sea.
A Tylosaurus, maybe. They were twenty-five or thirty
feet long. They probably crawl out where the beach is narrow and go in there to
rest, or breed, or something." A hoarse and unexpected chuckle suddenly
came out of him. "You'll have to bring your information up to date. You
seemed pretty positive that nature never went back to the past."
"It
couldn't go back a million years or more so fast," Bransom said.
"Couldn't it?" Gilfillan asked.
"It doesn't make any sense."
"No,"
Gilfillan said. "But then nobody knows what a certain level of radiation,
held over a long period, a dozen years or more, would do. Those lizards you
mentioned bred every year, maybe oftener, and there were a lot of breedings.
Anyhow, there the things were. Don't ask me to explain it."
There
was a long silence between them and then, as though talking to himself, Bransom said, "I've got to go back. I've got
to."
Gilfillan
sat up painfully and stared at him. "Go back?" he demanded, as though
he hadn't heard correctly. "Go back in there? You can't do it. You don't
know how many more of those things there are, or whether there are others even
worse. Smaller, more maneuverable, more deadly.
Remember the thing I saw on the beach. You might get bogged, lost,
caught by darkness---------- "
He shuddered. "You'd never get
out,"
he said. "You can't count on killing those things with firearms. They've
got several hearts, more than one brain. We were lucky. Lucky
as hell. I doubt I did more than blind it."
"I've
got to do it," Bransom said, as though he hadn't heard any of this.
"I can hire an airplane and bomb it, or rent a gunboat in South America
somewhere and stand off the island and work it over. Or bring some men with
flame throwers here."
"Nonsense,"
Gilfillan said. "You'd have to saturate at least nine square miles, and
you'd probably blow your package of diamonds to the devil. Even the flame
throwers would need a small army and cost you more than you could afford. Besides
that, the island's probably under a mandate. Even if you could get permission,
which I doubt, there would be people, officials, scientists, the
press."
This
last objection brought Bransom to his feet. "No!" he
almost shouted. "No! I can't do that, I can't
have------------------ " He
stared at
Gilfillan, and his voice died away. It was a reaction that caught Gilfillan by
surprise; he would often speculate about it in the future and finally come near
the truth. "It isn't any use," Bransom said after a moment.
"I've spent so much money now that I couldn't afford it."
"I'm sorry, Alan," Gilfillan said.
He didn't know what else to say.
Bransom stood there with his shoulders
slumped, looking
even
more haggard now than he had when he first sat up. "Gone," he said. "All gone. Ah, the hell with it. The
hell with it for good and all."
He
turned and started to walk toward the dilapidated wharf, dragging his feet
through the sand. After watching him for a moment Gilfillan got to his feet and
started after him, somewhat confused and feeling that he'd been kicked and
beaten by a gang of thugs. The reaction to the business in the swamp, the
entire day, had taken hold of him, and he felt cold and a little nauseated. It
would be a dreary trip home, he thought, and he hoped there would be a tide so
they could get away from the lagoon before night.
THE
GREEN HILLS OF EARTH
by
Robert A. Heinlein
This
is the story of Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Space-ways—but not the
official version. You sang his words in school:
ƒ pray for one last landing
On
the globe that gave me birth; Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
Or perhaps you sang in French or German. Or
it might have been Esperanto, while Terra's rainbow banner rippled over your
head.
The
language does not matter—it was certainly an Earth tongue. No one has ever
translated Green Hills into the lisping Venerean speech; no Martian ever
croaked and whispered it in the dry corridors. This is ours. We of Earth have
exported everything from Hollywood crawlies to synthetic ra-dioactives, but
this belongs solely to Terra, and to her sons and daughters wherever they may
be.
We
have all heard stories of Rhysling. You may even be one of the many who have
sought degrees by scholarly evaluations of his published works—Songs of the
Spaceways; The Grand Canal, and other Poems; High and Far; and Up Ship!
Nevertheless,
although you have sung his songs and read his verses, in school and out, your
whole life, it is at least an even-money bet—unless you are a spaceman
yourself—that you have never even heard of most of Rhysling's unpublished
songs, such items as Since the Pusher Met My Cousin; That Red-Headed Venusberg
Gal; Keep Your Pants On, Skipper; or A Space Suit Built for Two. Nor can we
quote them in a family magazine.
Rhysling's
reputation was protected by a careful literary executor and by the happy chance
that he was never interviewed. Songs of the Spaceways appeared the week he
died; when it became a best seller, the publicity stories about him were pieced
together from what people remembered about him plus the highly colored handouts
from his publishers.
The
resulting traditional picture of Rhysling is about as authentic as George
Washington's hatchet or King Alfred's cakes.
In
truth, you would not have wanted him in your parlor; he was not socially
acceptable. He had a permanent case of sun itch, which he scratched
continually, adding nothing to his negligible beauty.
Van
der Voort's portrait of him for the Harriman Centennial edition of his works
shows a figure of high tragedy, a solemn mouth, sightless eyes concealed by
black silk bandage. He was never solemn! His mouth was always open, singing,
grinning, drinking or eating. The bandage was any rag, usually dirty. After he
lost his sight he became less and less neat about his person.
"Noisy"
Rhysling was a jetman, second class, with eyes as good as yours, when he signed
on for a loop trip to the Jovian asteroids in the R. S. Goshawk. The crew
signed releases for everything in those days; a Lloyd's associate would have
laughed in your face at the notion of insuring a spaceman. The Space
Precautionary Act had never been heard of, and the company was responsible only
for wages, if and when. Half the ships that went farther than Luna City never
came back. Spacemen did not care; by preference they signed for shares, and any
one of them would have bet you that he could jump from the two hundredth floor
of Harriman Tower and ground safely, if you offered him three to two and allowed
him rubber heels for the landing.
Jetmen
were the most carefree of the lot and the meanest. Compared with them, the
masters, the radarmen, and the astrogators (there were no supers or stewards in
those days) were gentle vegetarians. Jetmen knew too much. The others trusted
the skill of the captain to get them down safely; jetmen knew that skill was
useless against the blind and fitful devils chained inside their rocket motors.
The
Goshawk was the first of Harriman's ships to be converted from chemical fuel
to atomic power piles—or rather the first that did not blow up. Rhysling knew
her well; she was an old tub that had plied the Luna City run, Supra-New York
space station to Leyport and back, before she was converted for deep space. He
had worked the Luna run in her and had been along on the first deep-space trip,
to Drywater, on Mars—and back, to everyone's surprise.
He
should have made chief engineer by the time he signed for the Jovian loop trip,
but, after the Drywater pioneer trip, he had been fired, blacklisted, and
grounded at Luna City for having spent his time writing a chorus and several
verses at a time when he should have been watching his gauges. The song was the
infamous The Skipper is a Father to His Crew, with thé uproariously unprintable
final couplet.
The
black list did not bother him. He won an accordion from a Chinese barkeep in
Luna City by cheating at one-thumb and thereafter kept going by singing to
miners for drinks and tips until the rapid attrition in spacemen caused the
company agent there to give him another chance. He kept his nose clean on the
Luna run for a year or two, got back into deep space, helped give Venusberg its
original ripe reputation, strolled the banks of the Grand Canal when a second
colony was established at the ancient Martian capital, and froze his toes and
ears on the second trip to Titan.
Things
moved fast in those days. Once the power-pile drive was accepted, the number of
ships that put out from the Luna-Terra system was limited only by the
availability of crews. Jetmen were scarce; the shielding was cut to a minimum
to save weight, and few married men cared to risk possible exposure to
radioactivity. Rhysling did not want to be a father, so jobs were always open
to him during the golden days of the claiming boom. He crossed and recrossed
the system, singing the doggerel that boiled up in his head and chording it out
on his accordion.
The
master of the Goshawk knew him; Captain Hicks had been astrogator on Rhysling's
first trip in her. "Welcome home, Noisy," Hicks had greeted him.
"Are you sober, or shall I sign the book for you?"
"You
can't get drunk on the bugjuice they sell here, skipper." He signed and
went below, lugging his accordion.
Ten
minutes later he was back. "Captain," he stated darkly, "that
Number Two jet ain't fit. The cadmium dampers are warped."
"Why tell me? Tell the chief."
"I did, but he says they will do. He's
wrong."
The
captain gestured at the book. "Scratch out your name and scram. We raise
ship in thirty minutes."
Rhysling looked at him, shrugged, and went
below again.
It is a long climb to the Jovian planetoids;
a Hawk-class clunker had to blast for three watches before going into free
(light. Rhysling had the second watch. Damping was done by hand then, with a
multiplying vernier and a danger gauge. When the gauge showed red, he tried to
correct it—no luck.
Jetmen
don't wait; that's why they are jetmen. He slapped the emergency discover and
fished at the hot stuff with the tongs. The lights went out, he went right
ahead. A jetman has to know his power room the way your tongue knows the inside
of your mouth.
He
sneaked a quick look over the top of the lead baffle when the lights went out.
The blue radioactive glow did not help him any; he jerked his head back and
went on fishing by touch.
When
he was done he called over the tube, "Number Two jet out. And for gosh
sake get me some light down here!"
There
was light—the emergency circuit—but not for him. The blue radioactive glow was
the last thing his optic nerve ever responded to.
As
Time and Space come bending back to shape this star-specked scene,
The tranquil tears of tragic joy still spread their silver sheen;
Along the Grand Canal still soar the fragile
Towers of Truth;
Their fairy grace defends this place of Beauty, calm and couth.
Bone-tired the race that raised the Towers,
forgotten are their lores;
Long gone the gods who shed the tears that
lap these crystal shores.
Slow beats the time-worn
heart of Mars beneath this icy
sky;
The thin air whispers
voicelessly that all who live must
die-Yet
still the lacy Spires of Truth sing
Beauty's madrigal And she herself will ever dwell along the Grand Canal!1
On
the swing back they set Rhysling down on Mars at Drywater; the boys passed the
hat and the skipper kicked in a half month's pay. That was all—finis—just
another space bum who had not had the good fortune to finish it off when his
luck ran out. He holed up with the prospectors and archaeologists at How-Far? for a month or so, and could probably have stayed forever
in exchange for his songs and his accordion playing. But spacemen die if they
stay in one place; he hooked a crawler over to Drywater again and thence to
Marsopolis.
The
capital was well into its boom; the processing plants lined the Grand Canal on
both sides and roiled the ancient waters with the filth of the runoff. This was
before the Tri-
1 From The Grand Canal, by permission of Lux
Transcriptions, Ltd., London and Luna City.
Planet
Treaty forbade disturbing cultural relics for commerce; half the slender,
fairy-like towers had been torn down, and others were disfigured to adapt them
as pressurized buildings for earthmen.
Now
Rhysling had never seen any of these changes and no one described them to him;
when he "saw" Marsopolis again, he visualized it as it had been
before it was rationalized for trade. His memory was good. He stood on the
riparian esplanade where the ancient great of Mars had taken their ease, and
saw its beauty spreading out before his blinded eyes—ice-blue plain of water
unmoved by tide, untouched by breeze, and reflecting serenely the sharp, bright
stars of the Martian sky, and beyond the water the lacy buttresses and flying
towers of an architecture too delicate for our rumbling, heavy planet. The
result was Grand Canal.
The
subtle change in his orientation which enabled him to see beauty at Marsopolis
when beauty was not, now began to affect his whole
life. All women became beautiful to him. He knew them by their voices and
fitted their appearances to the sounds. It is a mean spirit indeed who will
speak to a blind man other than in gentle friendliness; scolds who had given
their husbands no peace sweetened their voices to Rhysling.
It
populated his world with beautiful women and gracious men. Dark Star Passing,
Berenice's Hair, Death Song of a Wood's Colt, and his other love songs of the
wanderers, the womenless men of space, were the direct result of the fact that
his conceptions were unsullied by tawdry truths. It mellowed his approach,
changed his doggerel to verse, and sometimes even to poetry.
He
had plenty of time to think now, time to get all the lovely words just so, and
to worry a verse until it sang true in his head. The monotonous beat of Jet
Song—
When
the field is clear, the reports all seen,
When
the lock sighs shut, when the lights wink green,
When
the check-offs done, when it's time to pray,
When the captain nods, when she blasts away-------------
Hear
the jets!
Hear
them snarl at your back When you're stretched on the rack; Feel your ribs clamp
your chest, Feel your neck grind its rest. Feel the pain in your ship, Feel her
strain in their grip. Feel her rise! Feel her drive! Straining steel, come
alive, On her iets!
—came to him not while he himself was a jetman, but later while he was
hitchhiking from Mars to Venus and sitting out a watch with an old shipmate.
At
Venusberg he sang his new songs and some of the old, in the bars. Someone would
start a hat around for him; it would come back with a minstrel's usual take
doubled or tripled in recognition of the gallant spirit behind the bandaged
eyes.
It
was an easy life. Any space port was his home and any ship his private
carriage. No skipper cared to refuse to lift the extra mass of blind Rhysling
and his squeeze box; he shuttled from Venusberg to Leyport to Drywater to New
Shanghai, or back again, as the whim took him.
He
never went closer to Earth than Supra-New York Space Station. Even when signing
the contract for Songs of the Spaceways he made his mark in a cabin-class liner
somewhere between Luna City and Ganymede. Horowitz, the original publisher, was
aboard for a second honeymoon and heard Rhysling sing at a ship's party.
Horowitz knew a good thing for the publishing trade when he heard it; the
entire contents of Songs were sung directly into the tape in the communications
room of that ship before he let Rhysling out of his sight. The next three
volumes were squeezed out of Rhysling at Venusberg, where Horowitz had sent an
agent to keep him liquored up until he had sung all he could remember.
Up
Ship! is not certainly authentic Rhysling throughout.
Much of it is Rhysling's, no doubt, and Jet Song is unquestionably his, but
most of the verses were collected after his death, from people who had known
him during his wanderings.
The
Green Hills of Earth grew through twenty years. The earliest form we know about
was composed before Rhysling was blinded, during a drinking bout with some of
the indentured men on Venus. The verses were concerned mostly with the things
the labor clients intended to do back on Earth if and when they ever managed to
pay their bounties and thereby be allowed to go home. Some of the stanzas were
vulgar, some were not, but the chorus was recognizably that of Green Hills.
We know exactly where the final form of Green
Hills came from, and when.
There
was a ship in at Venus Ellis Isle which was scheduled for the direct jump from
there to Great Lakes, Illinois. She was the old Falcon, youngest of the Hawk
class and the first ship to apply the Harriman Trust's new policy of extra-fare
express service between Earth cities and any colony with scheduled stops.
Rhysling
decided to ride her back to Earth. Perhaps his own song had got under his
skin—or perhaps he just hankered to see his native Ozarks one more time.
The
company no longer permitted deadheads. Rhysling knew this, but it never
occurred to him that the ruling might apply to him. He was getting old, for a
spaceman, and just a little matter-of-fact about his privileges. Not senile—he
simply knew that he was one of the landmarks in space, along with Halley's
Comet, the Rings, and Brewster's Ridge. He walked in the crew's port, went
below, and made himself at home in the first empty acceleration couch.
The
captain found him there while making a last-minute tour of his ship. "What
are you doing here?" he demanded.
"Dragging it back to Earth, captain." Rhysling needed no eyes to see a skipper's
four stripes.
"You
can't drag in this ship: you know the rules. Shake a leg and get out of here.
We raise ship at once." The captain was young; he had come up after
Rhysling's active time, but Rhysling knew the type—five years at Harriman Hall
with only cadet practice trips instead of solid, deep-space experience. The two
men did not touch in background or spirit; space was changing.
"Now,
captain, you wouldn't begrudge an old man a trip home."
The
officer hesitated—several of the crew had stopped to listen. "I can't do
it. 'Space Precautionary Act, Clause Six: No one shall
enter space save as a licensed member of a crew of a chartered vessel, or as a
paying passenger of such a vessel under such regulations as may be issued
pursuant to this act.' Up you get and out you go."
Rhysling lolled back, his hands under his
head. "If I've got to go, I'm damned if I'll walk. Carry me."
The
captain bit his lip and said, "Master-at-arms! Have this man
removed."
The
ship's policeman fixed his eyes on the overhead struts. "Can't
rightly do it, captain. I've sprained my shoulder." The other crew
members, present a moment before, had faded into the bulkhead paint.
"Well, get a working party 1"
"Aye
aye, sir." He,
too, went away.
Rhysling
spoke again. "Now look, skipper—let's not have any hard feelings about
this. You've got an out to carry me if you want to—the 'distressed-spaceman'
clause."
"Distressed spaceman, my eye! You're no distressed spaceman; you're a
space lawyer. I know who you are; you've been bumming around the system for
fifteen years. Well, you won't do it in my ship. That clause was intended to
succor men who had missed their ships, not to let a man drag free all over
space."
"Well,
now, captain, can you properly say I haven't missed my ship? I've never been
back home since my last trip as a signed-on crew member. The law says I can
have a trip back."
"But that was years ago. You've used up
your chance."
"Have
I, now? The clause doesn't say a word about how soon a man has to take his trip
back; it just says he's got it coming to him. Go look it up, skipper. If I'm
wrong, I'll not only walk out on my two legs, I'll beg your humble pardon in
front of your crew. Go on—look it up. Be a sport."
Rhysling
could feel the man's glare, but he turned and stomped out of the compartment.
Rhysling knew that he had used his blindness to place the captain in an
impossible position, but this did not embarrass Rhysling—he rather enjoyed it.
Ten minutes later the siren sounded, he heard
the orders on the bull horn for Up-Stations. When the soft sighing of the locks
and the slight pressure change in his ears let him know that take-off was
imminent, he got up and shuffled down to the power room, as he wanted to be
near the jets when they blasted off. He needed no one to guide him in any ship
of the Hawk class.
Trouble
started during the first watch. Rhysling had been lounging in the inspector's
chair, fiddling with the keys of his accordion and trying out a new version of
Green Hills.
Let me breathe unrationed air again Where there's no lack nor dearth
And something, something, something Earth. It
would not come out right. He tried again.
Let the sweet fresh breezes heal me
As they rove around the girth Of our lovely mother planet,
Of the cool, green hills of
Earth.
That was better, he thought. "How do you
like that, Archie?" he asked over the muted roar.
"Pretty good. Give out with the whole thing." Archie Mac-dougal, chief jetman,
was an old friend, both spaceside and in bars; he had been an apprentice under
Rhysling many years and millions of miles back.
Rhysling obliged, then
said, "You youngsters have got it soft. Everything
automatic. When I was twisting her tail you had to stay awake."
"You still have to stay awake."
They
fell to talking shop, and Macdougal showed him the new direct-réponse damping rig which had replaced the manual
vernier control which Rhysling had used. Rhysling felt out the controls and
asked questions until he was familiar with the new installation. It was his
conceit that he was still a jetman and that his present occupation as a
troubadour was simply an expedient during one of the fusses with the company
that any man could get into.
"I
see you still have the old hand-damping plates installed," he remarked,
his agile fingers flitting over the equipment.
"All except the
links. I unshipped them because they obscure the dials."
"You ought to have
them shipped. You might need them."
"Oh, I don't know. I think--------- "
Rhysling
never did find out what Macdougal thought, for it was at that moment the
trouble tore loose. Macdougal caught it square, a blast of radioactivity that
burned him down where he stood.
Rhysling
sensed what had happened. Automatic reflexes of old habit came out. He slapped the discover and rang the alarm to the control room
simultaneously. Then he remembered the unshipped links. He had to grope until
he found them, while trying -to keep as low as he could to get maximum benefit
from the baffles. Nothing but the links bothered him as to location. The place
was as light to him as any place could be; he knew every spot, every control, the way he knew the keys of his accordion.
"Power
room!
Power room! What's the alarm?"
"Stay
out!" Rhysling shouted. "The place is 'hot.'" He could feel it
on his face and in his bones, like desert sunshine.
The links he got into place, after cursing
someone, anyone, for having failed to rack the wrench he needed. Then he
commenced trying to reduce the trouble by hand. It was a long job and ticklish.
Presently he decided that the jet would have to be spilled, pile and all.
First he reported. "Control!"
"Control aye
aye!"
"Spilling
Jet Three—emergency."
"Is this
Macdougal?"
"Macdougal
is dead. This is Rhysling, on watch. Stand by lo record."
There
was no answer; dumfounded the skipper may have been, but he could not interfere
in a power-room emergency.
He
had the ship to consider, and the passengers and crew. The doors had to stay
closed.
The
captain must have been still more surprised at what Rhysling sent for record.
It was:
We rot in the molds of Venus, We retch at her tainted breath.
Foul are her flooded jungles, Crawling with unclean death.
Rhysling went on cataloguing the Solar System
as he worked, "harsh bright soil of Luna," "Saturn's rainbow
rings," "the frozen night of Titan," all the while opening and
spilling the jet and fishing it clean. He finished with an alternate chorus:
We've
tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth: Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of
Earth.
Then,
almost absent-mindedly, he remembered to tack on his revised first verse:
The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade. All hands! Stand by! Free falling!
And the lights below us fade. Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet, Up leaps the race of
Earthmen
Out, far, and onward yet—
The ship was safe now and ready to limp home,
shy one jet. As for himself, Rhysling was not so sure. That "sunburn"
seemed pretty sharp, he thought. He was unable to see the bright, rosy fog in
which he worked, but he knew it was there. He went on with the business of
flushing the air out through the outer valve, repeating it several times to
permit the level of radioaction to drop to something a man might stand under
suitable armor. While he did this, he sent one more chorus, the last bit of
authentic Rhysling that ever could be:
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us
birth; Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
DOOMSDAY DEFERRED
by
Will F. Jenkins
If I
were sensible, I'd say that somebody else told me this story, and then cast
doubts on his veracity. But I saw it all. I was part of it. I have an invoice
of a shipment I made from Brazil, with a notation on it, "José Ribiera's stuff." The shipment went
through. The invoice, I noticed only today, has a mashed soldado ant sticking to the page. There is nothing
unusual about it as a specimen. On the face of things, every element is
irritatingly commonplace. But if I were sensible, I wouldn't tell it this way.
It began in Milhao, where José Ribiera came to me. Mil-hao is in Brazil, but from it the Andes can be
seen against the sky at sunset. It is a town the jungle unfortunately did not
finish burying when the rubber boom collapsed. It is so far up the Amazon basin
that its principal contacts with the outer world are smugglers and fugitives
from Peruvian justice who come across the mountains, and nobody at all goes
there except for his sins. I don't know what took José Ribiera there. I went because one of the three known specimens of Morpho andiensis was captured nearby by Bohler in 1911, and a
lunatic millionaire in Chicago was willing to pay for a try at a fourth for his
collection.
I
got there after a river steamer refused to go any farther, and after four days
more in a canoe with paddlers who had lived on or near river water all their
lives without once taking a bath in it. When I got to Milhao, I wished myself
back in the canoe. It's that sort of place.
But
that's where José
Ribiera was, and in
back-country Brazil there is a remarkable superstition that os Senhores Norteamericanos are honest men. I do not explain it. I simply
record it. And just as I was getting settled in a particularly noisome inn, José knocked on my door and came in. He was a small brown man, and he was
scared all the way down deep inside. He tried to hide that. The thing I noticed
first was that he was clean. He was barefoot, but his tattered duck garments
were immaculate, and the rest of him had been
washed,
and recently. In a town like Milhao, that was startling.
"Senhor,"
said José in a sort of apologetic desperation, "you are a Senhor Norteamericano. I—I beg your aid."
I
grunted. Being an American is embarrassing, sometimes and in some places. José closed the door behind him and fumbled inside his garments. His eyes
anxious, he pulled out a small cloth bundle. He opened it with shaking fingers.
And I blinked. The lamplight glittered and glinted on the most amazing mass of
tiny gold nuggets I'd ever seen. I hadn't a doubt it was gold, but even at
first glance I wondered how on earth it had been gathered. There was no flour
gold at all— that fine powder which is the largest part of any placer yield.
Most of it was gravelly particles of pinhead size. There was no nugget larger
than a half pea. There must have been five pounds of it altogether, though, and
it was a rather remarkable spectacle.
"Senhor,"
said José tensely, "I beg that you will help me turn this into cattle! It is
a matter of life or death."
I
hardened my expression. Of course, in thick jungle like that around Milhao, a
cow or a bull would be as much out of place as an Eskimo, but that wasn't the
point. I had business of my own in Milhao. If I started gold buying or cattle
dealing out of amiability, my own affairs would suffer. So I said in polite
regret, "I am not a businessman, senhor, do
not deal in gold or cattle either. To buy cattle, you should go down to Sâo Pedro"—that was four days' paddle downstream, or considering the
current perhaps three—"and take this gold to a banker. He will give you
money for it if you can prove that it is yours. You can then buy cattle if you
wish."
José looked at me desperately. Certainly half the
population of Milhao—and positively the Peruvian-refugee half— would have cut
his throat for a fraction of his hoard. He almost panted: "But, senhor! This would be enough to buy cattle in Sâo Pedro and send them here, would it not?"
I
agreed that at a guess it should buy all the cattle in Sâo Pedro, twice over, and hire the town's wheezy steam launch to tow them
upriver besides. José looked sick with relief. But, I said, one
should buy his livestock himself, so he ought to go to Sâo Pedro in person. And I could not see what good cattle would be in the
jungle anyhow.
"Yet—it
would buy cattle!" said José,
gulping. "That is what
I told—my friends. But I cannot go farther than Milhao, senhor. I cannot go to Sâo Pedro. Yet I must—I need to buy cattle for—my friends! It is life and
death! How can I do this, senhor?"
Naturally, I considered
that he exaggerated the emergency.
"I
am not a businessman," I repeated. "I would not be able to help
you." Then at the terrified look in his eyes I explained, "I am here
after butterflies."
He
couldn't understand that. He began to stammer, pleading. So I explained.
"There
is a rich man," I said wryly, "who wishes to possess a certain
butterfly. I have pictures of it. I am sent to find it. I can pay one thousand
milreis for one butterfly of a certain sort. But I have no authority to do
other business, such as the purchase of gold or cattle."
José looked extraordinarily despairing. He looked numbed by the loss of hope. So, merely
to say or do something, I showed him a color photograph of the specimen of Morpho andiensis which is in the Goriot
collection in Paris. Bug collectors were in despair about it during the war.
They were sure the Nazis would manage to seize it. Then José's eyes lighted
hopefully.
"Senhor!"
he said urgently.
"Perhaps my—friends can find you such a butterfly! Will you pay for such a
butterfly in cattle sent here from Sao Pedro, senhor?"
I said rather blankly that I would, but---------------- Then
I was
talking to
myself. José had bolted out of my room, leaving maybe five pounds of gravelly
gold nuggets in my hands. That was not usual.
I
went after him, but he'd disappeared. So I hid his small fortune in the bottom
of my collection kit. A few drops of formaldehyde, spilled before closing up a
kit of collection bottles and insects, is very effective in chasing away
pilferers. I make use of it regularly.
Next
morning I asked about José. My queries were greeted with shrugs. He was a very
low person. He did not live in Milhao, but had a clearing, a homestead, some
miles upstream, where he lived with his wife. They had one child. He was
suspected of much evil. He had bought pigs, and taken them to his clearing and
behold he had no pigs there! His wife was very pretty, and a Peruvian had gone
swaggering to pay court to her, and he had never come back. It is notable, as I
think of it, that up to this time no ant of any sort has come into my story. Butterflies, but no ants. Especially not soldados—army ants. It is queer.
I
learned nothing useful about José, but I had come to Milhao on business, so I
stated it publicly. I wished a certain butterfly, I said. I would pay one
thousand milreis for a perfect specimen. I would show a picture of what I
wanted to any interested person, and I would show how to make a butterfly net
and how to use it, and how to handle butterflies without injuring them. But I
wanted only one kind, and it must not be squashed.
The
inhabitants of Milhao became happily convinced that I was insane, and that it
might be profitable insanity for them. Each person leaped to the nearest
butterfly and blandly brought it to me. I spent a whole day explaining to
bright-eyed people that matching the picture of Morpho andiensis required more than that the number of legs
and wings should be the same. But, I repeated, I would pay one thousand milreis
for a butterfly exactly like the picture. I had plenty of margin
for profit and loss, at that. The last time a Morpho andiensis was sold, it brought $25,000 at auction. I'd
a lot rather have the money, myself.
José Ribiera came back. His
expression was tense beyond belief. He plucked at my arm and said, "Senhor," and I grabbed him
and dragged him to my inn.
I hauled out his treasure. "Here!"
I said angrily. "This is not mine! Take it!"
He
paid no attention. He trembled. "Senhor," he said, and swallowed. "My friends—my friends do not think they
can
catch the butterfly you seek. But if you will tell
them------------- " He
wrinkled his
brows. "Senhor, before a butterfly is born, is it a little
soft nut with a worm in it?"
That
could pass for a description of a cocoon. José's friends—he was said not to
have any—were close observers. I said so. José seemed to grasp at hope as at a
straw.
"My-—friends
will find you the nut which produces the butterfly," he said urgently,
"if you tell them which kind it is and what it
looks like."
I
blinked. Just three specimens of Morpho andiensis had
ever been captured, so far as was known. All were adult insects. Of course
nobody knew what the cocoon was like. For that matter, any naturalist can name
a hundred species— and in the Amazon valley alone—of which only the adult forms
have been named. But who would hunt for cocoons in jungle like that outside of
Milhao?
"My
friend," I said skeptically, "there are thousands of different such
things. I will buy five of each different kind you can discover, and I will pay
one milreis apiece. But only five of each kind, remember!"
I
didn't think he'd even try, of course. I meant to insist that he take back his
gold nuggets. But again he was gone before I could stop him. I had an
uncomfortable impression that when I made my offer, his face lighted as if he'd
been given a reprieve from a death sentence. In the light of later events, I
think he had.
I
angrily made up my mind to take his gold back to him next day. It was a
responsibility. Besides, one gets interested in a man—especially of the
half-breed class—who can un-feignedly ignore five pounds of gold. I arranged to
be paddled up to his clearing next morning.
It
was on the river, of course. There are no footpaths in Amazon-basin jungle. The
river flowing past Milhao is a broad deep stream perhaps two hundred yards
wide. Its width seems less because of the jungle walls on either side. And the
jungle is daunting. It is trees and vines and lianas as seen from the stream,
but it is more than that. Smells come out, and you can't identify them. Sounds
come out, and you can't interpret them. You cut your way into its mass, and you
see nothing. You come out, and you have learned nothing. You cannot affect it.
It ignores you. It made me feel insignificant.
My
paddlers would have taken me right on past Jose's clearing without seeing it,
if he hadn't been on the river bank. He shouted. He'd been fishing, and now
that I think, there were no fish near him, but there were some picked-clean
fish skeletons. And I think the ground was very dark about him when we first
saw him, and quite normal when we approached. I know he was sweating, but he
looked terribly hopeful at the sight of me.
I left my two paddlers to smoke and slumber
in the canoe. I followed Jose into the jungle. It was like walking in a tunnel
of lucent green light. Everywhere there were tree trunks and vines and leaves,
but green light overlay everything. I saw a purple butterfly with crimson wing
tips, floating abstractedly in the jungle as if in an undersea grotto.
Then
the path widened, and there was Jose's dwelling. It was a perfect proof that
man does not need civilization to live in comfort. Save for cotton garments, an
iron pot and a machete, there was literally nothing in the clearing or the
house which was not of and from the jungle, to be replaced merely by stretching
out one's hand. To a man who lives like this, gold has no value. While he keeps
his wants at this level, he can have no temptations. My thoughts at the moment
were horror. The two of them seemed to live with terror. It was too odd to be
quite believable. But their child—a brown-skinned three-year-old quite innocent
of clothing—was unaffected. He stared at me, wide-eyed.
"Senhor,"
said José in a trembling voice, "here are the things you desire, the small
nuts with worms in them."
His
wife had woven a basket of flat green strands. He put it before me. And I
looked into it tolerantly, expecting nothing. But I saw the sort of thing that
simply does not happen. I saw a half bushel of cocoons!
José
had acquired them somehow in
less than twenty-four
hours. Some were miniature capsules of silk which would
yield little butterflies of wing spread no greater than a mos-
quito's. Some were sturdy fat cocoons of stout brown silk.
There were cocoons which cunningly mimicked the look of
bird droppings, and cocoons cleverly concealed in twisted
leaves. Some were green—I swear it—and would pass for
buds upon some unnamed vine. And---------
It
was simply, starkly impossible. I was stupefied. The Amazon basin has been
collected, after a fashion, but the pupa and cocoon of any reasonably rare
species is at least twenty times more rare than the
adult insect. And these cocoons were fresh! They were alive! I could not
believe it, but I could not doubt it. My hands shook as I turned them over.
I
said, "This is excellent, José!
I will pay for all of them
at the rate agreed on—one milreis each. I will send them to Sâo Pedro today, and their price will be spent for cattle and the bringing
of the cattle here. I promise it!"
José did not relax. I saw him wipe sweat off his face.
"I—beg you to command
haste, Senhor," he said thinly.
I
almost did not hear. I carried that basket of cocoons back to the riverbank. I
practically crooned over it all the way back to Milhao. I forgot altogether
about returning the gold pellets. And I began to work frenziedly at the inn.
I
made sure, of course, that the men who would cart the parcel would know that it
contained only valueless objects like cocoons. Then I slipped in the parcel of José's gold. I wrote a letter to the one man in Sao Pedro who, if God was good,
might have sense enough to attend to the affair for me. And I was almost
idiotically elated.
While
I was making out the invoice that would carry my shipment by refrigerated air
express from the nearest airport it could be got to, a large ant walked across
my paper. One takes insects very casually in back-country Brazil. I mashed him,
without noticing what he was. I went blissfully to start the parcel off. I had
a shipment that would make history
among bug
collectors. It was something that simply could not be done!
The fact of the impossibility hit me after
the canoe with
the parcel started downstream. How the devil those cocoons
had been gathered--------
The
problem loomed larger as I thought. In less than one day, José had collected a half bushel of cocoons, of at least one hundred
different species of moths and butterflies. It could not be done! The
information to make it possible did not exist! Yet it had happened. How?
The
question would not down. I had to find out. I bought a pig for a present and
had myself ferried up to the clearing again. My paddlers pulled me upstream
with languid strokes. The pig made irritated noises in the bottom of the canoe.
Now I am sorry about that pig. I would apologize to its ghost if opportunity
offered. But I didn't know.
I
landed on the narrow beach and shouted. Presently José came through the tunnel of foliage that led to his house. He thanked me,
dry-throated, for the pig. I told him I had ordered cattle sent up from Sâo Pedro. I told him humorously that every ounce of meat on the hoof the
town contained would soon be on the way behind a wheezing steam launch. José swallowed and nodded numbly. He still looked like someone who
contemplated pure horror.
We
got the pig to the house. José's wife sat and rocked her child, her eyes sick
with fear. I probably should have felt embarrassed in the presence of such
tragedy, even if I could not guess at its cause. But instead, I thought about
the questions I wanted to ask. José
sat down dully beside me.
I
was oblivious of the atmosphere of doom. I said blandly, "Your friends are
capable naturalists, José. I am much pleased. Many of the 'little nuts'
they gathered are quite new to me. I would like to meet such students of the
ways of nature."
José's teeth clicked. His wife caught her breath. She looked at me with an oddly
despairing irony. It puzzled me. I looked at José, sharply. And then the hair stood up on my head. My heart tried to stop.
Because a large ant walked on José's
shoulder, and I saw what kind
of ant it was.
"My
God!" I
said shrilly. "Soldados! Army ants!"
I
acted through pure instinct. I snatched up the baby from its mother's arms and
raced for the river. One does not think at such times. The soldado ant, the army ant, the driver ant, is the
absolute and undisputed monarch of all jungles everywhere. He travels by
millions of millions, and nothing can stand aeainst him. He is rave.nrno
fernr.itv and inmrViaiistihla number. Even man abandons his settlements when the army ant marches in,
and returns only after he has left—to find every bit of flesh devoured to the
last morsel, from the earwigs in the thatch to a horse that may have been
tethered too firmly to break away. The army ant on the march can and does kill
anything alive, by tearing the flesh from it in tiny bites, regardless of
defense. So—I grabbed the child and ran.
José Ribiera screamed at me, 'Wo.' Senhor! No!"
He
sat still and he screamed. I'd never heard such undiluted horror in any man's
voice.
I
stopped. I don't know why. I was stunned to see José and his wife sitting frozen where I'd left them. I was more stunned, I
think, to see the tiny clearing and the house unchanged. The army ant moves
usually on a solid front. The ground is covered with a glistening, shifting
horde. The air is filled with tiny clickings of limbs and mandibles. Ants swarm
up every tree and shrub. Caterpillars, worms, bird nestlings, snakes, monkeys
unable to flee—anything living becomes buried under a mass of ferociously
rending small forms which tear off the living flesh in shreds until only white
bones are left.
But José
sat still, his throat
working convulsively. I had seen soldados on
him. But there were no soldados.
After a moment José got to his feet and came stumbling toward me. He looked like a dead man.
He could not speak.
"But
look!" I cried. My voice was high-pitched. "I saw soldado ants! I saw them!"
José gulped by pure effort of will. I put down the child. He ran back to his
mother.
"S-si. Yes,"
said José, as if his lips were very stiff and his throat
without moisture. "But they are—special soldados. They are—pets. Yes. They are tame. They are
my—friends. They—do tricks, senhor. I
will show you!"
He
held out his hand and made sucking noises with his mouth. What followed is not
to be believed. An ant—a large ant, an inch or more long—walked calmly out of
his sleeve and onto his outstretched hand. It perched there passively while the
hand quivered like an aspen leaf.
"But
yes!" said José hysterically. "He does tricks, senhor! Observe! He will stand on his head!"
Now,
this I saw, but I do not believe it. The ant did something so that it seemed to
stand on its head. Then it turned and crawled tranquilly over his hand and
wrist and up his sleeve again.
There was silence, or as much silence as the
jungle ever holds. My own throat went dry. And what I have said is insanity,
but this is much worse. I felt Something waiting to
see what I would do. It was, unquestionably, the most horrible sensation I had
ever felt. I do not know how to describe it. What I felt was—not a personality,
but a mind. I had a ghastly feeling that Something was
looking at me from thousands of pairs of eyes, that it was all around me.
I
shared, for an instant, what that Something saw and
thought. I was surrounded by a mind which waited to see what I would do. It
would act upon my action. But it was not a sophisticated mind. It was
murderous, but innocent. It was merciless, but naïve.
That
is what I felt. The feeling doubtless has a natural explanation which reduces
it to nonsense, but at the moment I believed it. I acted on my belief. I am
glad I did.
"Ah,
I see!" I said in apparent amazement. "That is clever, José! It is remarkable to train an ant! I was absurd to be alarmed. But—your
cattle will be on the way, José! They should get here very soon! There will be
many of them!"
Then I felt that the mind
would let me go. And I went.
My
canoe was a quarter mile downstream when one of the paddlers lifted his blade
from the water and held it there, listening. The other stopped and listened
too. There was a noise in the jungle. It was mercifully far away, but it
sounded like a pig. I have heard the squealing of pigs at slaughtering time,
when instinct tells them of the deadly intent of men and they try punily to
fight. This was not that sort of noise. It was worse; much worse.
I made a hopeless spectacle of myself in the
canoe. Now, of course, I can see that, from this time on, my actions were not
those of a reasoning human being. I did not think with proper scientific
skepticism. It suddenly seemed to me that Norton's theory of mass consciousness
among social insects was very plausible. Bees, says Norton, are not only units
in an organization. They are units of an organism. The hive or the swarm is a
creature—one creature—says Norton. Each insect is a body cell only, just as the
corpuscles in our blood stream are individuals and yet only parts of us. We can
destroy a part of our body if the welfare of the whole organism requires it,
though we destroy many cells. The swarm or the hive can sacrifice its members
for the hive's defense. Each bee is a mobile body cell. Its consciousness is a
part of the whole intelligence, which is that of the group. The group is the
actual creature. And ants, says Norton, show the fact more clearly still; the
ability of the creature which is an ant colony to sacrifice a part of itself
for the whole. ... He gives
illustrations of what he means. His book is not accepted by naturalists generally,
but there in the canoe, going down-river from Jose's clearing, I believed it
utterly.
I
believed that an army-ant army was as much a single creature as a sponge. I
believed that the Something in Jose's jungle
clearing—its body cells were soldado ants—had
discovered that other creatures perceived and thought as it did. Nothing more
was needed to explain everything. An army-ant creature, without physical
linkages, could know what its own members saw and knew and felt. It should need
only to open its mind to perceive what other creatures saw and knew and felt.
The
frightening thing was that when it could interpret such unantish sensations, it
could find its prey with a terrible infallibility. It could flow through the
jungle in a streaming, crawling tide of billions of tiny stridulating bodies.
It could know the whereabouts and thoughts of every living thing around it.
Nothing could avoid it, as nothing could withstand it. And if it came upon a
man, it could know his thoughts too. It could perceive in his mind vast
horizons beyond its former ken. It could know of food—animal food—in quantities
never before imagined. It could, intelligently, try to arrange to secure that
food.
It had.
But
if so much was true, there was something else it could do. The thought made the
blood seem to cake in my veins. I began frantically to thrust away the idea.
The Something in Jose's clearing hadn't discovered it yet. But pure terror of
the discovery had me drenched in sweat when I got back to Milhao.
TEST-TUBE TERROR
by
Robert Standish
The
brief description of myself given here has little or
nothing to do with my story. I give it in order to create a "climate of
credibility." My name is Mark Harrowby. I am a bachelor, aged thirty-six, a patent lawyer by profession. You will find my name listed
in the London telephone directory at 149, Woolpack Street, Westminster. Among
my various clients are numbered several immensely rich, internationally known
corporations, the kind which don't entrust their secrets to blabbermouths. In
short, I am a responsible citizen. Just remember that, if, while reading this
story, your credulity becomes strained.
Three
days after the Russians launched Sputnik No. 1, I received a letter bearing a
Geneva postmark. It was written by Giselle Duclos, who, I may say, is
responsible for the fact that I am sfill a bachelor. Giselle is twenty-seven
years of age, Swiss by nationality and a willowy, blue-eyed blonde by Nature's
favor. I fell in love with her ten years ago. Her brother, Pierre, is my oldest
and closest friend, two years younger than I am. Madame Duclos, their mother,
widow of a minor Swiss civil servant, ran a boardinghouse in Geneva for students.
I spent some months there in 1939, which is how my life became entangled with
theirs.
Every
summer since 1946, Giselle, Pierre and I have gone on long walking tours, in
the Swiss and French Alps, in the Dolomites, the Pyrenees and, once, in the
Snowdon region of North Wales. We like walking and, although not mountaineers
in the accepted sense of the word, we like best to walk among mountains.
Briefly,
Giselle's refusal to marry me is due to her belief that Pierre's work is more
important than marriage. I find this strangely inconsistent, bearing in mind
that Pierre is a biologist and geneticist and Giselle is his assistant. A
biologist who shirks marriage!
Like
most Swiss, Giselle and Pierre are sober-minded,
down-to-earth people. That is why the tone of Giselle's letter shook me. Here it is:
Dear Mark: I know how busy
you are and how difficult it will be for
you to get away from London, but . you
may believe me when I say that nothing—nothing you are doing can be as important
as your coming to Geneva at once. I dare not explain more in writing. Let me
know very casually when and where to meet you. do
not telephone. Love,
Giselle
There it was, laid on the line. Had I not
been sure that she would not have written in this strain without good cause, I
would have put my own affairs first. As it was, I booked on a flight two days
ahead, sending Giselle a post card to say when I arrived and, casually as
requested, mentioning that I was passing through Geneva and hoped to see her.
Giselle's
appearance shattered me when she met me at the airport. She was thin, haggard
and—I know no other word— hunted. She talked a lot and said nothing, using a
torrent of words as a kind of safety valve.
We
took the lakeside road toward Nyon and Lausanne, after driving twice round a
quiet city block to make sure that we were not being followed. I will confess
to being somewhat irritated by all this; it seemed that Giselle was out of
character.
"We've rented a small furnished chalet
in the mountains," she explained to me, "and so far, I'm almost sure,
they haven't located us yet. But it's only a question of time."
"Who is
They?" I asked bluntly.
"We
don't know, Mark; that's what makes it all so frightening."
The
chalet stood at one end of a vast alpine meadow at about five thousand feet
above sea level. It took us three hours of hard driving to reach it. There was
no other human habitation in sight. Even the cows had been taken down to lower
pastures, for snow was imminent. Two huge, ferocious-looking Alsatians prowled
round the chalet, creating an uproar as we approached.
Then Pierre emerged to quieten them.
He had a bad case of the jitters—worse even
than Giselle. He looked as though he had not slept for a week.
"Thanks
for coming," he said with a warm handshake, leading the way into the
warmth of the chalet, where the savory smells of a stew cooking reminded me
that I was hungry. When dinner was served, Giselle and Pierre picked at theirs;
I wolfed two large plates of the stew. I had a fair idea that I was about to
hear unpleasant things, which, I find, sit better on a
full stomach.
"Well,
let's have it," I said at length, when we had done the washing up.
"What
would you say, Mark," Pierre asked abruptly, "if I told you that it
lies in my power now—today—to destroy every blade of grass in the world?"
"I
would say, Pierre, that you were the most dangerous human being alive and the
sooner you were put behind steel bars, the better. Are you suggesting that you
could do this?"
He
nodded sadly. "But I don't expect you to believe me, Mark. I intend to
prove it to you. No, I know you don't doubt me," he said, cutting short my
protestations. "Nevertheless, it is important that you should shed all
doubt. That way, don't you see, you will be able to feel the staggering weight
of responsibility that Giselle and I have been carrying about. We don't know
what to do, Mark, and we're counting on you to help us decide."
"Let's have it from
the beginning," I urged him.
"It
all dates from about four years ago, when Giselle told me something she had
heard to the effect that a fortune was waiting for anyone who could produce a
really effective weed killer—something far better than any at present in use.
Well," Pierre said apologetically, "I was tempted. I make very little
money. I'm not awfully interested in money, really. But I thought it would be
nice if Giselle could buy some pretty clothes. I could do with a couple of new
suits, too, and a car that isn't rattling to pieces. Mother left us a little
money, as you know, but it went. I needed a lot of things for the laboratory
and they were expensive. Then, after I had begun work on the weed killer, I
sold my insurance policies to raise money for the trip to Australia."
"You
didn't tell me you had been to Australia," I said in amazement.
"I didn't tell
anyone—then."
"You
sound as though you are ashamed of trying to make a little money, Pierre, but
you don't have to be. With your brains and ability, why shouldn't you want to
live decently? But go on," I urged him.
"Well,
I found my weed killer," he went on. "I won't tell you any details
about it, Mark. It's better for your own peace of mind, and your safety, that
you know nothing. Suffice to say that it was successful beyond my wildest
dreams. It was" —he fumbled for words—"like looking for a box of
matches and finding—a volcano."
"But what took you to
Australia?" I asked him.
"I
had to find someplace where—it couldn't get out of hand. I knew that inside the
Great Barrier Reef, off \he coast of Queensland, there were uninhabited islands.
By discreet inquiries, we learned of Kangaroo Island. Nobody lived there
because there was no fresh water. It was about three miles along and a mile
broad, large enough for my purpose. On an island, don't you see, it was
possible to keep it within bounds. Well, to cut it short, we chartered a small
interisland cutter for a few days.
"We
first walked right round the island to make sure nobody was living there.
Then, at six o'clock one morning, just before sunrise, we took some of It—the weed killer—to what we judged was the center of the
island. We simply poured the contents of a small jar onto the grass and waited.
Well, there wasn't long to wait. Because of the hot sun, I suppose, all the
processes were speeded up, just as the processes of decay are accelerated in a
warm climate. All I need tell you now is that before noon the entire island,
which at dawn had been clothed from end to end with coarse grass, was
black—just as black as if it had been burned."
"You
are telling me, then, that three square miles of grass were completely
destroyed in a matter of six hours?" I asked. "Is that it?"
"That's it, Mark," said Pierre
soberly. "Think it over and in the morning we'll show you something that
will end your doubts."
There
were three rough bunks in the chalet. Giselle's was in a curtained alcove. We
all went to bed. I hope the others slept better than I did.
We rose early, for the autumn days were
short. Without waiting for breakfast, we walked across the wide expanse of
alpine meadow, Giselle carrying a small glass jar with a screw top containing
what looked like a bright green sludge. Pierre carried a bamboo cane about six
feet long, to one end of which was tied a piece of white rag. This he planted
firmly in the soil at a spot about one mile from the chalet. Giselle handed me
the jar.
"What do I do with
it?" I asked.
"Unscrew it," she told me,
"and simply pour the contents on the grass. Then we'll go back and have
breakfast."
The
jar, when unscrewed, gave off a foul stench. It was unbelievably horrible and
unlike anything I had smelled before. I poured the contents on the ground—it
had the consistency of heavy engine oil—replaced the screw cap, and that was
that. We walked back to breakfast.
Aside
from attempted mayhem by the two Alsatians, the morning passed without
incident. There were things I wanted to say to Giselle, but this was manifestly
not the time to say them.
At
eleven o'clock by my watch, Pierre put on his heavy coat and said curtly,
"Let's go."
Halfway
toward the white flag, the stench of corruption came to meet us. Twice I was on
the point of vomiting. When we arrived at the spot where I had spilled the
green sludge— I can't go on calling it It—there was a lengthening, winding
ribbon of blackened grass. Had I not known otherwise, I would have said that it
had been burned. Pierre kept on looking at his watch.
Pierre
and Giselle each carried, slung across the back, a
small apparatus such as fruitgrowers use to spray their trees. In France, where
vines are all-important, they are used to spray vineyards with sulphate of
copper, I think it is.
"What
are they for?" I asked, more for the sake of hearing my own voice than
anything else. I think I knew anyway.
"Call
them fire extinguishers," replied Pierre, "and you won't be far
wrong."
I lost count of time then. In my throat a
pulse was beating heavily and I realized that I was scared. I was in the
presence of something evil—something Absolute,
something which I sensed was capable of setting up a chain of causation so vast
and so horrifying that already my imagination was balking.
"Alongside
this," I heard Pierre say as though from a long way away, "the atom
bomb is a child's toy."
On
the lips of most men such a statement would have sounded ridiculous. But
uttered by this tough- and sober-minded little Swiss, it had the ring of stark
truth.
"Look!" he said a
few moments later.
I
turned to the black patch of grass, which had begun to grow larger—more
rapidly. It seemed to be alive at the edges, creeping in an ever-extending
path, undulating as it went. Except for the fact that there were no visible
flames, nor any heat being given off, the grass was being consumed by what was
for all practical purposes a fire. In five minutes the blackened strip was too
wide to leap.
When
the destroyed area was almost an acre in extent, Pierre asked, "Seen
enough?"
I
nodded. He and Giselle, starting back to back, walked in opposite directions
around the perimeter, spraying the outermost edge and, as it seemed,
extinguishing the fire. Yes, I had seen enough.
We returned to the chalet in silence. I was
conjuring up ugly visions of a world in which that black, creeping, undulating
horror had got out of hand, a world filled with the bellow-ings of starving
cows, the piteous bleating of sheep. Then I thought of the thin cries of
infants, tugging vainly at empty breasts; of growing children, losing their
boisterous high spirits for lack of the food which stoked their fires. No
grass, no meat, no milk, or cheese, or butter—not just for a few days or weeks,
but forever.
My
work brings me in contact with a great many scientists, who seem to share an
attitude, believing, or professing to believe, that a fidelity to what they are
pleased to call "pure science" absolves them from a regard for the
humanities. I am exaggerating for effect, but the attitude is there all right.
But
Giselle and Pierre were not like that, which, I am convinced, was why I liked
them so. Science had made them humble, not arrogant. Nevertheless, as I turned
these thoughts over in my mind, I did not understand how they could have
experienced ten seconds of doubt as to what to do with Pierre's discovery or
why they needed advice from me. But then, I was being hasty in my judgments,
for I did not know the whole story.
"I wish," I said, "that you
would tell me how I fit into this picture. What do you want me to do?"
"You've
seen the harm Pierre's discovery could do," replied Giselle. "Do you
believe that it could be used in any way for the good of humanity?"
"What
we mean, Mark, and we may as well say it plainly," said Pierre, "is
could we, or anyone, using it as a threat, bring about disarmament and peace?
And if so, to whom should we entrust the secret?"
"Offhand,"
I replied, "I would say that the sooner your discovery is suppressed and
forgotten, the better for everyone —particularly you two. But that is a hasty
reply and I'd like to ask you a question in turn. Why pick on me? I'm not very
wise. In your eyes, how do I seem to qualify to advise you?"
"We
know you well, Mark, and we trust you," replied Pierre simply. "You
are our friend and we are satisfied that your advice, whatever it may be, will
be honest."
"All
right, I accept that," I told them. "Now tell me something else. You
are both Swiss nationals. Your country has a long tradition of neutrality. Why
didn't you just go to Bern, put your formula, or whatever it may be, into the
hands of the proper authorities, and let them do the worrying? That, to me,
seems the proper thing to have done."
"If it had been something which could be used as a defensive
weapon.
Mark, we would not have hesitated. But it can't be. It is of its essence
offensive. Switzerland, therefore, would never extract any value from it—if
there is any value."
"But Switzerland is your country,
Pierre," I said, "and I
would have thought-------- "
"England
is your country, Mark," interposed Giselle sharply. "We will turn
over the secret to you if you ask for it, although I pray for your sake you
won't accept the offer. Would you, in turn, and as a matter of duty, hand over
the secret to the British government?"
The
question hit me between the eyes. It was fair enough. It was not until several
minutes had passed that I replied, "No."
"Why?"
"Because
I can envisage a set of circumstances in which a British government, stampeded
by some terrific emergency, might be tempted to use it as a weapon and—well, I
suppose I believe that nothing—nothing at all—could justify its use. In the
present ideological struggle—the undeclared war—the bone of contention is, when
you get down to facts, the richness of the earth. Some peoples are alleged to
have too much of it. Others too little. Your
invention, discovery, or whatever you care to call it, is purely destructive.
It would remove the bone of contention by destroying it and the contenders,
reducing the world to the nice neat mathematical zero you scientists bandy
about so freely."
"Giselle
and I agree with you there, Mark. That, roughly, has been our conclusion. Then,
do you think, any good purpose could be served by handing it over
simultaneously to the Americans and the Russians?"
"No."
"To
either the Americans or the Russians?"
"No,"
I replied firmly. "It seems to me," I went on, "that we have
reached an impasse in our thinking. We agree that it is useless giving the
secret to Switzerland because of the certainty that Switzerland would not use
it, while I wouldn't care to pass it over to any other country because of the
risk that it might be used. Surely, that points the way clearly to its
suppression. You've asked me for advice. Here it is: Destroy any of the stinking
stuff still in your possession. Destroy all documents relating to it and forget
the whole thing. And now, if it's all the same to you, I'd like to phone the
Geneva airport for a reservation and ask Giselle to drive me there."
"But,
Mark------- "
"Listen,
Pierre," I interrupted. "We may chew this thing to death by talking
about it until tomorrow, but you'll never get any other advice from me."
"But you don't know the whole story,
Mark," said Giselle unhappily. "It isn't so
simple as you seem to think it is. We came to your conclusions months ago. We
have already destroyed all Pierre's notes, together with our stock of the
stuff, except the small jar which you handled this morning. The only thing left
now is about fifty liters of the liquid that we use in the spray gun—the fire
extinguisher."
"Then
there's nothing to worry about," I said brightly. "I can go home now
and earn my living."
"We both memorized
Pierre's formula, Mark," said Giselle.
"Then forget it,"
I retorted.
"Have
you ever tried to wipe something off the slate of your memory?" asked
Pierre. "It isn't so easy as you make it
sound."
"So
you can't forget the formula? The secret remains safe so long as neither of you
chatters."
"But,
Mark, the secret isn't safe," said Pierre glumly. "Someone knows
about it or at least suspects it. Our house has been ransacked twice. Giselle
and I have been followed. Letters have been intercepted. I'm not sure, but I
think our phone was tapped. I don't think we have been traced here yet, but it
is only a question of time. It began with offers of huge sums of money. Giselle
answered the phone one morning and a voice said, 'I am speaking on behalf of
friends who want me to tell you that you and your brother can have more money
than you will ever be able to spend. They would like to meet you at a time and
place of your choosing—any time, anywhere.' In a crowd one day someone thrust a
hundred-franc note into my hand. On it was written: 'There are millions more
where this one came from.' Then the tone of the telephone messages became
nasty, sinister. There were threats. That was when we destroyed
everything."
"You've never had any indication as to
who these mysterious people are?" I asked.
"No. Your guess is as good as
ours," replied Pierre. "I suspect that it is either the Russians or
the Americans. Neither wants the secret in order to use it, so much as to
prevent the other getting hold of it."
"Yes, what you say sounds reasonable
enough," I was forced to agree. "But even if you are right, all you
have to do is to tell them both to jump in the lake and keep your mouth
shut."
"There are ways of making obstinate
people talk," said Pierre. "It has become one of the modern fine
arts. I don't think either Giselle or I would be able to resist oain verv
Now
I began to understand the fears which haunted Giselle and Pierre. Indeed, their
fears had begun to communicate themselves to me. I also knew too much for my
own health's sake, and I wished fervently that I had not been dragged into the
affair.
"That
changes things," I said at length. "My advice to you now is to go to
Geneva immediately, both of you, to tell some high-ranking police official of
your predicament and ask him to give you asylum where you will be safe."
"Mark is right,"
said Giselle. "That is what we must do."
"Thanks, Mark; we'll do that,"
added Pierre. "Let's eat something and go on into town."
Having
made the decision, it seemed as though a weight had been lifted from them.
There was a bottle of whisky in the cupboard and we drank a toast in silence.
Then the telephone rang, loud and shrill.
"It
can't be for us," said Giselle, "because nobody knows we are
here."
In
order to stop the nerve-shattering noise of the bell, because the others showed
no inclination to answer it, I lifted the receiver.
"Is that Professor Duelos?" asked a voice, speaking in French.
"There
is no Professor Duelos
here," I replied.
"You must have the wrong number."
"Will
you tell the professor," continued the voice calmly, "that some
friends are inquiring when the grass on Kangaroo Island will start to grow
again."
I hung up.
The
words uttered were harmless enough, but I find it impossible to exaggerate the
sheer malignity they conveyed to me and to the others when I relayed the
message.
"It's
easy enough to talk of going to Geneva," said Pierre, "but how are we
going to get there? They know we are here, and nothing is easier than to
prevent us reaching the main road. There isn't a living soul for miles."
"I
think," I said, "that Pierre should have a chat with the police, now.
A police escort looks pretty good to me."
Pierre agreed. He went to the phone. It was
dead.
There
was nothing to say. The facts were too painfully obvious. Paradoxically, the
phone was more eloquent dead than alive, for no words spoken over it could have
so emphasized our isolation. We all wanted passionately to get back to the
city, just as, tacitly, we agreed that it was highly
improbable that we should be allowed to do so. They—the mysterious of Kangaroo
Island; the people who had been instrumental in cutting the phone; the people
whose vague existence constituted a menace, who had reduced Giselle and Pierre
to nervous wrecks and who had shattered some of my complacency — They would
find means of intercepting us. Two miles of the road back to civilization lay
through dense, dark pine forest, sinister enough in broad daylight, but in
darkness terrifying to contemplate. Not even the two Alsatians or Pierre's
shotgun made the journey more palatable.
"They
wouldn't shoot or try to kill us," I said hopefully, "because if you
are right, you would be no good to them dead."
Then
I became selfish and personal. They would never get anything out of me because,
thank God, I knew nothing, but I wondered all the same how they would assure
themselves that I knew nothing.
Darkness
had fallen more than an hour before we thought of lighting the lamps. The stove
was getting low. When I went outside to fetch some wood, it had begun to snow.
Big wet flakes were falling. A vast white blanket covered the alpine meadow.
"Giselle
and I have had longer to think about all this than you have, Mark," said
Pierre at length. "We are prepared— for anything."
I let it pass.
"But
you will be all right. You know nothing," he continued. "All the
same, old chap, I'm sorry we dragged you into this mess and, as things have
turned out, all to no avail."
Sitting
on either side of the dining table, each with a pen and a pad of paper, Giselle
and her brother spent the next minutes writing at furious speed. When they had
finished writing, they went outside to the woodshed.
"You'll
find what we've written—afterward," said Pierre. "It's underneath a
pile of sawdust. I don't think They will look
there."
"It isn't your blasted
formula, I hope?" I heard myself say.
"No,
Mark," he replied equably. "What we have written is merely to
exonerate you, in case there should be any attempt made to hold you responsible
for what may happen to us. That's all."
I believed I understood,
and I felt mortally ashamed.
Then
I went for a short walk. I felt that they might wish to be alone for a little,
time. I had turned the car when Giselle and I arrived. I had left it facing
downhill, in case there might be difficulty starting it. The snow was several
inches deep, but no more was fall ins. The darkness
was intense. I switched on the car's headlights, which threw a beam of light
about half a mile down the hill. Against the white background, four dark
figures were plainly visible, plodding stolidly up the hill. I had the
impression that they were men to whom snow was no novelty. They could, of course,
have been Swiss. Why not? This was Switzerland. The Swiss were used to snow.
I
went inside to tell the others what I had seen. My courage had returned. They,
I believed, were no longer vague, ephemeral creatures, formless and terrifying.
They were now real, for I had seen them.
The
two Alsatians had heard the newcomers. They went mad with rage. Pierre turned
them loose and, roaring defiance, they went out into the night to do battle. A
few seconds later there came the sound of two shots,
fired, I judged, from a small-caliber pistol. Silence followed. Imagination
conjured up a picture of two faithful dogs lying dead, their life's blood
staining the virgin whiteness of the snow. Two shots, two
seconds apart. Result: two dead dogs. Expert work by someone trained to
kill. It was so sudden, so ruthlessly efficient that, despite the warmth of
the chalet, I felt chilled to the bone.
Once again, I was scared. I cracked a feeble
joke to hide my fears. It fell flat. This was an ill-chosen moment for
witticisms.
Someone
tapped on the window. "Come outside!" a voice said. "We wish to
speak with you!"
We
had extinguished the lamp. The only light in the room came from the mica door
of the stove. Quite calmly, Pierre rose from his seat and kissed Giselle on the
forehead. I shook the hand he offered me.
"Good-by!"
he said, putting his hand to his mouth, dying as he did so.
Giselle
kissed me on the lips and said something I did not hear. Then her hand carried
something to her mouth. I could have stopped her, but I did not do so. Then,
still smiling sadly, she died.
"Come outside!" called the same
voice.
Something
crashed through the window, landing with a thud on the wooden floor. Choking
and clawing at my throat, I went obediently to the door. Something was put over
my face. The next thing I remember, and that dimly, was a voice saying,
"He knows nothing. He is no use to us." The left sleeve of my jacket
was slit. The shirt also. There was a dull ache in my
arm, like that from a blunt hypodermic needle.
The
words echoed in my brain: "He knows nothing. He is no use to us." How
were they so sure?
I
heard the crunch of heavy boots in the snow. The sound grew fainter until it
died away. I was lying in the snow outside the door of the chalet. When I went
inside, the fumes had cleared. I mended the broken window with a sheet of paper
and some adhesive tape. Then I relighted the lamp.
Pierre
and Giselle were still at the table. They had died in order to save the world
from the horrors of the creeping black death they had
evolved. This story is their epitaph.
They
will not have died in vain if the world understands the message of their
deaths. Science has outrun morality. That, I believe, is the true meaning of
the Biblical reference to new wine in old bottles. Men, all kinds of men—statesmen,
soldiers and airmen, scientists and lesser people—are being confronted daily
with decisions beyond their moral capacity. The new wine is too strong; the
bottles too weak. Giselle and Pierre dared not go on living, because they would
not usurp the prerogatives of God. I live because they did not share their
knowledge with me.
Meanwhile, as their memorial, there is a
blackened acre in an alpine meadow and a dead, sterile island in the Barrier
Reef. When, if ever, will they be green again? When God, who
does not have to fumble in a biochemical laboratory, wills it so. This,
however clumsily delivered, is the message which my good friends left behind
them. They died that we may live.
ISLAND
OF FEAR
by William Sambrot
Kyle
Elliot clutched the smooth tight-fitting stones of the high wall, unmindful of
the fierce direct rays of the Aegean sun on his neck, staring, staring through
a chink.
He'd
come to this tiny island, dropped into the middle of the Aegean like a pebble
on a vast blue shield, just in the hope that something—something like what lay
beyond that wall—might turn up. And it had. It had.
Beyond,
in the garden behind the wall, was a fountain, splashing gently. And in the center of that fountain, two nudes, a mother and child.
A
mother and child, marvelously intertwined, intricately wrought of some stone
that almost might have been heliotrope, jasper or one of the other
semiprecious chalcedonies— although that would have been manifestly impossible.
He
took a small object like a pencil from his pocket and extended it. A miniature telescope. He gasped, looking once more through
the chink. Heavens, the detail of the woman I Head slightly turned, eyes just
widening with the infinitesimal beginning of an expression of surprise as she
looked—at what? And half sliding, clutching with one hand at the smooth thigh,
reaching mouth slightly rounded, plump other hand not quite touching the
milk-swollen breast—the child.
His
professional eye moved over the figures, his mind racing, trying to place the
sculptor, and failing. It was of no known period. It might have been done
yesterday; it might be millenniums old. Only one thing was certain—no catalogue
on earth listed it.
Kyle had found this island by pure chance.
He'd taken passage on a decrepit Greek caique that plied the Aegean, nudging
slowly and without schedule from island to island. From Lesbos to Chios to
Samos, down through the myriad Cyclades, and so on about the fabled sea,
touching the old, old lands where the gods had walked like men. The islands
where occasionally some treasure, long buried, came to light, and if it pleased
Kyle's eyes, and money obtained it, then he
would add
it to his small collection. But only rarely did anything please Kyle. Only rarely.
The
battered caique's engine had quit in the midst of a small storm which drove
them south and west. By the time the storm had cleared, the asthmatic old
engine was back in shape, coughing along. There was no radio, but the captain
was undisturbed. Who could get lost in the Aegean?
They
had been drifting along, a small water bug of a ship
lost in the greenish-blue sea, when Kyle had seen the dim purple shadow that
was a tiny island in the distance. The glasses brought the little blob of land
closer and he sucked in his breath. An incredible wall, covering a good quarter
of the miniature island, leaped into view, a great horseshoe of masonry that
grew out of the sea, curved, embraced several acres of the land, then returned,
sinking at last into the sea again, where white foam leaped high even as he
watched.
He
called the captain's attention to it. "There is a little island over
there." And the captain, grinning, had squinted in the direction of Kyle's
pointing finger.
"There
is a wall on it," Kyle said, and instantly the grin vanished from the
captain's face; his head snapped around and he stared rigidly ahead, away from
the island.
"It
is nothing," the captain said harshly. "Only a few goat-herders live
there. It has no name, even."
"There
is a wall," Kyle had said gently. "Here"—handing him the
glasses—"look."
"No."
The captain's head didn't move an iota. His eyes remained straight ahead.
"It is just another ruin. There is no harbor there; it is years since
anyone has gone there. You would not like it. No electricity."
"I want to see the wall
and what is behind it."
The
captain flicked an eye at him. Kyle started. The eye seemed genuinely agitated.
"There is nothing behind it. It is- a very old place and
everything is long since gone."
"I want to see the
wall," Kyle said quietly.
They'd
put him off, finally, the little caique pointing its grizzled snout to sea, its
engine turning over just enough to keep it under way, its muted throbbing the
only sound. They'd rowed him over in a dinghy, and as he approached he'd
noticed the strangely quiet single street of the village, the lone inn, the few
dories with patched lateen sails, and on the low, worn-down hills the herds of
drifting goats.
Almost,
he might have believed the captain; that here was an old tired island,
forgotten, out of the mainstream of the brilliant civilization that had
flowered in this sea—almost, until he remembered that wall. Walls are built to
protect, to keep out or keep in. He meant to see what.
After
he'd settled in the primitive little inn, he'd immediately set out for the wall,
surveying it from the low knoll, surprised again to note how much of this small
island it encompassed.
He'd
walked all around it, hoping to find a gate or a break in the smooth,
unscalable wall that towered up. There had been none. The grounds within
sprawled on a sort of peninsula that jutted out to where rock, barnacled,
fanged, resisted the restless surf.
And
coming back along the great wall, utterly baffled, he'd heard the faint musical
sound of water dropping within, and, peering carefully at the wall, had seen
the small aperture, no bigger than a walnut, just above his head.
And looked through the aperture, and so
stood, dazed at so much beauty, staring at the woman and child, unable to tear
away, knowing that here, at last, was the absolute perfection he'd sought
throughout the world.
How
was it that the catalogues failed to list this master work? These things were
impossibly hard to keep quiet. And yet, not a whisper, not a rumor had drifted
from this island to the others of what lay within those walls. Here on this
remote pinprick of land, so insignificant as to go unnamed, here behind a huge
wall which was itself a work of genius, here was this magic mother and child
glowing all unseen.
He
stared, throat dry, heart pumping with the fierce exultation of the avid
connoisseur who has found something truly great—and unknown. He must have it—he
would have it. It wasn't listed; possibly—just possibly—its true worth was unknown.
Perhaps the owner of this estate had inherited it, and it remained there, in
the center of the gently falling water, unnoticed, unappreciated.
He
reluctantly turned away from the chink in the wall and walked slowly back
toward the village, scuffling the deep, pale
immemorial dust. Greece. Cradle of western culture. He thought again of the
exquisite perfection of the mother and child back there. The sculptor of that
little group deserved to walk on Olympus. Who was it?
Back
in the village, he paused before the inn to take some of the dust off his
shoes, thinking again how oddly incurious, for Greeks, these few villagers
were.
"Permit me?"
A boy, eyes snapping, popped out of the inn
with a rag in one hand and some primitive shoe blacking in the other, and began
cleaning Kyle's shoes.
Kyle
sat down on a bench and examined the boy. He was about fifteen, wiry and
strong, but small for his age. He might have, in an earlier era, been a model
for one of Praxiteles' masterpieces: the same perfectly molded head, the tight
curls, two ringlets falling over the brows, like Pan's snubbed horns, the
classic Grecian profile. But no, a ridged scar ran from the boy's nose to the
corner of the upper lip, lifting it ever so slightly, revealing a glimmer of
white teeth.
No,
Praxiteles would never have used him for a model— unless, of course, he had a
slightly flawed Pan in mind.
"Who
owns the large estate beyond the village?" he asked in his excellent
Greek. The boy looked up quickly and it was as if a shutter came down over his
dark eyes. He shook his head.
"You
must know it," Kyle persisted. "It covers the whole south end of this
island. A big wall, very high, all the way to the
water."
The
boy shook his head stubbornly. "It has always been there."
Kyle
smiled at him. "Always is a long time," he said. "Perhaps your
father might know?"
"I am alone," the
boy said with dignity.
"I'm
sorry to hear that." Kyle studied the small, expert movement of the boy.
"You really don't know the name of the persons who live there?"
The boy muttered a single
word.
"Gordon?"
Kyle leaned forward. "Did you say The Gordons'? Is it an English family
that owns that property?" He felt the hope dying within. If an English
family owned it, the chances were slim indeed of obtaining that wonderful stone
pair.
"They are not
English," the boy said.
"I'd like very much to
see them."
"There is no
way."
"I
know there's no way from the island," Kyle said, "but I suppose they
must have a dock or some facilities for landing from the sea."
The
boy shook his head, keeping his eyes down. Some of the villagers had stopped,
and now were clustered about him, watching and listening quietly. Kyle knew his
Greeks, a happy boisterous people, intolerably curious sometimes; full of
advice, quick to give it. These people merely stood, unsmiling, watching.
The boy finished and Kyle flipped him a fifty-lepta coin. The boy caught it and smiled,
a flawed masterpiece.
"That
wall," Kyle said to the spectators, singling out one old man, "I am
interested in meeting the people who own that property."
The old man muttered something and walked
away.
Kyle
mentally kicked himself for the psychological error. In Greece, money talks
first. "I will pay fifty—one hundred drachmas," he said loudly,
"to anyone who will take me in his boat around to the seaward side of the
wall."
It
was a lot of money, he knew, to a poor people eking out a precarious existence
on this rocky island, with their goats and scanty gardens. Most of them
wouldn't see that much cash in a year's hard work. A lot of money—but they
looked at one another, then turned and without a backward glance they walked
away from him. All of them.
Throughout
the village he met the same mysterious refusal, as difficult to overcome as
that enigmatic wall that embraced the end of the island. They refused even to
mention the wall or what it contained, who built it, and when. It was as though
it didn't exist for them.
At
dusk he went back to the inn, ate dolmadakis—minced
meat, rice, egg and spices—surprisingly delicious; drank ret-sina, the resinated, astringent wine of the
peasant; and wondered about the lovely mother and child, standing there behind
that great wall with the purple night clothing them. A vast surge of sadness,
of longing for the statues swept over him.
What
a rotten break! He'd run into local taboos before. Most of them were the
results of petty feuds, grudges going back to antiquity. They were cherished by
the peasants, held tight, jealously guarded. What else was there of importance
in their small lives? But this was something entirely different.
He was standing on the outskirts of the
darkened village, gazing unhappily out to sea, when he heard a soft scuffling.
He turned quickly. A small boy was approaching. It was the shoeshine boy, eyes
gleaming in the starshine, shivering slightly, though the night was balmy.
The
boy touched his arm. His fingers felt icy. "I—I will take you in my
boat," he whispered.
Kyle
smiled, relief exploding within him. Of course, he should have thought of the
boy. A young fellow, alone, without family, could use a hundred drachmas,
whatever the taboo.
"Thank you," he
said warmly. "When can we leave?"
"Before the ebb tide—an hour before
sunrise," the boy
said. "Only"—his teeth were chattering—"I will take you, but
I will not come any closer than the outer rocks between the
walk. From there, you must wait until the ebb tide and walk
—and walk------- "
He gasped, as though choking.
"What are you afraid of?" Kyle
said. "I'll take all the
responsibility for trespassing, although I don't think----------- "
The
boy clutched his arm. "The others—tonight, when you go back to the inn,
you will not tell the others that I am rowing you there?"
"Not if you don't want
me to."
"Please do not!" he gasped.
"They would not like it if they
knew—after, that I-------- "
"I understand,"
Kyle said. "I won't tell anyone."
"An
hour before sunrise," the boy whispered. "I will meet you at the wall
where it goes into the water to the east."
The
stars were still glowing, but faintly, when Kyle met the boy, a dim figure
sitting in a small rowboat that bobbed up and down, scraping against the kelp
and barnacles that grew from the base of the monolithic wall. He realized
suddenly that the boy must have rowed for hours to get the boat this far around
the island. It had no sails.
He
climbed in and they shoved off, the boy strangely silent. The sea was rough, a
chill predawn wind blowing raggedly. The wall loomed up alongside, gigantic in
the mist.
"Who
built this wall?" he asked, once they were out onto the pitching water,
heading slowly around the first of a series of jagged, barnacled rocks,
thrusting wetly above the rapidly ebbing tide.
"The old ones," the boy said. His
teeth were chattering, he kept his back steadfastly to
the wall, glancing only seaward to measure his progress. "It has always
been there."
Always. And
yet, studying the long sweep of the wall beginning to emerge in the first
light, Kyle knew that it was very old. Very old. It
might well date back to the beginning of Greek civilization. And
the statues—the mother and child. All of it an enigma
no greater than the fact that they were unknown to the outside world.
As
they drew slowly around until he was able to see the ends of the thick walls
rising out of the swirling, sucking sea, he realized that most certainly he
could not have been the first—not even one of the first hundred. This island
was remote, not worth even being on a mail route, but surely, over the many,
many years that wall had towered, it must have been visited by people as
curious as he. Other collectors. And
yet, not a rumor.
The
boat rasped up against an enormous black rock, its tip, white
with bird droppings, startlingly luminous in the half light. The boy shipped
his oars.
"I
will come back here at the next tide," he said, shaking as though with a
fever. "Will you pay me now?"
"Of course." Kyle took out his billfold. "But aren't you at
least going to take me farther in than this?"
"No," the boy
said shrilly. "I cannot."
"How about the dock?" Kyle surveyed the considerable expanse of
shallow, choppy surf between the rocks and the narrow sloping beach. "Why,
there isn't a dock!"
There was nothing between the walls but sand,
dotted with huge rocks, and inland, a tangled growth of underbrush with an
occasional cypress rearing tall.
"I'll tell you what. I'll take the boat
in and you wait here,"
Kyle said. "I won't be long. I just want to get a chance to
meet whoever owns the place and arrange---------- "
"No!" There was sharp panic in the
boy's voice. "If you
take the boat-------- "
He half rose, leaning forward to shove off
from the
rock. At that instant a swell raised the boat, then dropped it suddenly out
from under the boy. Overbalanced, he swayed, arms waving wildly, then went over backwards, hitting his head on the rock. He
slipped under the water like a stone.
Kyle
made a quick lunge, and missing, immediately dived out of the rowboat after
him, rasping his chest on the barnacled shelf of rock a few feet beneath the
boat. He got a good handful of the boy's shirt, but it tore like paper. He
grabbed again, got a firm grip on his hair and stroked for the surface. He held
him easily, treading water, looking for the rowboat. It was gone, kicked away
by his powerful dive, perhaps behind one of the other rocks. No time to waste
looking for it now.
He
swam to shore, pulling the boy easily. It was only a hundred yards or so to the
smooth white beach, curving between the two arms of the wall that sloped out
and down into the ocean. When he came out of the water the boy was coughing
weakly, salt water dribbling from his nose.
Kyle
carried him well above the tide mark and sat him down on the sand. The boy
opened his eyes and peered at him, puzzled.
"You'll
be all right," Kyle said. "I'd better get your boat before it drifts
too far."
He
walked back down to the surf line, kicked oft his shoes |and stroked off to where the boat rose and fell, nuzzling
another of the large rocks that littered the space between the towering walls.
He rowed the boat back, facing the sea and the swift-rising sun. The wind had
dropped to a whisper.
He
beached the boat and gathered up his shoes. The boy was leaning against a rock,
looking inland over his shoulder in an attitude of rigid watchfulness.
"Feeling
better now?" Kyle called cheerfully. It occurred to him that their little
mishap was an excellent excuse for being here, on property belonging to someone
who obviously valued his privacy highly.
The
boy didn't move. He remained staring back into the tangle of trees, back to
where the massive walls converged in the distance, stark, white, ancient.
Kyle touched him on the bare shoulder. He
pulled his hand away, fists tightly clenched. He looked at the sand. Here were
the marks where the boy had risen, here the dragging footsteps where he'd come
to lean against this rock. And here he still stood, glancing over his shoulder
toward the trees, lips barely parted, a look of faint surprise just starting on
his face.
And there, coming out of the tangled trees, a
delicate tracery of footsteps led toward this rock and behind. Footsteps, slender, high-arched, as though a woman, barefooted,
scarcely touching the sand, had approached for just an instant. Looking
at the strange footprints, Kyle understood completely what he should have
guessed when first he'd peered through that chink in the wall, gasping at the
unimaginable perfection of the woman and her child.
Kyle
knew intimately all the ancient fables of early
Greece. And now, looking at the footprints in the sand, one of the most
terrible leaped into his mind: the Gorgons.
The
Gorgons were three sisters, Medusa, Euryale and Stheno, with snakes writhing
where their hair should have been. Three creatures so awful to look upon, the
legend said, that whosoever dared gaze upon them
instantly turned to stone.
Kyle stood on the warm sand, with the gull
cries, the restless Aegean sea sounds all about him, and he knew, at last, who
the old ones were who'd built the wall; why they'd built it to lead into the
living waters—and whom—what—the walls were meant to contain.
Not
an English family named the Gordons. A much more ancient family, named—the
Gorgons. Perseus had slain Medusa, but her two hideous sisters, Euryale and
Stheno, were immortal.
Immortal. Oh, God! It was impossible! A myth! And
yet------
His
connoisseur's eyes, even through the sweat of fear, noted the utter perfection
of the small statue that leaned against the rock, head turned slightly, an
expression of surprise on the face as it peered over one shoulder in the direction
of the trees. The two tight ringlets, like snubbed horns
above the brow, the perfect molding of the head, the classic Grecian profile.
Salt water still flecked the smoothly gleaming shoulders, still dripped from
the torn shirt that flapped about the stone waist.
Pan
in chalcedony. But Pan had a flaw. From the nose to the comer of the upper lip
ran a ridge, an onyx scar that lifted the edge of the onyx lip slightly, so
that, faintly, a glimmer of onyx teeth showed. A flawed
masterpiece.
He
heard the rustle behind him, as of robes, smelled an indescribable scent, heard
a sound that could only have been a multiple hissing—and though he knew he
mustn't, he turned slowly. And looked.
SINISTER JOURNEY
by Conrad Richter
It
was the night I slept in Douglas Creel's bed that it happened. You may recall
my friend's mysterious disappearance. It was a sensation at the time. A modern
American composer and pianist, he was celebrated among artists and liberal
thinkers for his fight toward the planned improvement of conditions for
mankind. You may remember he disappeared from a mining town in New Mexico named
Grantham. What you may not know is that he was born there, the son of a pioneer
Southwestern doctor, and that he had kept up his father's house.
He
usually came back once a year, as a rule in the fall or early winter. He
thought the sun and altitude benefited him, and here he did a good deal of
composing. The neighbors complained. They said that fortunately they couldn't
hear him all the time because of the roar of trucks hauling ore to the mill.
But when they did hear, his big black piano kept them awake far into the night.
If it had been tuneful music, they said, it wouldn't have been so bad. But the
kind of modern stuff he worked over, playing the same notes again and again,
got on their nerves. They even brought out a petition against him, but the town
officials squashed it.
This
particular November, Doug had come back to the house from Paris. The neighbors
muttered and groaned and resigned themselves. Then the night of November
twenty-third, they slept like babes. The sheriff said Doug had returned to the
house at ten after dining at the Copper Queen Hotel. He had never come out of
the house again. Or if he had, he hadn't been dressed. His clothing was still
intact next day, old Apolonia, his Mexican housekeeper, testified. His money
remained untouched in the pocket of his trousers folded over a chair; his
familiar green-leather music memorandum book was found in his coat in the
closet. Only a pair of blue pajamas, his red slippers and a
purple dressing gown were missing.
Doug had never married, was blessed with
neither brother
nor
sister. His parents had died some years before, but there was no satisfying the
public clamor that he be found. Some of his friends in New York and London
hinted that enemies of liberalism had done away with him. This came out in the
newspapers and made his disappearance an international affair.
I
was East at the time and didn't come West until the excitement had died down.
More than once when Doug was in Europe I had stayed and worked in his house,
and now I drove straight to Grantham. The town was greatly changed since I had
been there last. Lately uranium had been found in the hills and a mill revamped
to handle the new ore. Trucks brought it in day and night. This fact together
with the typical raw appearance of the town, the scarred hills with piles of
dirt and tailings all around gave a modernistic atomic air to the place. It was
the kind of environment that Doug loved. He felt completely at home in it, and
I felt sure he would never have left it of his own volition.
When
I knocked on the door, Apolonia, with her niece, Felicitas, standing behind
her, greeted me like a long-lost brother. She said Judge Connover had been
paying her out of the estate to stay at the house, but she hadn't been alone a
single night since Mr. Creel had disappeared. Nor would she.
Even with Felicitas she was nervous. She hoped I would stay for a while. With a
man in the house they would feel safe.
It
seemed perfectly natural to find myself in Douglas' studio again as night
closed down. Clouds came with it and rain fell, a very welcome circumstance in
the Southwest. The house had been built on one floor. Doug's studio where he
both worked and slept was in a wing at the rear of the house. I found the
records of his own Concerto in G Minor, the Utopia Concerto, on the turntable.
Evidently he had played it not too long before he disappeared. On impulse I
lifted the disks to the arm of the record changer and started them off. Then I
sat down and leaned back. The sense of Doug's presence was still strong in the
room, but if there were any vibrations of his thought still around, they were
unintelligible to me. All that reached me besides the music was the fierce roar
of ore trucks on the street in front of the house.
Grantham
lies some six thousand feet above sea level. As a rule, coming up to this
altitude from the east or west coast, I can sleep like a top. Tonight something
kept me awake. How long I lay there sleepless I am unsure, but I remember thinking
that a bit of food or drink in my stomach might help me to drop off. I resolved
to get a drink of water from the bathroom.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I put my bathrobe
around me and felt for my slippers with my feet.
It
had not occurred to me until now how extraordinarily dark Doug's studio seemed.
"It's the rain," I told myself and started for the bathroom without
turning on the light. Sleep experts claimed that a light woke you up too
completely. So I used Doug's bed as a launching pier and took off in the
blackness for where I knew the bathroom to be.
At
first I thought nothing of it, but presently I realized that it had never taken
me so long to reach the bathroom door. I kept on. My hands were stretched
before me. When they found nothing but empty air, the queerest feeling came
into my fingers. Why, I knew every foot of this room as I did my own at home!
But when I had taken a dozen more steps, I knew at last I was irretrievably
lost. And now suddenly I grew aware that the sound of ore trucks from the
street had ceased. All was silence. At a considerable distance I thought I
detected the faintest glow of pale light, but although I hurried toward it, for
a long time it grew appreciably no closer. As a level road often appears to
have a grade at night, so it seemed that I was going downhill.
When
I came out at last, there was no sense of getting into fresh air. It had
stopped raining. Unusually large and brilliant stars were out, and a quarter moon shone. By their light and some other unidentified glow,
I looked on a place I had never seen before. The raw, mine-scarred hills, the
rocks, the piles of tailings and rude Western houses were gone. All was level
or gently rolling land dotted with the most curious small houses I had ever
seen, many of them without walls, some without roofs, the ground cultivated
closely around them, while streets no wider than walks wound through like
narrow ornamental parkways. The whole effect was like one gigantic landscaped
park swarming with tiny houses evidently planned for outdoor living. There was
something of the charm of a Japanese landscape although obviously it was more
modernistic than that.
"This is certainly not
Grantham," I said to myself aloud.
"I
believe it used to be called that many years ago," a voice answered me. It
was in curious, slurred English that I could barely understand.
I
looked around to see a man standing behind me. He was small and again I had the
feeling of Japan. Then I saw it was not a Japanese,
but an American face, although strangely different.
"Are you an officer?" I asked.
"I'm an observer of peace and
plenty," he said.
"I don't know what that means," I
confessed. "But perhaps you can tell me what I want to know?"
"We
don't say or even think the word 'want' any
more," he corrected me. "We have freedom from want here."
I stared at him, not
understanding at first.
"You mean nobody wants
for anything?"
He watched me in mild
surprise.
"Nothing. It's all supplied. Of course, everyone has
his own work to do. But we tolerate no hunger, ugliness or shab-biness, no
poverty or housing shortage, no illiteracy or ignorance, certainly no medical
or other lack that interferes with the peace, contentment and security of our
people."
His
words spoken so matter-of-factly, together with the evidences of this brave new
world before my eyes, moved me. So Doug's great dream, the perfectly planned
state he had always preached about, was actually realized.
"I've
been looking for a friend," I began, but he interrupted me politely.
"We
don't look for anyone or anything here. No one is ever out of his place and
nothing is ever stolen or permanently lost, because everyone here has his
wants supplied and therefore has no desire to be anywhere else than where he
is. What you may have meant was to ask about another fugitive from your time
era. Creel is his name."
"You know
Douglas!" I exclaimed in delight.
"He's
creating musical master works for our people. He lives, as most everybody
knows, at GHK 2. I'll have someone take you there."
"Oh,
I don't mind walking," I said. "In fact I'd like to get a look at
your city."
"That would be impossible. Someone will
have to take you," he insisted courteously. "Even a visitor must not
want for anything."
"Not even for a little
privacy and freedom?" I murmured.
"Privacy
isn't freedom," he said gently. "Freedom from want is the only
freedom and it's possible alone through general harmony with one's fellows and
the public weal."
He
pulled something from under his coat and spoke into it in a kind of shorthand
English. After a remarkably short time a second observer appeared. He was very
civil and took me down into a little dale where we horizontally entered a tube
underground. The door was closed. I did not think we had moved. There was no
sensation of starting or stopping, but presently the door opened and I found
myself already within a marble-lined building where a higher observer welcomed
me. The room into which he took me was furnished with comfortable elegance. We
sat together on a form of sofa that moved slowly about as we talked. It was
this official who kept telling me how perfect their existence was.
"You
don't consider rain or drought an imperfection?" I asked.
"It
never rains here," he smiled. "And there's never any drought."
He took me out on a balcony. "You can well see how green everything is.
Ample moisture is supplied by underground irrigation."
"How
about sandstorms?" I persisted.
"Sandstorms are
obsolete and unknown," he answered.
"Well,
it still must get pretty hot in the summer and cold in winter," I
insisted.
"The
temperature never varies more than a degree or two, day or night, summer or
winter," he assured me. "Our food crops are raised the year round.
I'm not too well versed on that, but an observer from the food division can
give you the exact figures."
All
he had said staggered me. I began to wonder now if I hadn't perhaps fallen
asleep in Doug's bed after all. I felt my eyes. They were wide open. I squeezed
the skin of my cheek between thumb and forefinger till it hurt. But if I was
asleep, I didn't wake up.
After
a moment something gave me an idea. Looking up from the balcony I noted that a
slightly different moon hung overhead from the one when I first came.
The
heavens looked blue as any night sky in New Mexico and yet now as I examined
them I thought they resembled less the open firmament than a high, vast,
cerulean ceiling dotted with starry illuminations.
"Don't tell me we're in a cave!" I
exclaimed.
"We have no such word in our
language," he informed. "I believe in your time the word meant
something dark and disagreeable. Here you can see for yourself that it is all
very light and pleasant."
"But you're underground!" I
stammered.
"We
are simply under earth cover," he corrected me. "To most of us our
earth cover is more beautiful and desirable than the fickle and dangerous sky.
First it protects us against missiles that would vaporize us all. Then it
permits control of climate for increased plant and human welfare. The unruly
ball called the sun is a very coarse and unmanageable source of energy and
power. Our light rays are refined and far superior. There are many other
advantages too technical to discuss with someone from your backward era. One
thing you will soon notice for yourself, that our days and nights are always
clear, the earth cover never obscured by clouds as in the case of nature's
ordinary firmament."
I
had to admit when they took me to find Doug that I had never seen a more
beautiful day. The sky looked blue and flawless. I could almost imagine it a
gorgeous New Mexican morning in May. In other ways it was even superior. This
was the early hour when Grantham would be filled with the roar of rushing
trucks and cars. Here the streets were incredibly peaceful. I heard no passing
blare of radio or television. The only sounds were those of restrained human
voices and, under all, a soft persistent music, although where it came from I
couldn't tell. It seemed to permeate everywhere we went. At first I imagined it
discordant, a most unusual and modern sort of thing, composed of strange new
unpleasant repetitions. Fortunately it was low and I could put it out of my
mind. After a while it came to me that to hear such dissonance and then look
upon the beauty and relaxation around me made everything more enjoyable.
The
disposition of all the small, almost dwarflike people I saw was especially
agreeable. I witnessed no hurrying on the streets, no striving to be ahead at a
crosswalk. Their orderly behavior together with the planned loveliness of the
suburban landscape greatly impressed me, and I felt that Doug, when I actually
found him, would be beside himself with pride at the vindication of his thesis.
GHK 2 turned out to be a felicitous-looking
small house, with several rooms completely enclosed. One of the most attractive
of small Millennia women came to the door. She seemed to understand my archaic
American speech at once.
"Yes, my husband is here," she
assured me as if fully prepared for a visitor from another time era.
I
could scarcely believe my ears. The inveterate bachelor married at last and to
such a delectable creature! I entered with hearty and jovial words of
congratulation on my lips, but when I saw him they died in my throat.
Ever
since I knew him, Douglas Creel had been a plump and vigorous figure with
glasses, a dash of red in his cheeks and in his eye ever-renewed enthusiasm for
his projects. Now in this land of actual fulfillment of his dreams, he looked
extraordinarily haggard and ill. His eyes lighted on me with an almost
desperate gleam.
"Michael! How did you get here?" he
cried and wrung my hand like a drowning man. All the time he kept looking into
my face as if he couldn't get enough of something he hungered for. I had
almost to nudge him to get an introduction to his wife, whose name proved to be
Kultura. She took no affront at the delay, but bade me welcome as if nothing
could move her from her accustomed unexcitement.
"I
hope you'll be permitted to live in our vicinity," she said.
"Thank you, but I won't be able to stay
very long." She gave me a faintly amused look.
"I'm
sure you will. Nobody who comes from your and Douglas' time dimension ever
wants to go back to that poor age of want and rivalry."
"I've
never been in a more perfect and artistic world," I said gallantly, and
she smiled her quiet approval.
Not
till she had excused herself and gone to what she called a concurrence did he
become himself. Then he grasped my arm so that it hurt.
"Michael, you must get me out of
here!"
I looked at him with astonishment. "Out of what?"
"Out of this whole damnable era of freedom from fear and
want."
"But I thought this was what you always
wanted."
His face worked for a moment.
"I thought I knew better than God."
"This
era, as you call it, was made by God, too," I.reminded him.
"No!"
he shouted in revulsion. "By man. By the empty, fatuous, conceited head of man."
"Are you well, Doug? It looks wonderful
to me."
"You
think it's wonderful to see man-made dwarfs!" he shouted. "All around
me I see familiar faces, Grantham family faces. When I knew their ancestors
they were big, independent people. Nobody could boss them. Now generation by
generation that vigorous miner stock's been shrunken in head and body like the
head hunters shrink their enemies' heads. Only this is worse because the heads
and bodies are still alive."
"You're
joking, Douglas. How could they do that?"
"First
they control the air these cave people breathe, the light rays that regulate
their growth and hunger. It takes less to feed them. It also controls their
temper and disposition. Otherwise they'd never submit to living like grubs
under a log, never laying eyes on the real sun and constellations of the world,
but only these miserable overshiny Millennia imitations. They go from birth to
death without seeing a rainbow or Mt. Taylor a hundred miles across the globe
in the clear, New Mexican air. But that isn't the real tragedy of their
lives."
He took me to the window by
his piano.
"Look out. Do you
notice anything?" he asked.
I
told him I could see houses, shrubbery, flowers in bloom and, beyond, what I
supposed were factories, the most idealistic I had
ever looked upon, smokeless, noiseless.
"Do you see a
church?" he barked.
"Well, no, not from
here," I said.
"You
can't see any because there's none here. Where nobody wants for anything,
there's no need of God. His name and idea are neglected, forgotten. In all
Millennia, I'm probably the only person who prays."
"You, Doug!" I exclaimed, for I had never known him to go to church.
"Oh,
I've learned a lot of respect for God from His absence. Back home as a boy I
was told that everything good came from God. They didn't tell me that the lack
of good may be God too. I mean what makes you work and pray for something you
don't have. Now I believe that's more of God than the other because it lifts
you up and develops you while monotonous goodness makes you stagnate like a
frog in a swamp."
"If this is
stagnating, I'm for it, Doug," I protested.
"So
was I at first. When I first came I had lack and want and strain still left
from my American existence. Relief from those things was sweet. I thought it
would last forever. But once relief becomes permanent, it's nothing. It becomes
dull, cloying, pure animal existence. I found I was a human cow, to be kept in my
stall and never frightened or disturbed, but to stay calm and cowlike and go on
producing milk as my sole end and purpose in life."
"You
said once that when all want was supplied to man, then
arts and sciences would flourish," I reminded.
"I
was a blind fool," he said. "It's the wildness and freedom of the
Bible and Shakespeare that made them great literature, and Beethoven great
music. The same things helped to make early America great as we knew it."
"Somebody
here has to be more than cows to plan and control Millennia," I pointed
out.
"Ah, the Giant Guardians, or Great Hearts, as they're sometimes
called. The ones who provide all. We're told many wonderful stories.
But we really know only one thing about them—that they don't live in docile
security like we do or they'd never be big enough to run Millennia. They've had
problems aplenty to overcome, and that's what's made them our masters. They
even found out that human slaves must have some sort of lack to keep up their
tone. A history official told me that sometime after the regime was
established, the people sank back to nothing.
"They simply lived and ate and breathed.
So the Giant Guardians had to give them some sort of obstruction and
inharmony—not enough to arouse their manhood. Just enough to
keep them from going to pieces altogether. One of these things is
dissonance in music. Have you noticed? Listen. It's piped into every square
foot of Millennia so nobody, day or night, can ever be without it. It stirs up
subconscious unpleasantness, lack of security. Not too much. Just enough to
keep the inner energies aroused to overcome this uneasy sense of inharmony
inside of them. Listen. Do you hear it?"
"What
kind of music do you play now?" I asked, remembering that his great pet
had been dissonance.
"The
Cacophony of the Cave," he said bitterly. "I'm given a piano by the
state and asked to compose. But can I compose what I wish? No. Only variations
of the same monotonous and repetitious phrases that back in our era originated
among primitive slave peoples."
He paced up and down, a wild light in his
eyes.
"What
I have suffered here, nobody knows. Never did I catch the spirit of my American
era till I left it. Its phrases kept ringing in my head. I had to put it to
music. But they heard me as they hear everything, and stopped me. Such longing
and moving and passionate sounds are contrary to order here. They interfere
with tranquillity. I was forbidden to touch the piano for such purpose. They
gave me what they call a Concurrer to see that I co-operated."
He gave
the piano a sharp thump as he passed, turned to me and went on.
"But
they couldn't stop me. I needed no piano. All those magnificent sounds and
harmonies rang in my ears night and day. There was no time to lose. I saw ahead
of me the time when they would no longer come to me, when I'd be only half
alive like these kept people. So I set down my song of America secretly. It's a
concerto for the piano, although the orchestration isn't finished yet." He
took from some secret place in the piano a handwritten manuscript of music
paper. Just sight of it seemed to exert great influence on him. A light shone
in his eyes. For a minute he was the man I used to know in New Mexico. Then a
step sounded on the walk outside.
"Kultura!"
he whispered. "The Concurrer." Quickly he replaced
the manuscript. "She'll try to get you out of here,
Michael,
but never leave me. And never rest till you go back again to our time."
"I'll go back. And you'll go back with
me!"
"You, perhaps, but never me." His face looked pitiable. "Those who
once pander to tyranny are never free from it. They've committed the
unpardonable sin. Sooner or later they must pay for it with their lives."
His voice was so filled with anguish that I
can hear it yet. Then the door opened and his wife came in, sweet and calm as
if there was nothing but security and light in the world.
"I've been allotted a place for your
friend, Michael, to live. Down in RLD 146. I'll show
him there."
Douglas exchanged a look
with me.
"Let him stay one day, Kultura. I want
him to hear me play at the Concert of Abundance tonight. Just to have him there
will give me something I need."
Not
a sign of displeasure or unwillingness crossed her face. It seemed only
interest in my well-being that made her keep proposing objection after objection,
including my lack of suitable clothes which could not be supplied me for
several days. Finally my willingness to attend the concert in bathrobe and
slippers appeared to disarm her. It did not require as much courage on my part
as it sounded. Most Millennia dress was so bright and extreme that pajamas and
bathrobe looked rather fitting, indeed on the conservative side.
Just
the same, I wondered if she did not suspect some collusion between us. At
dinner she spoke to me kindly yet pointedly of what she called the Benevolent
Instruction given enemies of Millennia, transgressors of the spirit of freedom
from want. Only the contented and co-operating citizens of Millennia, she
reminded me, enjoyed the good and abundant life I saw around me. A state like Millennia
required extensive servicing by unseen co-ordinators. Beneath us lay an
immense labyrinth of tunnels and caverns where the water, power, disposal and
other systems were based, and it was here that those
lacking in proper appreciation for their blessings were trained in what she
called Benign Common Weal. She spoke of them temperately, but it was not lost
upon me that they were doomed inmates of the bowels of the earth, breathers of
what air could be pumped down to them, spending their lives there never to see
the synthetic light of Millennia again.
If
her purpose was to frighten me, she succeeded admirably. Before we left for the
concert that evening, I imagined I saw Douglas take something from beneath the
sounding board of the piano and slip it into his music case. Then the three of
us went to the tube underground.
We
came out of the tube into the greatest outdoor bowl—if it can be called
outdoor—that I had ever seen. It lay cradled between the rolling subterranean
hills and was already nearly filled with an audience of staggering size.
Looking across the vast sea of Millennia faces drawn here by the promise of
music, I had the feeling of being in a land of advanced enlightenment and
culture.
But
that feeling vanished, once I heard the music. It was a very large and
impressive orchestra. It played with great skill and dexterity. But when the
music with great volume and precision started, I found it the same dissonance
and repetition I had heard piped into the streets and houses of Millennia.
Even Douglas, when his time came, performed in the common monotonous manner.
Just the same, at the end of the number, they clapped Douglas back with a
unanimity that could not be denied.
That
was when it happened. I saw him lift a hand to the orchestra to be silent, that
this time he would play alone. Again he seated himself at the shimmering blue
piano. A change had come over him. Up to this time he had seemed weary,
mechanical, almost drugged. Now just the way he sat at his instrument stirred
me. When he reached out and with strength unknown among these pygmies pulled
with his own hands the piano closer to him, the crowd
murmured and I felt the hair at the back of my head rise. So far he had played
from the usual Millennia music, printed in a kind of glowing colored type read
without a light at a distance and so arranged that it rolled on and on. But
now he set up a quarto of ordinary music paper scrawled in black. To my
consternation it looked very much like the manuscript of his secret American
concerto.
For
a long moment he sat silent and motionless. Then his hands lifted over the
keys.
I have heard in my not inconsiderable
lifetime a great many compositions, symphonies, tone poems and suites that
purport to convey the spirit of America to the listener, but never anything
that succeeded like this. Perhaps part of its powerful effect on me came from
hearing it in what Douglas called this desert of the hopes of mankind. From the
very first there sounded a ringing call to life and freedom. The dissonances
and monotonous repetitions of slave-people existence were gone. In their stead
blew a breath of fresh air from the mountains and sea, neither of which these
kept-people had ever seen.
As
it went on, I could see the early ships tossing on the ocean bringing lovers of
freedom to our shores, the strong bodies of pioneers cutting down the dark
forests and breaking up the darker prairie soil. I could picture the mills and
factories springing up along the streams, first with foaming water for power,
then with the pound and hiss of steam and finally the smooth hum of electrical
might. I could hear the hoofs of oxen and horses, the iron tires of wagons and
carriages, the rush of train, automobile, boat and plane, with the indescribable
stir that was the vast fluidic emancipation of people traveling east and west,
north and south, wherever they wanted. Not in childish and mechanical imitation
were these given, but infused with a magnificent harmony, wildness and even
ferocity of spirit that opened my eyes to my own country and era as nothing had
ever done before. I realized it must have been Douglas' exile and hunger for it
here that had led him to catch its secret as he never could have done in New
York or at his father's house in Grantham.
In a
fierce and powerful climax that returned again and again with its passionate
and majestic chords, Douglas finished. Then something happened I would not have
believed possible. The thousands of docile kept-people went crazy in their
bright October colors. It was as if racial memory was not yet dead at the pit
of their brains and Douglas had reached deep to stir up their ancient passion.
They stood up, shouting and waving, grabbing at and striking one another. I
stared, amazed. So long had their natural emotions been repressed that they
didn't know how to react to them. Sight of their fellows breaking into madness
only multiplied the violence in themselves. They
began surging over the seats toward the platform and the man who had aroused
them.
At
first I thought they meant to lionize Douglas, show him their admiration and
affection. But I was to learn that the emotions of liberty are a dangerous
thing in persons unprepared for it and unable to tell the difference between
liberation and mob rule. The hordes of hysterical little people swarmed over
the platform, knocking down this man bigger and more gifted than they, striking
him and one another. I saw Douglas with a bloody face struggle to rise and go
down a second time with the pygmies jumping on him. I remembered then his
tragic and bitter prediction, and knew that he would never rise again.
Now
one of the bloody little men started singing in triumph the main and recurring
air that had run through Douglas' concerto. Others took it up and soon the
entire bowl was a shrill and fearful chorus. The
observers-of-freedomfront-want who so far had been helpless, seized the
opportunity to try to regain control. One of them shouted orders
through the relay system, but no one heard him. Others reached Douglas and
dragged his body out. Meantime another snatched the offending music from the
piano and tore the manuscript to pieces, scattering it to the crowd. A ribbon
of paper with a bar or two written in Douglas' hand came fluttering toward me.
I caught it and put it into my bathrobe pocket.
But
that act betrayed me. In a moment the mob on the platform recognized my
unconforming height and dress. It started toward me. Thanks to my superior size
and strength, I was able to force my way through those nearest me. But a
greater mob remained between me and escape. I remembered that on entering I had
noticed occasional doorways in the descending aisles. They were for exit, I
thought. Now I managed to reach one of the doors and wrench it open. Inside,
it was pitch dark. Hardly had I forced the door shut and shot the bolt before I
heard the mob rattling the handle.
Where
the passageway led to, I didn't know. But the door was starting to give and I
hurried along, feeling my way. Meantime the fiercely sung chorus from the
concerto rose and penetrated the darkness like the hands of Douglas himself at
the piano. It lifted me up and urged me on and this, I suspect, was the time
catalyst.
The
first thing I thought strange was that I blundered against no wall while I ran.
As on the night before, my outstretched hands found utterly nothing. And yet
there was a kind of floor beneath me which seemed to pitch upgrade. Far ahead
and still much higher, faint light seemed to hang in the blackness. Behind me I
heard the door shatter and tremendous echoing of voices in the passageway.
Then
abruptly, pandemonium ceased. In utter silence I ran on. Just as I reached the
faint light an unseen object tripped me and I fell. Fortunately it was into
something soft and springy. Feeling it with my hands, I thought it most resembled
a bed. The conviction grew that it was Douglas' bed. In a moment I made out
across the dim room the black bulk of his grand piano. Then I heard a sound
more beautiful than music to my ears. It was the roar of an ore truck passing
the house.
The
rest of the night I slept like a log. When I awoke in the common light of day
and with Doug's familiar furnishings around me, I told myself it had all been
an illusion, a dream. I got up and shaved and dressed as if nothing had
happened.
When
I left the room, I found Apolonia and Felicitas waiting in the front hall.
"Where
were you yesterday?" Apolonia's eyes were big on me.
"I just came
yesterday," I reminded her.
"You
came the day before," she accused. "Yesterday you never came out. I
knocked, but you didn't answer. All day and last night I am nervous like a cat.
I am afraid to come in that I find your clothes on the chair like Mr. Creel's
and nobody here."
"I
guess I was pretty tired from my trip and slept right through," I told
her.
Just
the same, I didn't care to spend another night in Douglas' house, and found a
room for myself at the Copper Queen. My bathrobe was soiled and torn. I had a
bellboy send it out to be cleaned and mended. Not until evening did I remember
what I thought I had put into the pocket. In the morning I asked the bellboy
where he had sent the bathrobe and went over.
"I
wonder if you found anything in the pocket?" I
asked, feeling a bit foolish.
They
brought out the cleaner who had worked on it, a Mexican girl who looked at me
with a calmness that reminded me of Millennia when I had first come.
"There
was nothing important in the pocket, sir," she said. "Nothing
but a torn piece of paper with marks like music on it. It was just a
scrap and I threw it in the trash. Last night Pedro burned it."
THE PLACE OF THE GODS
by
Stephen Vincent Benêt
The
north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden
to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search
for metal, and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a
priest. Afterward, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the
rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great
river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods; this is most
strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name, though we know its name. It is
there that spirits live, and demons; it is there that there are the ashes of
the Great Burning. These things are forbidden; they have been forbidden since
the beginning of time.
My
father is a priest; I am the son of a priest. I have been in the Dead Places
near us with my father. At first I was afraid. When my father went into the
house to search for the metal, I stood by the door, and my heart felt small and
weak. It was a dead man's house, a spirit house. It did not have the smell of
man, though there were old bones in a corner. But it is not fitting that a
priest's son should show fear. I looked at the bones in the shadow and kept my
voice still.
Then
my father came out with the metal—a good, strong piece. He looked at me with
both eyes, but I had not run away. He gave me the metal to hold. I took it and
did not die. So he knew that I was truly his son and would be a priest in my
time. That was when I was very young. Nevertheless, my brothers would not have
done it, though they are good hunters. After that, they gave me the good piece
of meat and the warm comer by the fire. My father watched over me; he was glad
that I should be a priest. But when I boasted or wept without reason, he
punished me more strictly than my brothers. That was right.
After a time, I myself was allowed to go into
the dead houses and search for metal. So I learned the ways of those houses,
and if I saw bones, I was no longer afraid. The bones
are
light and old; sometimes they will fall into dust if you touch them. But that
is a great sin.
I was taught the chants and the spells. I was
taught how to stop the running of blood from a wound, and many secrets. A
priest must know many secrets—that was what my father said. If the hunters
think we know all things by chants and spells, they may believe so; it does not
hurt them. I was taught how to read in the old books and how to make the old
writings; that was hard and took a long time. My knowledge made me happy; it
was like a fire in my heart. Most of all, I liked to hear of the Old Days and
the stories of the gods. I asked myself many questions that I could not answer,
but it was good to ask them. At night, I would lie awake and listen to the
wind; it seemed to me that it was the voice of the gods as they flew through
the air.
We
are not ignorant like the Forest People; our women spin wool on the wheel, our
priests wear a white robe. We do not eat grubs from the tree,
we have not forgotten the old writings, although they are hard to understand.
Nevertheless, my knowledge and my lack of knowledge burned in me; I wished to
know more. When I was a man at last, I came to my father and said, "It is
time for me to go on my journey. Give me leave."
He
looked at me for a long time, stroking his beard, then
he said at last, "Yes. It is time."
That night, in the house of priesthood, I
asked for and received purification. My body hurt, but my spirit was a cool
stone. It was my father himself who questioned me about my dreams.
He bade me look into the smoke of the fire
and see. I saw and told what I saw. It was what I have always seen—a river and,
beyond, it, a great Dead Place, and in it the gods walking. I have always
thought about that. His eyes were stern when I told him; he was no longer my
father but a priest. He said, "This is a strong dream."
"It
is mine," I said, while the smoke waved and my head felt light. They were
singing the Star song in the outer chamber, and it was like the buzzing of
bees in my head.
He
asked me how the gods were dressed, and I told him how they were dressed. We
know how they were dressed from the book, but I saw them as if they were before
me. When I had finished, he threw the sticks three times and studied them as
they fell.
"This
is a very strong dream," he said. "It may eat you up."
"I am not afraid," I said, and
looked at him with both eyes. My voice sounded thin in my ears, but that was
because of the smoke.
He
touched me on the breast and the forehead. He gave me the bow and the three
arrows.
"Take
them," he said. "It is forbidden to travel east. It is forbidden to
cross the great river. It is forbidden to go to the Place of the Gods. All
these things are forbidden."
"All
these things are forbidden," I said, but it was my voice that spoke, and
not my spirit. He looked at me again.
"My
son," he said, "once I had young dreams. If your dream does not eat
you up, you may be a great priest. If it eats you, you are still my son. Now go
on your journey."
I
went fasting, as is the law. My body hurt, but not my heart. When the dawn
came, I was out of sight of the village. I prayed and purified myself, waiting
for a sign. The sign was an eagle. It flew east.
Sometimes
signs are sent by bad spirits. I waited again on the flat rock, fasting, taking
no food. I was very still; I could feel the sky above me and the earth beneath.
I waited till the sun was beginning to sink. Then three deer passed in the
valley, going east; they did not wind me or see me. There was a white fawn with
them—a very great sign.
I
followed them at a distance, waiting for what would happen. My heart was
troubled about going east, yet I knew that I must go. My head hummed with my
fasting; I did not even see the panther spring upon the white fawn. But before
I knew it, the bow was in my hand. I shouted and the panther lifted his head
from the fawn. It is not easy to kill a panther with one arrow, but the arrow
went through his eye and into his brain. He died as he tried to spring; he
rolled over, tearing at the ground. Then I knew I was meant to go east; I knew
that was my journey. When the night came, I made my fire and roasted meat.
It
is eight suns' journey to the east and a man passes by many Dead Places. The
Forest People are afraid of them, but I am not. Once I made my fire on the edge
of a Dead Place at night and, next morning, in the dead house, I found a good
knife, little rusted. That was small to what came afterward, but it made my
heart feel big. Always when I looked for game, it was in front of my arrow, and
twice I passed hunting parties of the Forest People without their knowing. So I
knew my magic was strong and my journey clean, in spite of the law.
Toward
the setting of the eighth sun, I came to the banks of the great river. It was
half a day's journey after I had left the god road; we do not use the god roads
now, for they are falling apart into great blocks of stone, and the forest is
safer going. A long way off, I had seen the water through trees, but the trees
were thick. At last I came out upon an open place at the top of a cliff. There
was the great river below, like a giant in the sun. It is very long, very wide.
It could eat all the streams we know and still be thirsty. Its name is
Ou-dis-sun, the Sacred, the Long. No man of my tribe
has seen it; not even my father, the priest. It was magic and I prayed.
Then I raised my eyes and looked south. It
was there—the Place of the Gods.
How
can I tell what it was like? You do not know. It was there, in the red light,
and they were too big to be houses. It was there, with the red light upon it,
mighty and ruined. I knew that in another moment the gods would see me. I
covered my eyes with my hands and crept back into the forest.
Surely,
that was enough to do, and live. Surely, it was enough to spend the night,upon the cliff. The Forest People themselves do not come
near. Yet, all through the night, I knew that I should have to cross the river
and walk in the Place of the Gods, although the gods ate me up. My magic did
not help me at all, and yet there was a fire in my bowels, a fire in my mind.
When the sun rose, I thought, "My journey has been clean. Now I will go
home from my journey." But even as I thought so, I knew I could not. If I
went to the Place of the Gods, I would surely die, but if I did not go, I could
never be at peace with my spirit again. It is better to lose one's life than
one's spirit, if one is a priest and the son of a priest.
Nevertheless,
as I made the raft, the tears ran out of my eyes. The Forest People could have
killed me without fight, if ihey had come upon me then, but they did not come.
When the raft was made, I said the sayings for the dead and painted myself for
death. My heart was cold as a frog and my knees like water, but the burning in
my mind would not let me have peace. As I pushed the raft from the shore, I
began my death song; I had the right. It was a fine song. I sang:
'7 am John, son of John. My people are
the Hill
People.
They are the men. I go into the Dead Places, but I am not slain. I take the
metal from the Dead Places, but I am not
blasted.
I
travel upon the god roads and am not afraid. E-yah!
I
have killed the panther, I have killed the fawn! E-yah! I have come to the
great river. No man has
It
is forbidden to go east, but I have gone; forbidden
to go on the great river, but I am there. Open
your hearts you spirits, and hear my song. Now I go to the Place of the Gods; 1 shall not return. My body is painted for death and my limbs weak,
but my
heart is big as I go to the Place of
the
Gods!"
All the same, when I came to the Place of the
Gods, I was afraid, afraid. The current of the great river is very strong; it
gripped my raft with its hands. That was magic, for the river itself is wide
and calm. I could feel evil spirits about me in the bright moming; I could feel
their breath on my neck as I was swept down the stream. Never have I been so
much alone. I tried to think of my knowledge, but it was a squirrel's heap of
winter nuts. There was no strength in my knowledge any more and I felt small
and naked as a new-hatched bird— alone upon the great river, the servant of the
gods.
Yet,
after a while, my eyes were opened and I saw. I saw both banks of the river; I
saw that once there had been god roads across it, though now they were broken
and fallen like broken vines. Very great they were, and wonderful and
broken—broken in the time of the Great Burning, when the fire fell out of the
sky. And always the current took me nearer to the Place of the Gods, and the
huge ruins rose higher before my eyes.
I do
not know the customs of rivers; we are the People of the Hills. I tried to
guide my raft with the pole, but it spun about. I thought the river meant to
take me past the Place of the Gods and out into the Bitter Water of the
legends.
I
grew angry then; my heart felt strong. I said aloud, "I am a priest and
the son of a priest!" The gods heard me; they showed me how to paddle with
the pole on one side of the raft. The current changed itself; I drew near to
the Place of the Gods.
When
I was very near, my raft struck and turned over. I can swim in our lakes; I
swam to the shore. There was a great spike of rusted metal sticking out into
the river; I hauled myself up upon it and sat there, panting. I had saved my
bow and two arrows and the knife I found in the Dead Place, but that was all.
My raft went whirling downstream toward the Bitter Water. I looked after it,
and thought if it had trod me under, at least I would be safely dead. Nevertheless,
when I had dried my bowstring and restrung it, I walked forward to the Place of
the Gods.
It felt like ground underfoot; it did not
burn me. It is not true—what some of the tales say—that the ground there burns
forever, for I have been there. Here and there were the marks and stains of the
Great Burning on the ruins, that is true. But they
were old marks and old stains. It is not true, either—what some of our priests
say—that it is an island covered with fogs and enchantments. It is not. It is a
great Dead Place—greater than any Dead Place we know. Everywhere in it there
are god roads; though most are cracked and broken. Everywhere there are the
ruins of the high towers of the gods.
How
shall I tell what I saw? I went carefully, my strung bow in my hand, my skin
ready for danger. There should have been the wailings of spirits and the
shrieks of demons, but there were not. It was very silent and sunny where I had
landed; the wind and the rain and the birds that drop seeds had done their
work; the grass grew in the cracks of the broken stone. It is a fair island; no
wonder the gods built there. If I had come there a god, I also would have
built.
How
shall I tell what I saw? The towers are not all broken; here and there one
still stands, like a great tree in a forest, and the birds nest high. But the
towers themselves look blind, for the gods are gone. I saw a fish hawk,
catching fish in the river. I saw a little dance of white butterflies over a
great heap of broken stones and columns. I went there and looked about me;
there was a carved stone with cut letters, broken in half. I can read letters,
but I could not understand these. They said ubtreas. There was also the shattered image of a man
or a god. It had been made of white stone and he wore his hair tied back like a
woman's. His name was Ashing, as I read on the cracked half of a stone. I
thought it wise to pray to Ashing, though I do not know that god.
How
shall I tell what I saw? There was no smell of man left on stone or metal. Nor
were there many trees in that wilderness of stone. There are many pigeons,
nesting and dropping in the towers; the gods must have loved them, or, perhaps,
they used them for sacrifice. There are wild cats that roam the god roads,
green-eyed, unafraid of man. At night they wail like demons, but they are not
demons. The wild dogs are more dangerous, for they hunt in a pack, but them I
did not meet till later. Everywhere there are the carved stones, carved with
magical numbers and words.
I
went north; I did not try to hide myself. When a god or a demon saw me, then I
would die, but meanwhile I was no longer afraid. My hunger for knowledge burned
in me; there was so much that I could not understand. After a while, I knew
that my belly was hungry. I could have hunted for my meat, but I did not hunt.
It is known that the gods did not hunt as we do; they got their food from
enchanted boxes and jars. Sometimes these are still found in the Dead Places.
Once, when I was a child and foolish, I opened such a jar and tasted it and
found the food sweet. But my father found out and punished me for it strictly;
for, often, that food is death. Now, though, I had long gone past what was
forbidden, and I entered the likeliest towers, looking for the food of the
gods.
I
found it at last in the ruins of a great temple in the mid-city. A mighty
temple it must have been, for the roof was painted like the sky at night with
its stars—that much I could see, though the colors were faint and dim. It went
down into great caves and tunnels—perhaps they kept their slaves there. But
when I started to climb down, I heard the squeaking of rats, so I did not go. Rats
are unclean, and there must have been many tribes of them, from the squeaking.
But near there I found food, in the heart of a ruin, behind a door that still
opened. I ate only the fruits from the jars; they had a very sweet taste. There
was drink, too, in bottles of glass; the drink of the gods is strong and made
my head swim. After I had eaten and drunk, I slept on the top of a stone, my
bow at my side.
When
I woke, the sun was low. Looking down from where I lay, I saw a dog sitting on
his haunches. His tongue hung out of his mouth; he looked as if he were
laughing. He was a big dog with a gray-brown coat, as big as a wolf. I sprang
up and shouted at him, but he did not move; he just sat there as if he were
laughing. I did not like that. When I reached for a stone to throw, he moved
swiftly out of the way of the stone. He was not afraid of me; he looked at me
as if I were meat. No doubt I could have killed him with an arrow, but I did
not know if there were others. Moreover, night was falling.
I
looked about me. Not far away there was a great, broken god road, leading
north. The towers were high enough, but not so high, and while many of the dead
houses were wrecked, there were some that stood. I went toward this god road,
keeping to the heights of the ruins, while the dog followed. When I had
reached the god road, I saw that there were others behind him. If I had slept
later, they would have come upon me asleep and torn out my throat. As it was,
they were sure enough of me; they did not hurry. When I went into the dead
house, they kept watch at the entrance; doubtless they thought they would have
a fine hunt. But a dog cannot open a door, and I knew, from the books, that the
gods did not like to live on the ground but on high.
I had just found a door I could open when the
dogs decided to rush. Ha! They were surprised when I shut the door in their
faces; it was a good door, of strong metal. I could hear their foolish baying
beyond it, but I did not stop to answer them. I was in darkness; I found stairs
and climbed. There were many stairs, turning around till my head was dizzy. At
the top was another door; I found the knob and opened it. I was in a long small
chamber. On one side of it was a bronze door that could not be opened, for it
had no handle. Perhaps there was a magic word to open it, but I did not have
the word. I turned to the door in the opposite side of the wall. The lock of it
was broken and I opened it and went in.
Within,
there was a place of great riches. The god who lived there must have been a
powerful god. The first room was a small anteroom. I waited there for some time, telling the
spirits of the place that I came in peace and not as a robber. When it seemed
to me that they had had time to hear me, I went on. Ah, what riches! Few, even,
of the windows had been broken; it was all as it had been. The great windows
that looked over the city had not been broken at all, though they were dusty
and streaked with many years. There were coverings on the floors, the colors
not greatly faded, and the chairs were soft and deep. There were pictures upon
the walls, very strange, very wonderful. I remember one of a bunch of flowers
in a jar; if you came close to it, you could see nothing but bits of color, but
if you stood away from it, the flowers might have been picked yesterday. It
made my heart feel strange to look at this picture,
and to look at the figure of a bird, in some hard clay, on a table and see it
so like our birds. Everywhere there were books and writings, many in tongues
that I could not read. The god who lived there must have been a wise god, and
full of knowledge. I felt I had a right there, as I sought knowledge
also.
Nevertheless, it was strange. There was a
washing place, but no water; perhaps the gods washed in air. There was a
cooking place, but no wood, and though there was a machine to cook food, there
was no place to put fire in it. Nor were there candles or
lamps. There were things that looked like lamps, but they had neither
oil nor wick. All these things were magic, but I touched them and lived; the
magic had gone out of them. Let me tell one thing to show. In the washing
place, a thing said "Hot," but it was not hot to the touch; another
thing said "Cold," but it was not cold. This must have been a strong
magic, but the magic was gone. I do not understand—they had ways—I wish that I
knew.
It
was close and dry and dusty in the house of the god. I have said the magic was
gone, but that is not true; it had gone from the magic things, but it had not
gone from the place. I felt the spirits about me, weighing upon me. Nor had I
ever slept in a Dead Place before, and yet, tonight, I must sleep there. When I
thought of it, my tongue felt dry in my throat, in spite of my wish for
knowledge. Almost I would have gone down again and faced the dogs, but I did
not.
I
had not gone through all the rooms when the darkness fell. When it fell, I went
back to the big room looking over the city and made fire. There was a place to
make fire and a box with wood in it, though I do not think they cooked there. I
wrapped myself in a floor covering and slept in front of the fire.
Now
I tell what is very strong magic. I woke in the midst
of the night. When I woke, the fire had gone out and I was cold. It seemed to
me that all around me there were whisperings and voices. I closed my eyes to
shut them out. Some will say that I slept again, but I do not think that I
slept. I could feel the spirits drawing my spirit out of my body as a fish is
drawn on a line.
Why should I lie about it? I am a priest and
the son of a priest. If there are spirits, as they say, in the small Dead
Places near us, what spirits must there not be in that great Place of the Gods?
And would not they wish to speak after such long years? I know that I felt
myself drawn as a fish is drawn on a line. I had stepped out of my body; I
could see my body asleep in front of the cold fire, but it was not I. I was
drawn to look out upon the city of the gods.
It
should have been dark, for it was night, but it was not dark. Everywhere there
were lights—lines of light, circles and blurs of light—ten thousand torches
would not have been the same. The sky itself was alight; you could barely see
the stars for the glow in the sky. I thought to myself, "This is strong
magic," and trembled. There was a roaring in my ears like the rushing of
rivers. Then my eyes grew used to the light and my ears to the sound. I knew
that I was seeing the city as it had been when the gods were alive.
That was a sight indeed! Yes, that was a
sight! I could not have seen it in the body—my body would have died. Everywhere
went the gods, on foot and in chariots; there were gods beyond number and
counting, and their chariots blocked the streets. They had turned night to day
for their pleasure; they did not sleep with the sun. The noise of their coming
and going was the noise of many waters. It was magic what they could do; it was
magic what they did.
I
looked out of another window; the great vines of their bridges were mended and
the god roads went east and west. Restless, restless were the gods, and always
in motion! They burrowed tunnels under rivers; they flew in the air. With
unbelievable tools they did giant works; no part of the earth was safe from
them, for, if they wished for a thing, they summoned it from the other side of
the world. And always, as they labored and rested, as they feasted and made
love, there was a drum in their ears—the pulse of the giant city, beating and
beating like a man's heart.
Were
they happy? What is happiness to the gods? They were great, they were mighty, they were wonderful and terrible. As I looked upon them and
their magic, I felt like a child; but a little more, it seemed to me, and they
would lay their hands upon the stars. I saw them with wisdom beyond wisdom and
knowledge beyond knowledge. And yet not all they did was well done, and yet
their wisdom could not but grow until all was peace.
Then
I saw their fate come upon them, and that was terrible past speech. It came
upon them as they walked the streets of their city. I have been in the fights
with the Forest People; I have seen men die. But this was not like that. When
gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know. It was fire falling out of
the sky and a mist that poisoned. It was the time of the Great Burning and the
Destruction. They ran about like ants in the streets—poor gods, poor gods! Then
the towers began to fall. A few escaped—yes, a few. The legends tell it. But
even after the city had become a Dead Place, for many years the poison was
still in the ground. I saw it happen; I saw the last of them die. It was
darkness over the broken city and I wept.
All
this, I saw. I saw it as I have told it; though not in the body. When I woke in
the morning, I was hungry, but I did not think first of my hunger, for my heart
was perplexed and confused. I knew the reason for the Dead Places, but I did
not see why it had happened. It seemed to me it should not have happened, with
all the magic they had. I went through the house looking for an answer. There
was so much in the house I could not understand, and yet I am a priest and the
son of a priest. It was like being on the side of the great river at night,
with no light to show the way.
Then I saw the dead god. He was sitting in
his chair by the window, in a room I had not entered before, and, for the first
moment, I thought that he was alive. Then I saw the skin on the back of his
hand—it was like dry leather. The room was shut, hot and dry; no doubt that had
kept him as he was. At first I was afraid to approach him; then the fear left
me. He was sitting, looking out over his city; he was dressed in the clothes of
the gods. His age was neither young nor old; I could not tell his age. But
there was wisdom in his face, and great sadness. You could see that he would
not run away. He had sat at his window, watching his city die; then he himself
had died. But it is better to lose one's life than one's spirit; and you could
see from the face that his spirit had not been lost. I knew that, if I touched
him, he would fall into dust; and yet, there was something unconquered in the
face.
That
is all of my story, for then I knew he was a man. I
knew then that they had been men, neither gods nor demons. It is a great
knowledge, hard to tell and believe. They were men; they went a dark road, but
they were men. I had no fear after that. I had no fear going home, though twice
I fought off the dogs and once I was hunted for two days by the Forest People.
When I saw my father again, I prayed and was purified.
He
touched my lips and my breast; he said, "You went away a boy. You come
back a man and a priest."
I
said, "Father, they were men! I have been in the Place of the Gods and
seen it! Now slay me if it is the law, but still I know they were men."
He
looked at me out of both eyes. He said, "The law is not always the same
shape. You have done what you have done. I could not have done it in my time,
but you come after me. Tell!"
I
told and he listened. After that, I wished to tell all the people, but he
showed me otherwise. He said, "Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat
too much truth at once, you may die of the truth. It was not idly that our
fathers forbade the Dead Places." He was right; it is better the truth
should come littie by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in
the old days they ate knowledge too fast.
Nevertheless,
we make a beginning. It is not for the metal alone we go to the Dead Places
now; there are the books and the writings. They are hard to learn. And the
magic tools are broken, but we can look at them and wonder. At least, we make a
beginning, And, when I am chief priest we shall go
beyond the great river. We shall go to the Place of the Gods —the place
Newyork—not one man but a company. We shall
walk in
the broken streets and say its name aloud, without fear. We shall look for the
images of gods and find the god Ashing and the others—the gods Lincoln
and Biltmore
and Moses. But they were men who built the city; they
were not gods or demons. They were men. I remember the dead man's face. They
were men who were here before us. We must build again.
THE PHANTOM SETTER
by
Robert Murphy
Not
long after Jack Barlow rented a small house and moved into the pretty, little
mountain village to run a timbering operation, he was standing at his back door
late one afternoon when a big, gaunt blue-ticked setter trotted through the
yard. He wondered to whom it belonged and whether it would be any good on
grouse. He had always loved grouse shooting and hadn't been able to do any of
it for five or six years; now that he was back in grouse country and hadn't a
dog, he wanted to meet someone who did have one with whom he could shoot until
he could get one of his own.
It
was the first setter he had seen in the village, and he called to it. The dog
stopped, turned its head toward him, looked at him for a long moment in an
oddly speculative way, wagged its tail slightly and went on.
This
piqued him a little, for he had a way with dogs. They liked him at sight, and
any dog which didn't hate the human race always came to him when he called it.
This was the first one within his recollection that hadn't, and certainly the
first one that had seemed to sum him up, make a gesture of friendliness and
then dismiss him. It had seemed to say that it had more important things to do
than pause for a pat on the head, no matter how pleasant this might be.
He
was still thinking about the setter when he walked down the street to the
little hotel where he had most of his meals, for he hadn't found a housekeeper
yet. After he finished his dessert, he went into the living room, sat down and
waited until the proprietor—a tall, middle-aged man named Gibney —had finished
his dinner and joined him. They talked a little about the weather and the
lumbering, and then Barlow asked, "The grouse season opens pretty soon,
doesn't it?"
Gibney
gave him a rather odd look. "Grouse?" he asked. "Oh, yes, it
starts in about a week. You a grouse hunter?"
"I've
been one since I could carry a gun," Barlow said, "but I've been in
the wrong kind of country for the past five
years. I'd like to start in again. There was a big
setter in my
yard a while ago, and I thought I'd ask you----------- "
Gibney
interrupted him. "Is that why you came here?" he asked.
This
seemed like a strange question to Barlow. "Here?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, is that why
you came to town? Grouse?"
"I came to town for
the lumbering. Surely you know that."
"Why"—Gibney
said and blinked—"why, yes, so I do." He got up, gave Barlow another
odd look and said, "Well, make yourself
comfortable. I've got to write some letters."
He
turned to go out of the room, but Barlow wasn't through with him yet. "I
wanted to ask you who owned the setter," he said, "and if it was any
good on grouse."
Gibney took a few steps, stopped and half
turned. "Nobody owns him," he said, "and nobody ever will. From
all I hear he's as good a grouse dog as you're liable to find. But if I were
you I'd let him alone."
Gibney
started to walk again. He went out of the room, his footfalls fading down the
hall, and Barlow stared after him. He couldn't imagine what had got into the
man, who had always seemed friendly and sensible enough before. He was
apparently still friendly; his tone hadn't been hostile or unpleasant; but it
was hard to find him sensible. Why would a sensible man warn him against a dog
that was both ownerless and good at his work? Was there some rivalry over the
beast in the village, with trouble in the offing for anyone—any stranger,
especially—who got interested in him? Barlow was well aware that there were
occasionally some strange characters in out-of-the-way mountain villages, but
what did that have to do with Gibney's question as to why he, Barlow, had come
there? Gibney knew—and had known all along—that he was getting out timber.
Gibney had even advised him, when he had first started, what local men to hire
and what men to leave alone.
None
of it made sense. Barlow shook his head and went out of the hotel. When he was
on the street he paused for a moment, looking about, wondering what to do with himself. He didn't want to return to his house; it was too
early to go to bed, and he didn't feel like sitting in the little old-fashioned
living room wondering what Gibney had meant. There was a fog now, and the few
lights along the street were haloed and dim. The eaves along the porch roof of
the hotel dripped in a melancholy way, and the village—which was only a few
scattered houses, the hotel and a store—seemed to have withdrawn into the
mist and partially disappeared. Half a block away there was a diffused reddish
glow, and Barlow remembered then that he previously had noticed a bar sign in
that direction. He had stayed away from it, not being much of a drinker, but
tonight he thought it would be better than his empty house; he walked down the
street and went in.
It
was not much of a place, made by knocking down the wall between two rooms in an
old house. There was a homemade bar with a dirty mirror and a few bottles
behind it, several battered tables and an old jukebox; the light was dim. He
had met the man behind the bar, so he nodded to him, moved to the bar and asked
for a beer. When it came he picked it up and looked around. At the other end of
the room three men' were seated around one of the tables, and Barlow was
surprised to see that they didn't look like most of the natives he had seen around
the village.
Their
clothes were better; they looked more like retired city men,
and not poor ones either. Each one had a drink in front of him, and they were
talking in a desultory way. He was so bemused at seeing them there, in that
dingy place, that he stared at them. They looked back at him uninterestedly,
and after a moment he remembered his manners and turned away.
"Do
those men live here?" he asked the bartender in a low voice.
"Them?"
the bartender asked, inclining his head slightly. "No. They all got little
houses—fancy cabins, sort of—outside of town and come up about this time of
year."
"What
for?"
Barlow asked. "What could they do here?"
"They
say they hunt them grouse," the bartender said.
"But nobody sees them doing it very often."
"Ah,"
Barlow said and walked over to their table. "Gentlemen," he said,
"my name is Barlow. I don't want to intrude, but I'm a grouse hunter, and
Jerry tells me that all of you are too. Would you mind if I sat down?"
The three of them seemed to withdraw into
themselves. They looked at him somewhat stonily, with an obvious lack of
enthusiasm, for a long moment; then the tallest of them spoke up.
"Ah," he said in a grudging tone. "Yes. Do sit down. My name is
Roberts. This is Charley Deakyne, and that's Bill Farley to your right."
Deakyne was a chunky, sandy-haired man, and
Farley had a square, ruddy face; all three of them wore good tweeds and had an
executive look about them. They nodded to him with no change of expression,
with no warmth whatever, and Barlow was suddenly thoroughly fed up with them.
"I'm
sorry," he said. "I seem to have come along at an inopportune
time." He turned away, went back to the bar, swallowed his beer, paid for
it and with a nod at the bartender walked out of the place. As he went out the
door he glanced quickly back at the three men; none of them had moved.
The
fog was, if anything, thicker than when he had gone in and, as he walked
through it back to his house, he began to simmer with an anger that was half
bafflement. What the devil, he wondered, was wrong with everybody? The three
deadpan executive types, he was sure, had manners if they felt like using them;
the hotel proprietor didn't make sense. It seemed to happen when he mentioned
grouse—which, in his previous experience, had always brought men together for
lively and pleasant talk; for grouse hunters were a dedicated lot and had much
to say to one another. It was certainly different in this place.
The
rest of the week he was busy, running about in his jeep to the four places where
he had men working in the bright autumn woods and seeing to the sawing up of
his logs after they were trucked to the sawmill. He kept a sharp eye out for
grouse as he moved around or bumped over the logging roads, but saw only two or
three of them. It looked as though the shooting was going to be very poor, and
he began to feel discouraged about it; in the old days, moving about as he had
been moving, he would have seen dozens of birds. A good dog would have been a
godsend to him, and he saw no chance of getting one.
On
Sunday afternoon, at loose ends and still feeling discouraged, he got his gun
out of its case and took it out on the back porch to clean the grease out of
it. He was working with rags and cleaning rod when he looked up and was
startled to see the big setter sitting ten feet away in the grass with its head
cocked to one side, looking at him. It waved its tail gently. It was rather old
and ribby, bigger than people want setters any more, and there was a ring
around its neck where the hair was very thin, as though a collar had chafed it
badly. Barlow stopped rubbing the gun; he almost stopped breathing. His head
was instantly filled with wild schemes to get the beast into the house or the
garage, and he frantically cast about in his mind to remember where there was
something he could use for a leash. The dog somehow seemed to sense what he
was thinking, moved off several steps and, as •some dogs do, raised
its upper lip slightly and grinned at him.
This
manifestation, at once sardonic and as plain as words would have been, brought
Barlow back to earth again. It indicated to him that the dog knew perfectly
what he had been thinking, that such things had been tried on it many times
before and that it didn't intend to be taken in. Barlow stood the gun in the
corner of the porch and grinned.
"All
right," he said. "We won't try to fence you in. All grouse hunters
are crazy, but this one isn't as crazy as all that." He stepped off the
porch. "Come on," he said, "let's take a walk."
The
dog watched until he reached the back of his lot, where the woods began. There
he stopped and waved an arm, calling it on. It came past him at a run and, as
they got into the woods and moved on, it began to hunt, quartering back and
forth in front of him, never too far away. It was a delight to Barlow to be in
the woods again, moving through, the crimson and gold of maple and beech and
the somber gloom of the hemlock thickets with a dog working in front of him.
It
was like the one or two really good dogs he had owned years ago, covering an
extraordinary amount of ground at a fast and steady pace, never beyond his
view. It made him feel, as he had felt with those fine dogs of the past, as
though there was a sort of empathy between them. No word need be said; the dog
acted as a part of the hunter, a more sensitive extension of the man, never out
of touch.
Presently
he saw how good it really was; at the edge of a witch-hopple thicket it
suddenly stopped, crept forward with its belly low for a few steps and stopped
again. Barlow stopped himself, for the dog was not pointing yet; either the
bird was still stirring a little or the dog wasn't quite sure of its location.
Suddenly, with great caution, the dog moved off to the right and, taking a wide
half circle, faced Barlow again from the other side of the thicket and froze.
The bird had been running in front of them, and the dog had swung around it,
headed it off and stopped it. It had been a beautiful performance.
Barlow
began to walk in, tingling with expectation. When he reached the middle of the
thicket, a big, old grouse rose from under his feet with its booming thunder of
wings, angled up through an opening in the trees with its tail spread wide and
disappeared. To see a grouse rise again in the autumn woods, after the dog had
handled it so well, brought a lump to Barlow's throat. With the curious
dichotomy of the hunter he loved both the bird and the hunting of it; and he
had neither seen the bird nor hunted it for a long time.
He
called the dog; it came without hesitation and sat down beside him. As he
gently stroked its head, he knew that he wanted it more than he had wanted
anything for years, and that he couldn't have it. There was no way to bind it
to him; its actions in his yard had shown him plainly enough—even if
Gibney,
the hotelkeeper, hadn't told him—that it would go its own way and come to him
when it wanted to. He wondered if that was why he had been warned against it.
Had Gibney seen people make fools of themselves over
it before and warned him out of kindness, or was there more? He had a sudden,
inexplicable feeling that there was, that he had been seduced by a strange,
masterless dog into an experience that he would be sorry for. He put his hand
under the dog's jaw to raise its head and look into its eyes, but it broke away
from him and started to hunt again. He watched it for a moment, rather
disturbed but unable to leave it, and followed.
They
found no other grouse, which didn't surprise Barlow; he hadn't expected that
they would find any so close to the village. He was beginning to think of
turning back when they came out onto a road, which Barlow recognized as the one
which wound around the hills and finally went through the village. There was a
car parked 700 or 800 yards away, and it started toward them. When it reached
them it stopped, and Barlow recognized the driver as the man named Roberts,
whom he had seen in the bar.
"Good
afternoon, Barlow," Roberts said. "I thought I'd find you about here.
Someone saw you leave the village with the dog, and from your direction I
guessed your course." He smiled slightly at Barlow and then switched his
attention to the dog, which turned its back on him and sat down.
"Ah,
yes," Barlow said. "Kind of you to go to all the
trouble. I suppose there's a phone call at the hotel, or someone wants
me."
"Not
that I know of," Roberts said. "I wanted to talk to you."
Barlow looked at him in surprise. He was
still looking at the dog, and there wasn't any more warmth or friendliness in
his voice than there had been in the bar. "Talk to me at home then,"
Barlow said in irritation. "I'm usually there in the evenings."
"I want to talk to you here,"
Roberts said, and his glance
swung to Barlow, cold with hostility. "Before----------- " He caught
himself.
"I don't want you around here, Barlow. I'll buy you out and give you a
very good profit."
Barlow
stared at him. "Will you, now?" he asked, checking his rising temper.
"Good. Bring a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash to my house
tonight at eight, and I'll go. Otherwise, stay out of my way. I don't like
you."
He
turned away, climbed the bank beside the road and started into the woods. The
dog stood up and followed him. He had gone about fifty feet when Roberts
shouted, "It's as much for your good as mine, you
fool! Go while you can! Go
before that accursed beast Go!
Go!"
Barlow
increased his pace and didn't turn around; the dog moved out, and the shouting
from the road diminished behind him and finally ceased.
The
dog left him shortly before he got back to his house. One moment it was
quartering about in front of him and the next it had vanished completely. He
didn't whistle or call; he knew it wouldn't be back that day and wondered with
a pang whether it would ever be back again. The shooting season started on the
morrow and, now that he had seen what the dog could do with an old grouse smart
enough to make a fool of an ordinary bird dog and live for a long time so close
to the village, a feeling of depression descended upon him. This depression
deepened when he thought of Roberts, who had acted almost like a madman.
Roberts, with his ridiculous offer —to which he had got an equally ridiculous
reply—and his shouting, was certainly a disturbed character; but the more
Barlow thought over what Roberts had said, the more it seemed as though the dog
was the cause of it. It seemed obvious that he wanted Barlow out of the village
because of the dog and had met him on the road to get ahead of the two others
with an offer, but why had he called the dog an accursed beast?
Barlow
was so engrossed in his puzzled thoughts when he entered the back door that at
first he didn't see Farley, he of the square, ruddy face in the bar, and jumped
when Farley said "Hello!" from the door of the living room. "I
didn't mean to startle you," Farley went on. "I thought you saw me. I
say, I'm sorry I acted such an ass the other night."
Barlow
had gathered himself and prepared to give Farley the same treatment he had
given Roberts, but this approach disarmed him. "It's all right," he
said. "Won't you sit down?" Farley took a chair, and Barlow studied
him. He was still wary, despite Farley's belated politeness, and said,
"Have you come to buy me out too?"
"Buy you out?" Farley asked.
"Why would I try to buy you out?"
"Roberts
offered to," Barlow said. "He waylaid me on the road."
Farley showed some signs of agitation; he
half stood up and then sat
down again. His face
hardened. "Why,
that------ "
he began and stopped. Then he smiled, a painful,
unhappy
grimace. "He obviously didn't succeed," he said. "He was always
too jumpy, too gruff, not diplomatic enough. He
probably meant, at first, to ask you what I'm going to ask you and somehow got
put off it."
"And what is that?"
"To let me shoot with
you."
Barlow
simply stared at him; it was the second one of them he'd stared at. "Let
you shoot with me?" he asked. "Why?"
"The
dog likes you," Farley said. "He went for a walk with you. Believe
me, Barlow, I'd give almost anything. It might work. Just
once, just once more." He was almost pleading now; he leaned
forward in his chair, and his hands twitched on the arms of it. "Just once. Please."
Barlow was astounded; maybe this one was mad too.
"Look," he said, "all of you treated me as though I had
cholera, and I've got to like the people I shoot with. You all
begin to show up after I'd been seen walking the dog. I don't
know what this dog's got that any really fine dog hasn't--------------- "
"You
don't?" Farley almost shouted at him. "You don't? You're lying! When
you came in here, you were so bemused that you didn't even see me, and that's
proof enough. Barlow, it's worth a thousand dollars to me, I tell you!" He
came out of his chair and started for Barlow, but Barlow put up one hand and
stopped him.
'That's enough," he said. "I want
no part of any of you.
Go get yourselves dogs with your thousand dollars and let me
alone. Now, if you'll excuse me--------- "
Farley got a pleading look on his face and
held up his
hands. "No!" he exclaimed. "You've got to listen to me,
Barlow. I'll give you two thousand. What other use do I have
for money any more? I loved grouse shooting, and it's been
thirty years since I've had any like that. There isn't any like it
any more. I've come back and come back, it won't look at me
and------ "
His
voice had been rising; he was like a man pleading for an extension of a loan or
something else he needed very badly, and Barlow turned away from him, went out
through the kitchen and headed for the woods. As he entered the edge of them he
turned and saw Farley at the back door. He pointed his finger at the man and
said, "Go away. I won't talk to you. And find that other one, Deakyne, and
tell him to stay away from here."
He
turned again and walked rapidly on, considerably upset by the scene and even
more confused.
The next day the grouse season opened, and
Barlow was up early. He had bought a supply of meat, and he put a big pan of it
out by the back porch. As he cooked his breakfast he made a number of trips to
the back door to look out and see if the dog had come, but there was no sign of
it; it still hadn't appeared by the time he finished his breakfast. Feeling
like a fool, he took his gun and coat out on the back porch and sat there,
hoping it would come, but it didn't. He waited for an hour, feeling more
foolish all the time; then he swore, got into the jeep and drove off to where
he had seen a bird or two in the past.
He
hunted until the middle of the afternoon and didn't see a grouse. Like most men
who are accustomed to hunt with a good dog, he had the feeling that he was
possibly passing birds that froze at his approach and that a dog would have found,
or that there were birds which had run on ahead of him like the one the setter
had stopped. Having seen the dog work, he missed it all the more.
It
was a day of mounting frustration, and the day following was just like it
except that he heard a grouse fly off and never saw it; he began to wish that
he had never seen the dog. On the third morning, discouraged and glum, he slept
an extra hour and finally got up as grumpy as a bear fresh out of hibernation;
when he looked out the back door, more out of habit than of hope, the dog was
sitting on the back porch. His grumpiness evaporated; he ran about and got the
pan of meat and took it out. The dog grinned at him before it began to eat.
"Ah,
you devil," he said to it, half in delight and half in exasperation,
"you should have lived in the days of the Spanish Inquisition. You'd have
been the chief torturer."
The
dog had finished eating by that time; it sat down and looked at him. For a
moment its eyes held an odd, cool expression of satisfaction. Just as though it has me exactly where it
wants me, he
thought. He had never seen a dog look quite that way before, and a little
shiver went up his spine. He shook it off, went into the house and came back
with his gunning coat and gun. The dog followed him to the jeep, and they drove
off.
Barlow
drove six miles to a very wild stretch of country he had marked long before as
a likely spot, parked the jeep off the road and started into the woods. The dog
began to quarter back and forth in front of him, its pale body flashing through
the sunlight patches of the autumn woods, and Barlow followed happily. They
went deeper into the woods, crossed a rocky, swift stream and got into a high,
golden beech woods dotted with somber patches of hemlock. It was a good place
for grouse, and Barlow began to feel the fine anticipation again.
Suddenly
he realized that the dog was not in front of him, that it had disappeared. He
stopped to listen for it, disturbed. As he stood there a cloud covered the sun,
and the woods darkened; a mean, cold little wind sprang up, rattling the dry
leaves and sighing in the hemlocks. The darkness increased, and Barlow heard a
distant rolling like thunder, and then suddenly the sun came out again and the
wind fell. The woods were sunny and still once more, and off to his left he saw
the dog again.
He
followed on. Presently it was borne in upon him that he had got into an area
which had never been timbered, a thing he had never expected to see. The trees
were huge, towering up around him; he had never seen their like except in one
or two small parks where the primitive growth had been carefully preserved.
Here, all around him, as far as he could see, there was not a sign that man had
ever been this way. He was so amazed by this, to find such an area in a country
which he knew had been thoroughly cut over forty or fifty years ago, that he
forgot for a time to watch the dog. He recalled it with a start and looked
around. Forty yards in front of him, in an opening piled with a tangle of
deadfall timber, he saw it standing on point.
He
moved in. As he stopped a little behind the dog, a grouse got up and, although
it flew straight away, he missed it. The dog didn't move, and he took another
step. A second grouse rose from the deadfall, half climbing and half flying,
with its tail spread wide. As it straightened and began to fly off, he knocked
it down. The dog still held steady and, as he stood there, staring, with an
empty gun, twelve more birds came up in singles and twos and threes and boomed
away.
He
was still standing there in disbelief when the dog brought in the dead grouse
and laid it in front of him. He picked it up, the bird he would rather hunt
than any other, soft and beautiful, big, of a gray cast, with the wide, banded
tail and the black ruffs on the neck. He held it for a moment, still
unbelieving, for no one had seen fourteen grouse together in that country for
thirty years. He looked at the dog, which had turned away to hunt again. It
seemed younger, somehow; its coat seemed shinier in the sun; it moved more
smoothly, and the worn ring around its neck was harder to see.
A
queer feeling of unreality took hold of Barlow as he moved off after it through
the great, ancient trees, a feeling that didn't seem to have validity, because
he could feel the weight of the dead grouse in his game pocket and the fading
warmth of it against his back. He didn't have much time to think about it, for
the dog soon pointed again. This time he took the first bird out of a flock of
ten and watched, with the sheer pleasure of a dedicated grouse hunter who loves
to see birds fly, while the remaining birds took off as the first flock had
done.
The
rest of the morning was like that; there were,grouse
everywhere, in flocks and by twos and threes and occasionally a single. It was
like a grouse hunter's dream of heaven, like the remembered days of his youth
when there were still plenty of birds. Sometimes he watched them go for the
pleasure of watching; occasionally he shot at a difficult single, passing up
the easier ones. When he had six birds he took the shells out of his gun and
stopped shooting, whistled to the dog and turned back. The dog came in and
followed behind him, as though it, too, was satisfied.
It
had been—with the birds, the shooting, the perfect
work of the dog and the wild beauty of the country—the happiest day he had
spent for many years; he had long since forgotten the feeling of unreality that
had descended upon him at first. It was recalled to him suddenly, with a sense
of shock, when he found a cougar's tracks in the sand along a small stream. He
had never seen the track of a cougar, the catamount of the early settlers; the
beast had been gone from the country before he was born, but there was no
question in his mind, from the size of the footprints, that
that was what it was. He stood looking at the tracks for a long time, trying to
believe that he saw the actual evidence of a living creature that he knew for
sure had been exterminated in that country by the turn of the century. All
around him grew the great trees that had been long gone, too, and, thinking
confusedly of these things, he suddenly realized that he hadn't got into a
section that had somehow been spared the attentions of white men, but that they
hadn't got there yet. He had gone back in time.
The
cold little shiver once more ran up his spine, and he looked quickly about. The
woods were still, dreaming quietly in the sun, and the dog was gone. He
whistled and called; a wild turkey gobbled from far away, and that was all.
And
then there was a rising roar all about him, and the sunlight was dimmed; a dark
and flickering shadow fell all around him, and he looked up to see a wide, dark
river of birds, seemingly without limit or beginning or end, between him and
the sky. He could pick out, here and there against the great river of bodies,
some pigeonlike shapes and the swift, pigeonlike beat of their wings and knew
that he was seeing what no man of his generation had ever seen: one of the
great flights of the passenger pigeons that were gone from the earth.
Any
remaining doubt that he may have had was wiped from his mind; a sudden fear
that he would never get back again, that he was lost and alone in a world that
was now gone, a fear that turned him cold all over, suddenly came upon him and
he started to run. He struggled up the steep side of the stream bed under the
roaring torrent of pigeons and ran up toward the crest of the mountain that he
had been descending a short time before, desperately fighting his way through
deadfalls and stumbling over rotting, fallen timber. When he reached the top,
scratched and bruised and dripping with sweat, he had to stop; there was a pain
like a knife in his side, and his heart sounded like a drum.
He leaned against a tree until his breathing
returned nearly to normal and his sight cleared and
saw the second-growth timber all around him; as far as he could see, back over
the way that he had come, there were no more of the great ancient trees, and
the pigeons had gone as if they had never existed. His sigh of relief was more like
a sob, and he started to walk again. In ten minutes he came out on the road and
saw the jeep parked where he had left it. He went up to it, thumped it to make
sure that it was real and got in. His bulky game pocket pushed him forward in
the seat, and he got out again. He took the six grouse out of his coat one by
one and laid them carefully and unbelievingly on the floor. Only then, as he
looked at them, did he recall that the limit was two a day now and wondered
what he would say if a game warden stopped him. He shook his head, got in and
started the engine.
He was a good deal calmer by evening, but he
had no desire to eat anything; after the dinner hour he walked to the hotel and
found Gibney in the living room by himself. Gib-ney glanced at him. "You
look shaken up," Gibney said, "so I guess you did it."
"Yes,"
he said, "I did it. Maybe you can tell me now why you warned me."
"Sit
down," Gibney said. "You won't believe what I'm about to say;
witchcraft isn't very popular any more."
"Witchcraft? I don't--------- "
"I
don't know what else to call it," Gibney said. "That's why I never
talk about it when another grouse hunter comes along. I don't enjoy being
called a fool."
"Another grouse
hunter?"
Barlow said. "You mean they
hear about it and come here—come here------------- " He realized he
was repeating himself and stopped. "I didn't hear about it," he said.
"I wanted to hunt grouse again, and then the dog
came into my yard, and then Roberts and Farley------------ "
"They've
been there," Gibney said. "And they want to get back. They'll do
anything, almost anything, to get back again."
Barlow
stared at him. "You mean the dog takes them?" he asked. He was
beginning to see now.
"The
dog took them," Gibney said. "He takes everybody once. Listen now.
Ten years ago that dog belonged to a man named Micheals. He was a
perfectionist, a strange man, mad about grouse hunting. He trained the dog, and
one day the dog did something that put him in a rage. So he hanged the
beast."
"Hanged him!" Barlow exclaimed, aghast. "Good heavens, man, whoever hangs a
dog?"
"Micheals
had spent some time among the Eskimos, hunting polar bear, and Eskimos hang
dogs they don't want. So Micheals hanged him. Didn't you see that ring around
his neck? By the time somebody cut him down he was, to all intents, dead. But
he wasn't dead, as a matter of fact. He came around again, and six months later
it was Micheals who was dead. His gun went off accidentally and killed
him."
Barlow didn't say anything.
"Pure accident maybe. But after that the dog waited for
grouse hunters. He'd appear and get into their good graces,
take a walk with them and show them how good he was and
then------- "
"Yes," Barlow
said.
"Did
the dog disappear for a while, and the sky darken and all that?"
"Yes," Barlow
said again.
"And
then after it had taken them into the past somewhere, on the best hunt of their
lives, it would never have anything to do with them again."
"Never?" Barlow asked. "Never?
There isn't any way
to------ "
"Do you want to be like Roberts and
Farley and Deakyne? Coming back and back, hoping, waiting? There's no future in
it, Barlow. Believe me, I know. I've heard it all."
Barlow
was silent for a long time, staring at the floor, remembering the impossible
flocks of grouse, the great trees, the pigeons, the day. He wasn't frightened
of that place now; he wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything, to go
back.
" 'Sorrow's crown of sorrow,' " Gibney said softly,
quoting Tennyson, " 'is remembering happier things.' "
"Yes,"
Barlow said once more. By a great effort of will he dispelled his longing and his
hopes. "Thank you," he said and stood up and walked out of the hotel.
The mist had come again, giving what he could see of the village an eerie and
ghostlike air. He could see the diffused glow of the neon sign on the bar,
where Farley and Roberts and Deakyne were doubtless sitting together, and he
shivered and turned from it and walked on.
THE BIG WHEEL
by
Fred McMorrow
The
little man did not look up from his book of poems when the sound of the engine
came through the window of his office, a sound that had no more business being
on Mechanic Street than what it belonged to, a Jupiter Custom 12, or the kind
of man or woman a Jupiter Custom 12 would belong to, whoever was behind the
wheel.
"Sammy," the little man said,
"go out and tell the man in the Jupiter Custom 12
to come in here. Then take his car and put it inside in the back."
Sammy
looked out the window. "Now, how in hell did you know that was a Jupiter
Custom 12, Mr. Deels?" Sammy asked. "You got eyes in your ears or
something?"
"You
get used to them," Mr. Deels said. "You'll catch on when you've been
with us a little longer. Go on now, before he starts blowing his horn."
Mr.
Deels went on reading his poems until, his eye jumping to the left side of a page, he saw the hem of a camel's-hair coat just beyond. He
looked up. "Welcome," Mr. Deels said. "My name is Mr. Deels.
Hell on wheels with Mr. Deels."
"Hello,
how are you," said the big man in the camel's-hair. "I heard you had
a Diana IV M around here, and I'd like to see it."
"That's a beautiful car you've got
there," said Mr. Deels.
"Yes, I know," the man said. "About the Diana IV
M------ "
"I
can imagine the time and money it must have cost just to find that car of
yours," Mr. Deels said.
"Yes.
If you don't mind, I'm interested in buying your Diana IV M, if you've got one,
and I'm willing to pay cash."
"I
know, I know," said Mr. Deels. "Cash."
He sighed and arose and closed his book and put it in a desk drawer and locked
it. "I'm just curious," he said. "Do you know how many Diana IV
M's there are in the world, Mr. Carmody?"
"I thought you'd recognize me,"
said Mr. Carmody. 110
"I suppose you're used
to it," Mr. Deels said.
"Everybody goes to the
movies," said Mr. Carmody.
"Movies?" Mr. Deels said. "Oh, yes. But I believe I asked you a
question."
"All right," Mr. Carmody said
impatiently, "if it makes you happy, I suppose there are fifty Diana IV
M's in the world."
Mr. Deels smiled and wiped his hands,
surprisingly small, clean and uncalloused for the owner of a garage on Mechanic
Street, on a piece of cheesecloth and dropped it in a trash basket. "Well,
Mr. Carmody," he said, "there are less than half as many Diana IV M's
in the world today as there are Jupiter Custom 12's. What's the matter? Didn't
you know that?"
"Why, no," Mr. Carmody said.
"I'm surprised at you," Mr. Deels
said. "I'm shocked."
"What?" Mr.
Carmody said.
"Yes," Mr. Deels said, "I'm
shocked that a man who drives a Jupiter Custom 12 doesn't know how many Diana
IV M's there are in the world."
"Well------ " said Mr. Carmody.
"Why do you want the Diana,
Mr. Carmody?"
"Why?"
Mr. Carmody said. "Because it's a great car and I've got the money to own
it, that's why. Look, you ask a lot of questions."
"I'm interested in people who go to so
much trouble just to buy ah automobile, coming down here and all," Mr.
Deels said. "It's a little game with me. I like to. find
out what their motives are."
"Motives?" Mr. Carmody said, and the famous features
began to flush and the nostrils quivered and grew taut. "What
are you, some kind of a nut? I mean, where the devil do you
get off, acting the way you do in a crazy little dump like this?
I mean, this is no way to treat a customer who's willing to
give you your price. I mean, you don't get customers like me
every day, do you? I mean--------- "
"No
offense," Mr. Deels said. "Really, no offense.
Let's take a look at your car."
Mr.
Carmody laughed. "My car?" he said. "What are you going to do,
offer me a trade-in? Don't you know who you're talking to?"
"You
want a Diana IV M, don't you?" Mr. Deels said. "Then let's take a
look at your car. This way."
He
led the way through the garage, through and between and over and past
incredible piles of leaf springs and mufflers and tires and carburetors and
engine blocks, and desiccated corpses of terrible old cars and trucks, to the
back wall where the Jupiter Custom 12 was. Off to one side some mechanics were
working on a Torquemada, apparently reconditioning it.
"Oh,
I get it!" Mr. Carmody said suddenly. "Of course!
Say, Mr. Deels, I'm awfully sorry. I should have realized."
"You
should have realized what, Mr. Carmody?" Mr. Deels said, his eyes
traveling over the Jupiter.
"Well,"
Mr. Carmody said, "maybe my car isn't as rare as a Diana, but it's pretty
close, and you probably want it as a piece of merchandise."
"A piece of what?" Mr. Deels said, walking around the Jupiter,
his hands gliding over the paint and chrome, feeling the nicks and dents.
"Merchandise," Mr. Carmody said.
"You know, goods, buy and sell!"
"Oh,
yes," Mr. Deels said. "Merchandise." He
leaned over into the cockpit and tried an inside door handle, and it jiggled
loosely, and his hand drew back as if he had touched a snake. He stepped back
and looked along the right side of the car, tracing the long scar of a
side-swipe or a drunken attempt to back up in a tight space.
"Get
in and start the motor, will you, Mr. Carmody," Mr. Deels said, folding
his arms.
Mr.
Carmody jumped in and slammed the door and yanked the choke out all the way and
stamped on the self-starter. The car urr-urr-urred, but would not start.
"Don't worry about that, Mr. Deels," Mr. Carmody said. "She's
just a little sluggish waking up, like all old girls her age." He
assaulted the starter again, but the engine would not kick over. "Come on,
you! Come on, damn you!" Urr-urr-urr-urr-urr. Urr-urr-urr-urr-urr. Zzzzzzzzzz. "Oh, hell!" Mr.
Carmody kicked at the fire wall and pounded the wheel with his fist, nostrils
flaring.
"Please," Mr. Deels said.
"Permit me." Mr. Carmody shrugged and got out, and Mr. Deels slid
behind the wheel. He moved his hands and feet about the controls like an
organist, and the Jupiter cleared her congested throat and spat and went into a
rhythmic purr. Mr. Deels touched the accelerator gently, watching the
tachometer and wincing as he listened to the palpitations and pings of metal
fatigue and owner neglect in the engine's heartbeat. He shut off the ignition.
"I understand that you own several
horses, Mr. Carmody," Mr. Deels said.
"I've got a few nags on the coast, I
guess," Mr. Carmody said.
"What are their names, Mr.
Carmody?" "Their names? What's that got to
do with anything?" "And how many times have you been married, Mr. Carmody?"
"Six,
though I don't see what my horses or my marriages— I mean, I don't see how it's
any of your business."
Mr.
Deels smiled. "You're absolutely right, Mr. Carmody," he said.
"Some of the nuts you got to put up with
in this world," Mr. Carmody said. "Reading poems in
a lousy little body-and-fender shop! Say, since we're getting personal,
and I'm in one of the arts, you might say, and I might
know something about poetry, maybe you wouldn't mind telling me what kind of
poems a kooky grease monkey reads? Who wrote it? Anybody I know?"
"Not very well," Mr. Deels said.
"Well, who?"
"I did," Mr. Deels said.
"You
did? I'll be damned. What's it about, the romance of grinding valves or getting
crankcase oil squirted in your face or something like that?"
"Some
of it," Mr. Deels said. "And about speed and touch
and movement and texture. But we were getting down to business."
"It's about time."
"Let
me show you the Diana," Mr. Deels said. "It's over there, through
that door."
"Wait
a minute," Mr. Carmody said. "What about my car?"
"What about it?" Mr. Deels said.
"Well,
don't you want to drive it? Don't you want to look it over a little more? Don't
you want to know what it's like, what you're getting?"
"I
know what it's like," Mr. Deels said. "I
know exactly what it's like. The Diana. This way."
"Some
businessman," Mr. Carmody said, following the silent Mr. Deels.
"Boy, you found a home on Mechanic Street!"
Mr.
Deels led Mr. Carmody into a little, one-car garage as like the main garage as
a hospital operating room is like a slaughterhouse. The floor was holy-stone
clean, the walls a subdued shade of green, indirectly lighted; along one.: wall hung racks of tools and spare parts
that glistened like silver. In the center, her nose pointing at the street
door, the Diana IV M, long, sleek, poised, waiting, alive, tensed, all of her
lovely, all of her thrilling to Mr. Carmody's eyes and to his heart, her chrome
seeming to blend into the ultimate midnight black of her body paint without
definition as if she were, like an animal, all of a piece rather than the
creation of so many components of metal, rubber and glass.
Mr.
Carmody tried to say something, but he was a dreamer who tries to scream and
finds his throat full of cotton. He swallowed hard and found his voice.
"She's like a woman," Mr. Carmody said.
"The
huntress of the night," Mr. Deels said. "The moon
herself."
"My
Lord," Mr. Carmody said. "Where'd you get her? What's she doing here? Who owned her? Have you got records on
her? Papers?"
"Papers?" Mr. Deels said. "This isn't a horse or a dog, Mr. Carmody, this is a Diana IV M. This isn't something that has
to be proved. She speaks for herself."
"Well, how will I know
who owned the car?"
"Why should you want
to know?"
"Well,
I want to be able to tell people, sure, this is a Diana IV M, there's less than
fifty cars like it in the whole world, a maharaja owned her, handful of
diamonds, weight in gold, you know."
"That's
the most important thing, isn't it, Mr. Carmody?" Mr. Deels said.
"You want to own her. Like you own the
Jupiter."
"She's
a Diana," Mr. Carmody said. "Now, look, Mr. Deels. Let's knock off
all this frick-frack, frick-frack. I want the car, I've got the money, I'll pay
whatever you ask and you don't have to bargain with me. Now who owned
her?"
"There's
only been one owner," Mr. Deels said, his hand caressing the Diana's
fender as if it were the flank of a sleek black animal. "An
impatient, unkind sort of man with no real appreciation or understanding of
cars like this. A man who would pay thousands of
dollars for a blooded horse and then shoot her if he could not break her spirit
the first time he rode her."
"Why'd he get rid of the car?"
"There
was an accident," Mr. Deels said. "Oh, don't worry,
we repaired what damage there was. Yes, there was an accident, and her owner
had no further use for her after that. He just couldn't handle a Diana. Tell me
something, Mr. Carmody: How did you know about the Diana?"
"Why,
I was—I mean, I heard about—wait a minute," Mr. Carmody said, and frowned.
"Funny. I can't for the life of me tell you just
who told me about the car—or even how to get here! Now, what do you think of
that? But somehow I knew where to go, and I knew it'd be here."
Mr.
Deels nodded slowly. "You've come to the right place," he said.
"How
could I forget something like that?" Mr. Carmody said. "Well, never
mind. I've got a checkbook here, Mr. Deels. You name the figure."
"Nothing."
"I didn't get
that."
"I
said the figure is nothing. Let's say it will be a simple trade. Your car for mine."
"Brother,"
Mr. Carmody said, "you've got yourself a deal! Except I'm not half as much
of a nut as you are."
"I don't
understand."
"I
mean I don't buy cars just by listening to the motor. For all I know, you've
got a busted-down old Model-T motor under that hood, and I'm going to see this
car move before I sign anything. Now let's get in and take a little ride around
the block, shall we?"
"Certainly,"
Mr. Deels said. He fished a set of keys out of his pocket. "Would you like
to drive?"
"Later,"
Mr. Carmody said. "You know the neighborhood."
"You
do know how to drive a Diana, don't you?" Mr.
Deels said.
"Listen,
buster," Mr. Carmody said, "I've smashed up more boats like this than
you ever laid a monkey wrench to." "I'm sure you have," Mr.
Deels said. "Get in." "I'll open the garage door for you,"
Mr. Carmody said. "That won't be necessary. Get in."
"Oh,
I get it. Electric eye. Pretty fancy for Mechanic
Street," Mr. Carmody said. He climbed in beside Mr. Deels, and the seat
seemed to come in and grip him fast, as if it had been made for his hips alone.
Mr.
Carmody had never heard an engine start as the Diana's did. There was really
nothing like sound, like ignition kicking off. Like an animal rising from
sleep, the Diana suddenly started to vibrate, to stretch and to come to life.
Mr. Deels touched the accelerator and they seemed to evaporate through the
garage door into Mechanic Street.
Night
had fallen and there was no traffic. The buildings were unfamiliar blurs of
black, like the Diana herself. Mr. Deels wound the Diana around curves and
corners of strange streets without touching the brake or gearing down, so it
seemed, and she did not turn like a car but like a snake, and she kept going
faster.
They turned onto a highway Mr. Carmody had
never seen before, beyond whose lanes there was only limitless dark, a highway
traveled by Diana IV M's and Jupiter Custom 12's and Zenobias and Arcturuses,
all hurtling along without sound, their headlights fierce as feral eyes, and
never bumping or passing one another.
The
speed became so great that Mr. Carmody could not speak, and he fought to
breathe as his back was pushed farther and farther into the clasp of the
Diana's seat, and he seized Mr. Deels's arm and tried to communicate that he
had had enough. "She's all yours now, Mr. Carmody," said Mr. Deels,
his voice as clear as it had been in the garage, and he opened the driver's
door. "Take the wheel. Try her," he said, and stepped into the moving
dark.
Mr.
Carmody managed to get behind the wheel. He tried to control the hurtling fury
around and under him, but it seemed to enrage the Diana. There was a new burst
of speed, and the curve which her headlights suddenly picked up, and over which
she shot into a well of hopeless, bottomless black, was the last sight the
mortal eyes of Mr. Carmody would ever see or need to see.
Mr. Deels did not look up from his book when
the sound of the engine came through the window. "Sammy," Mr. Deels
said, "go out and tell the man in the Arcturus to
come in here." Mr. Deels went on reading until the stranger stood before
him.
"Welcome,"
Mr. Deels said. "My name is Mr. Deels. Hell on wheels with Mr.
Deels."
"Hello
yourself," the stranger said. "I heard you had a Jupiter Custom 12
around here, and I'd like to take a look at it."
"That's a beautiful car you've got
there," Mr. Deels said. "Yes, I know," the man said. "About the Jupiter Custom 12. . . ."
THE
DEATH DUST by
Frank Harvey
The
United States Air Force had named our moon vehicle Super Nova, which means "exploding star." We
weren't going to explode—we hoped—but we were certainly going to produce one
of the loudest roaring sounds heard by anyone in the world up to now.
Now
it was four o'clock in the morning at Cape Canaveral, Florida. There were three
of us: Maj. Dick Rivero, copilot and astrogator; Dr. Charles Ferris, our
medical and human-factors specialist; and myself, Maj. Jim Casey, aircraft commander.
I say aircraft commander advisedly. The Super Nova was
a gleaming metal skyscraper as it stood on the launching pad at the cape. It
had five stages, weighed fifteen hundred tons and its
rocket engines added up to seventeen million pounds of thrust. But the
payload—the top of the skyscraper in which we would ride—was an airplane. It
was a bigger and much more sophisticated version of the X-15 rocket plane which
Scott Crossfield and Bob White had tested so thoroughly in the Mojave Desert.
Major Rivero and I would sit side by side in front. Doctor Ferris would ride in
the small cabin behind us—certainly not an ideal arrangement for a
five-hundred-thousand-mile round trip, but let me say this for the Super Nova: It was designed to send three men to the moon
and back—not for a rest-and-relaxation junket—and none of us was complaining.
Returning from outer space, our X-15F would circle the earth three times,
dipping a little deeper into the air blanket each time, before committing
itself to a landing at Edwards Flight Test Center, in California. So, in a true
sense, the X-15F was an aircraft, and I was its commander.
It
was a rigid requirement that each of us be small. You wouldn't think the
engineers would quibble about a pound or two after designing a space ship as
high as an office building, but they had. It took twenty pounds of fuel, for
example, to carry a fountain pen to the moon and back—so every ounce, even
flesh and blood, had to pay its way.
I couldn't have asked for a better crew.
Colonel Burns, of the Aeromedical Laboratory, had wanted very much to go
himself, but he was too old and too heavy. He sent Dr. Charles Ferris, a
thin-faced, solemn little guy with a dry sense of humor, full of terms like
"mean diurnal cycle" and "uncompensated respiratory
acidosis." Don't let it fool you. Chuck was what the USAF calls a
"quiet tiger." When the heat was on, he just wouldn't quit. Once he
had slit the chest of a man whose heart had stopped beating, reached in and
massaged the heart—and saved the man's life. I didn't hear it from Chuck. I
read it in the records.
If
you follow the doing of the Strategic Air Command at all, you know Major
Rivero. He's a jet-bombardment expert —one of the slickest boys in SAC when it
comes to handling a K-system. He flew jet fighters, too, in Korea, which was
where I met him first. We had a nice little group out there: Rivero, Dad Smith,
Smoke Hunter, Pete De Flores—you know the roster. I'm an ex-fighter jock
myself, and I suppose I'm partial to the breed.
Now, on the launch pad at Canaveral, I looked
through the double-paned windscreen at our target, a ghostly lemon-colored disk
which hung over the Atlantic in the lilac haze. My mouth was too dry to spit. I
was scared. Certainly I was. So were the other guys, even though they weren't
showing it. Doctor Ferris was the coolest, I guess, but he could afford to be.
The only person who'd miss Doc, if our bird wandered
off toward the sun, was a certain lovely brunette who owned a smelly great Dane
and drove a sports car a hundred miles an hour. She'd grieve for Doc at least a
week. Then there'd be a new third party in the sports car, and it wouldn't be
the lovely brunette's mother. She admitted that her favorite toy was boys, and
nobody challenged the statement.
With Major Rivero it was different. Dick was
married to one of the cutest little gals—and one of the best cooks—in the whole
USAF. I'd eaten Jinny Rivero's Caesar salad and her enchiladas. Angels, sitting
down to dinner, should be so lucky! Dick must be thinking of Jinny now, the way
I was thinking of Hank. Hank's my boy. He's eleven. Since his mother died,
we've been living out of the same barracks bag, and we kind of like each other.
"Launch
Control to Super
Nova," a
voice said in my headset. "Final check. You
ready for lift-off, Major Casey?"
I
glanced sideways. Rivero's thumb was up. I twisted slightly in my contour seat,
hampered by the full-pressure suit, and looked at Ferris. He grinned through
his face plate.
"O.K.,
Launch Control," I radioed. "This is Major Casey. We are ready for
lift-off."
"Roger,
Major Casey. We are ninety seconds and counting. . . ."
Our
contour seats had been adjusted so that all of us bent forward at the waist in
the attitude which Colonel Burns' tests had indicated was best in violent
forward acceleration. Every inch of our bodies was supported. We did not need
that support at once. The cluster of seven rocket F-l engines that gave ten
million five hundred thousand pounds of thrust to our first stage lighted off
together with a sound that dug through the insulation and twisted in my ears
like broken glass. Outside the windscreen, the palmettos and blockhouses on the
cape were so blindingly bright in the reflected glare that it hurt to look at
them. We seemed to be nailed down. Then our streamlined skyscraper began to
lift, as if it were on hydraulic jacks.
"Go,
baby, go," the launch controller's voice said, a whisper in the storm of
sound. The cape fell away. Our tail flames turned the scattered clouds a
furnace white. Still we moved slowly, like a freight elevator. The lilac haze
slipped below us. Through the air blanket outer space was a delicate lettuce
green and the stars winked peacefully.
"We in a balloon?" Rivero's voice said, sounding brittle and
tiny. "Or are we in a moon rocket?" Then, at last, the speed began to
build.
I am not too clear about the stage firings.
They were automatic, of course. There were short periods of weightless coasting
in between. Each stage fired harder as we grew lighter. Even in our contour
seats the G loads got brutal. I blacked out in the middle of the fourth-stage
firing. Stage five stayed with us. We would have to use it to escape from the
moon on our return trip. A voice was speaking as I came out of the black-out.
"Hello, Super Nova. This is Central Control. We have taken over
from Launch. Do you read us, Major Casey?" "Loud and clear," I
said. "Go ahead." "You all right?"
"Fine," I said.
"How do we look on the scopes?"
"Green," the voice said, excited and happy. "Green as a
cotton-picking emerald—straight across the board. You've got escape
velocity now. You can't possibly fall back. If your moon homer works, you're
in."
I
looked out. We were in the near-horizontal part of our flight path, very high,
headed due east. As I watched we shot out of the earth's shadow into bright
sunlight. I did not want to take my eyes from the scene, even for a moment.
Over the intercom I asked Dick Rivero to read off our primary-panel
indications. Dick's voice said, "Altitude: nine hundred miles. Speed:
thirty-five thousand feet per second. Cabin pressure: normal. Everything's in
the green, skipper."
I
thanked him. The continent of Africa was rising slowly out of the sea and
spreading out under us on the curve of the world. As we lifted I could see the
whole massive sprawl of the Sahara, like a beige rug beside the swimming-pool
glitter of the Mediterranean. My throat ached and there was a prickling
hot'ness behind my eyes. This was a sight no man had seen before. Maybe this
was a sight that should be reserved for God. The horizon was no longer flat—or
even curved. It was gone altogether, and I was looking at the whole planet
earth, a giant cloud-streaked ball of dark ocean and
glowing land, floating there, like a dream, against the star blaze of deep
space. Out ahead of us, across two hundred forty thousand miles of emptiness,
hung our destination, incredibly clean and white, like a globe of glowing ice.
"Brother,"
Dick Rivero said softly on the intercom, and it sounded like a prayer. I
glanced over at him. "How are you doing Dick?"
He snapped back instantly, and was his old
kidding self. "Skipper—you know what the paratrooper said before his first
jump?"
"No. What did the paratrooper say?"
"He
said, T wish the folks back on the farm could see me now—back on the farm? "
It was good for a laugh. We all had to laugh
or cry, and laughing was a lot better. Doctor Ferris said, "I hope Dr.
Wernher von Braun is right."
"Right about
what?"
"He wrote a science-fiction story about
the moon. Said there was no dust. Not a speck. People ran around with
wheelbarrows, gathering rocks. It was a ball."
"In two and three-tenths days,"
Dick Rivero said, "we will know if the good doctor is right. If our moon
homer works, that is. If it doesn't—we are in for a good long trip around the
sun."
"Like eternity?" Ferris said.
"Yeah," Dick Rivero said.
"Like eternity."
We
passed through the Van Allen belt too rapidly for the deadly radiation, trapped
by the earth's magnetic field, to get through our shielding. We were
weightless, of course. It was an unpleasant feeling—and dangerous. If any of us
became violently nauseated, we could drown in our own stomach fluids, there
being no gravity to empty our throats. We'd brought special pumps for this
contingency, but we didn't need them. We were too busy to be sick, and after a
while we built up a tolerance to weightlessness, and the queasiness went away.
The
X-15F was fitted with a meteor bumper designed to vaporize anything up to the
size of a pea and prevent it from reaching our pressure hull, but no impacts
were really expected, and none occurred. We did hit very fine space dust about
eighty thousand miles out. It eroded the observation windows slightly,
destroying the lens-bright surface, but did not threaten our cabin integrity at
all. The radar and radio reception was good except for bursts of solar static
at times. Those monster antenna dishes on earth were following us with focused
beams, and it was working very well. They even sent us hi-fi recordings of Nat
King Cole, and at one point we heard a rebroadcast of a Yankee baseball game.
Actually, after the excitement of the blast-off wore away, the trip became
pretty humdrum. We had our helmets off, but we kept our pressure suits on. We'd
need them if and when we reached the moon, and they were the very devil to get
into in cramped quarters. Even our meals were no treat. Because of our
weightless condition, we had to squeeze our food into our throats out of big
plastic tubes—like eating tooth paste.
However,
as we left the earth behind and the moon got larger ahead of us, the tension
grew steadily. We had all studied the flight profile, and we knew that just a
few hundred feet per second in burnout velocity, back near the earth, could
make a disastrous difference in our chances of reaching the moon. We also knew
that a degree or two of error in path angle could throw us off the target by
thousands of miles. We were placing our faith in the infrared homing equipment.
I won't go into detail except to say that the homer was supposed to work
somewhat like a magnet. It was supposed to seek out the moon for us, lock onto
it and bring us down automatically, firing short
bursts of rocket power to correct for deviations.
When we were many hours out, I called earth
and checked on our profile. "You're doing just fine," they told me.
"According to our radar indications, you're right on the button. No
sweat."
"Thanks," I said. If I'd been
sitting in some air-conditioned radar room on earth, I'm sure I wouldn't have
been sweating either.
"You should transfer from earth gravity
to moon gravity very soon now," the earth radio said. "Watch for
it."
"What's
the guy think we're doing?" Major Rivero said on the intercom, not taking
his eyes off the homer. "Playing tiddlywinks?"
We watched the moon in silence. It was half
full. The
sunlight, coming in from the side, made furry-looking
shadows in the craters. Even the dark side glowed with
reflected earthshine. The place looked very beat up, as if a
peevish giant had worked on it with a sledge hammer. Rivero
said, "Oh, oh—looks like-------- "
I felt my body sag in the
seat.
"There
goes a guidance rocket!" Rivero yelled. "We got it made, you guys!
Our homer just locked onto the moon!"
We
didn't have it made. We had a chance to make it. There's a difference. I looked
through the windshield. I had made a study of the moon's surface. We were
corning down in one corner of a flat area which the astronomers call Mare
Imbrium. It looked like a mud flat after a crowd of kids has tossed a bunch of
junk into it. There were strings of tiny holes, such as water droplets would
make. There were cozy cups, like the imprints of pebbles. And there were wide
piecrust craters. The whole area was baked hard and white by the sun.
"Let's
get into our helmets," I said. "I don't look for any emergency on the
landing, but we have to be ready, just in case."
When we were all fully suited, I turned the
X-15F around, using the hydrogen-peroxide jets in the nose and wings, and we
began to drop toward the moon tail-first. There was a large booster stage still
fastened to our tail. It would serve two purposes: reverse rocket power for the
moon landing and enough solid-fuel energy to blast us back to earth on the
return trip. The homer had swiveled automatically as I reversed our heading.
It was now firing at intervals to reduce our speed and to keep us on course.
I
was now very tense. The homer would carry us close to the moon. Then I would
take over manually for the landing. I watched the backdown mirror. The moon's
surface now looked a great deal like the California desert, except that there
were no gullies or bushes. The sun's rays were horizontal, as in late
afternoon on earth, and every rock and hummock had a knife-sharp shadow
stripe. Those pits which had seemed like water droplets were now half a mile
wide. The piecrust rings were cliffs reaching up toward us.
I said, "Extend landing gear!"
Rivero said, "Gear
coming out, sir!"
I
saw the steel tripod sprout from its streamlined nest in the booster hull.
"Landing gear down and
locked!" Rivero said.
"Very
well," I said. "Now stand by for an emergency liftoff if we strike a
hole and start to tilt dangerously."
As
we approached the surface, I saw the white floor of the Mare Imbrium begin to
stir nervously, as if it were alive, under the downthrust of the landing
rockets. It was white dust. It boiled and churned wildly, and then we settled
into it as into an arctic white-out, and I cut the power. There was a bump, a
tilting as the tripod legs automatically positioned themselves to keep the moon
rocket vertical, pointed back toward earth. The sink meter slowed to zero and
stopped, and Dick Rivero's voice said, "Don't look now—because you can't
see a thing—but I think we just landed on the moon!"
It was cut and dried from here on out. We
were programed to spend exactly fourteen hours on the moon, and every moment of
that time was covered on our check list. First we had to preflight the space
vehicle for blast-off. We did not anticipate any difficulties, but it was only
sensible to have the back door open and the hinges oiled. We had flipped coins,
back on earth, to see who would be the first man to set foot on the moon—in
case we reached it—and I had been lucky. I'd go down the ladder first, followed
by Doctor Ferris, and Major Rivero would stay inside the ship and monitor the
temperatures and pressures on its instruments. It was our home away from home,
and we didn't want anything to go wrong with it while we were outside working.
Dick would have his chance to walk around on the moon as soon as we returned.
Getting
out of the cramped space lock and positioning the descent ladder in the blinding
fog of dust was a slow, irritating job. The stuff was as fine as talcum powder
and, since there was no atmosphere and very little gravity as compared to
earth, it merely hung there, glowing and opaque in the brilliant sunlight. I
made a Geiger-counter test on top of the ladder and again at the bottom,
standing in what felt like eider down, and there was no dangerous
radioactivity. "O.K., Doctor Ferris," I said on my helmet radio.
"Come on down. The coast is clear."
"Clear?" Chuck Ferris' voice said.
"You call this clear?"
"Of course it's clear," Dick
Rivero's voice said from inside the ship. "There's no dust out there. It's
your imagination."
Several moments later Ferris loomed dimly
beside me, a talcum-powdered, ghost in the glowing mist. We joined hands and
began moving cautiously out into the fog. We staggered like a couple of drunks
at first, being unused to the reduced gravity. But as we left the vicinity of
the rocket ship, the dust thinned—there was no wind to scatter it—and walking
became easier.
"Hey,
you guys," Dick Rivero said, and I couldn't miss the excitement and
impatience in his voice, even on the radio. "Seen any little polka-dotted
men yet?"
"None," I said.
"Any green cheese
lying around?"
"All
right," I said. "You watch the gauges. We'll take care of the local
sight-seeing. Your turn is coming."
In
perhaps ten minutes we were out of the dust fog altogether, standing on the
floor of a snow-white lunar valley. It was completely silent, of course, as
there was no air to transmit sound, and I have never seen anything so eerie or
so lonely. The peaks that rose into the black-velvet sky were like molten
bronze in the level sunlight. The stars were like tiny clusters of diamonds.
Over the rim of the bronze mountains the earth shone so brightiy I had to
squint when I looked at it. North America was now in sunlight.
"It's afternoon
at Yankee Stadium," Doctor Ferris said on the radio at my elbow.
"Wonder how Mickey Mantle's doing at bat?"
"Mantle should hit one here," I
said. "He'd probably drive it into lunar orbit."
I
heard a muffled exclamation—pain and irritation mixed —and looked quickly to
see if Doctor Ferris had fallen. He had not. He was looking with concern at me.
I said, "Rivero —that you?"
"Yeah, dammit!" Dick Rivero's voice snapped.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing—I just tore a little hole in my glove in the space lock."
"Space lock!" I said, suddenly angry. "What the devil
are you doing in the space lock?"
For a moment Rivero did not answer. Then his
voice sounded sheepish, like a kid caught with his hand in the cooky jar.
"It's nothing, skipper. I just stuck my hand out to get a sample of this
white dust. I'm back inside now."
"You're
inside now," I said. "And you are staying inside until we get back.
Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir!"
"We'll be back in less than an
hour." "Yes, sir!"
Doctor
Ferris and I got down to business. We dug through the cushion of white dust and
brought up some rock samples which looked like limestone. We stowed them in our
back packs. We unstoppered our gas-collector bags and left them open while we
checked lunar temperatures, both sun and shade. Earth scientists had been close
in their predictions. In the sun the thermometer registered one hundred and ten
degrees Fahrenheit. We were in the twilight zone, near the dark half of the
moon, and hence relatively cool. I was glad we had not landed in the glowing
heart of the bright side. It might have been too hot to leave the ship. The
shadows behind rocks were ink black and very cold; almost two hundred degrees
below zero Fahrenheit.
Personally,
my big moment came when Doctor Ferris took a color movie of me banging an
American flag through the lunar crust, with the planet earth hanging beside me
as a sort of incidental decoration. Too bad Columbus hadn't been equipped with
color cameras. He'd have had quite a laugh on the boys who were predicting he'd
go over the brink of the flat world in a giant waterfall.
"I've
got a feeling I have to hurry before the sun goes down," Doctor Ferris
said. "I keep forgetting the lunar day is fourteen earth days long."
Then suddenly I heard Dick Rivero's voice.
"Skipper—this is Rivero. Do you read me?" . "Roger, Dick," I said. "Go
ahead."
"You guys about
through out there?"
"Pretty near.
Why?"
"Hurry
it up, will you? I—I don't feel so good." "What's wrong?"
"I
took off my helmet and gloves. I felt stuffy, couldn't seem to breathe right.
Now—well—I feel like I might be going to throw up, and there's a funny rash on
my hands."
"Hold tight,
Dick," I said. "We're coming in! Right now!"
I
didn't even wait to fool with the gas collector. I began to run. I was scared.
I realized now how close to the panic point we all were. We were living on the
razor edge of death, and had been ever since we lifted off the pad at Cape
Canaveral. We'd done a lot of kidding. We'd put up a good front. But the fear
was in every one of us: We took it in and breathed it out with every breath we
drew. One slip, one mistake, one miscalculation, that's all it took on a space
mission.
It
took us fifteen terrible minutes to get back to the spaceship and another five
to get through the space lock into the cabin. When I saw Dick Rivero, sprawled
in his contour seat with his helmet off, I knew instantly that it was very bad.
His face was bright red, as if he'd spent the day in the broiling sun. His eyes
were already hollow, and they burned feverishly. I had on my space helmet and I
could not hear his voice, but I could tell by his lips what he was saying.
"Dust," those lips whispered. "Dust—dust. . . ."
I
saw the white stuff then. It was all over the cabin,
as if somebody had broken open a sack of flour. Doctor Ferris and I were coated
with it. Doctor Ferris pushed past me and lifted one of Dick's hands from below
the edge of the contour chair. I had to bite my lips to keep from yelling. That
hand was horrible to look at. It was swollen and blackened like the paw of some
animal. It looked as if it had been held in a raging fire.
I said, on my helmet radio,
"Doc—what is it?"
"I
don't know," Ferris replied. "Some anaerobic
bacteria, possibly. The symptoms are like hemorrhagic fever. I saw it in
Korea. Miserable stuff. Broke the
blood vessels under the skin."
"Is there an
antidote?"
"I've
got some serum that might help," Doctor Ferris said. "There's one way
to find out. Try it."
"The dust," I said.
"It's all over the place."
"Yeah,"
Chuck Ferris said. "The place is a bit messy. But we have no choice, have
we?" Then he did one of the bravest things I've ever seen a man do. He
took off his space gloves and began hunting swiftly in his medical locker for
his hypodermic and his serum.
I'm inbound now for earth. I was able to
blast off alone. Dick Rivero couldn't help because he was dead. The serum which
had relieved hemorrhagic fever in Korea had done him no good at all. Doctor
Ferris had given his own life for nothing. A few hours after we left the moon,
Chuck's hands got pink, got red, then blistered, and he knew that he, too, was
doomed. On his helmet radio, Chuck told me about the bacteria, or virus, or
whatever it was that filled the white dust. It must be almost impossible to
kill, Chuck said, or it could never have survived the savage heat and bitter
cold of the lunar crust. Obviously it attacked human tissue with frightening
and lethal speed. Perhaps it killed animals, too,
and plants—any living thing. If it reached the
earth---------------------
Chuck
stared at me through his space helmet. "If you take it in," he
whispered, "you may turn our earth as white and barren as the moon."
Then he pulled the helmet off—I guess he didn't want to die with his head in a
bottle—and when I looked at his face I had to shut my eyes. . . .
I am
the only living person in the X-15F now. I have been in radio contact with the
earth for some time. I have explained the danger of the white dust. At first
they suggested burning the X-15F immediately after landing. But while they
talked, I looked out and saw the dust clinging to the ship in the vacuum of
space. If I used reverse rockets to slow down and entered the earth's
atmosphere at a moderate speed, some of that white death might blow off and
sift down on the green continents as the X-15F wheeled around in orbit, prior
to landing.
The earth is growing fast now. It fills the
sky. I have not fired my retrorockets. I have not turned the X-15F around, so
they could not reduce my speed. I am coming in nose first, and the Gulf of
Mexico is dead ahead. I have removed the safety cover from the retrorocket
firing switch, and now I press it firmly and feel my body sag heavily back in
the contour chair as the rockets fire. They do not act as a brake. They
increase my speed rapidly: twenty-six thousand miles an hour . . . twenty-eight
thousand . . . thirty-three thousand. . . .
It will be quick. A sudden
smear of meteor fire—then nothing. But I have beaten the deadly stuff in
the white dust of Luna. None of it—not an atom—will reach the planet earth. Now
I am thinking of Hank, my son. I brace myself. I 'ean
forward. I do not shut my eyes. . . .
J
THE
LOST CONTINENT
by Geoffrey Household
Atlantis?
It's of more interest to poets and mystics than to archaeologists. The lost
continent is only a fable. We have no proof; you're looking at the best there
is. No, not me. In the case behind
my desk.
A
puma, you think? Have you just been to the zoo? Well, then, why do you call it
a puma rather than a lion or a leopard? Yes, you're quite right. One could
swear it was dug up in Peru or Ecuador. But an ivory puma is impossible. No
pumas in the Old World. No elephants in the New World.
I'll
tell you its history, though I warn you it is very unsatisfactory. It has no
ending. You go out where you came in. You'll just say to hell with me and Jim
Hawkes and all those visionary swordsmen who conquered the Americas and carefully
destroyed or displaced every blessed thing they ought to have preserved for us.
But
like all good stories it is really that of a man's character—a grubby little
man with bad teeth and no education, who cared as little for money and as much
for truth as any dedicated scholar rediscovering the past for the wages of a
manual worker.
At first Jim Hawkes was not allowed in when
he turned up at the side door of the museum and asked to see me. They thought
he had samples in his little bag. That was what he looked like—a salesman
peddling cheap pens on commission. Yet there was something honest and earthy
about him which was hard to distrust. He was a real Cockney too—with the
Londoner's genius for summing up doormen and minor officials and getting his
own way in spite of them.
While
he remembered to be on his best behavior he addressed me as "sir."
When he got excited he called me "guv'nor." At that first interview
he sensibly gave a thumbnail sketch of his background before coming to
business, but I can't distinguish between what he said then and all I learned
about him later. It's enough that he had passed twenty years
of
peace and war as steward on a tramp steamer, married a Portuguese wife and
settled down on her little farm in the Azores. He was one of those Englishmen
who consciously loathe industrial civilization. Most of them haven't the enterprise
to get out until they are tied to it. But Jim Hawkes knew an opportunity when
he saw one. And the sea had already accustomed him to exile.
Introductions over, he asked me if I believed
in Atlantis. He used the right word. It's a matter of belief, not scholarship.
I told him gently that we believed in nothing without proof.
"Here it is," he
said.
He opened his bag, scattering straw all over
the room, and put that ivory puma on my desk.
It
was like nothing I had ever seen. So far as technique and material went it
might have been a superb Persian ivory of the sixth or fifth century b.c.,
possibly brought to the
Azores by the Carthaginians. But the style was wrong. Too
realistic.
I
remember thinking it odd that such a marvelous craftsman at carving ivory in
the round had been unable to reproduce the strength and majesty of the lion. I
know lions. In art, that is. Remind me to give you a copy of my monograph, Treatment of the Conventional Mane.
"It's not a
lion," Jim Hawkes said. "I think it's a puma."
I
made no comment. I took him across to the American Section and put his ivory
alongside our two pre-Inca pumas —one in stone and one in pottery. Jim Hawkes
had a case.
When
we were sitting down again in my office I asked him how he had got hold of such
a curiosity, rather suspecting that he would tell me some unbelievable yam to
cover up the fact that he hadn't any right to it. But, no.
He was eager, falling over himself to invite questions. That was why he had
come.
He
told me that on the island of Graciosa he had discovered a shallow cave with
its entrance nearly hidden beneath subtropical vegetation. The floor—part
earth, part fine, dry dust—was completely undisturbed.
On a rock ledge at the back of the cave was standing the ivory puma.
He
thought at first that it was a child's toy. For all I know, it may have
been—though an ivory as large as a half-grown kitten argues a very high level
of civilization in the nursery. Then he realized that it did not belong to our
day at all, and his mind at once jumped to Atlantis.
But
it would be wrong to think of him as just one of those
lost-continent-cum-flying-saucer sort of cranks. His
hobby— and I can't think of a better for anyone living in the Azores— was
Atlantis. He knew all the usual arguments for and against. Like so many seamen
he was a great reader, though he had left school at the age of twelve. And he
had a passion for facts. I tell you; he saw the difference between fact and
conjecture much more clearly than some of my colleagues.
"What
1 want, Mr. Penkivel, sir," he said, "is to 'ave that cave excavated
proper like. Not treasure 'unting! Every cupful of soil sifted by them as
knows what's what. And I don't want nothink out of it for meself—and I'll pay
the labor."
I
asked him why me. Simple. He had turned up at the
museum and demanded the bloke who knew most about ivories. Just possibly I am.
But I also happened to be the bloke whom the porter was most annoyed with at
the moment.
Now
I really must repeat that there is no conclusive evidence for the existence of
Atlantis. But as well as a so-called expert in ancient art, I am also a
Cornishman. Part of us always dips into the ocean with the sun. So when I had
taken Jim out to lunch next day and again convinced myself that he was dead
straight, I decided I might as well spend the six weeks' holiday, which was
coming to me, in running a trial trench through that cave. I did not tell my
colleagues what I intended. They would have thought I needed a holiday even
more than I really did.
Like
all islanders Jim knew how to travel cheaply. When he returned to the Azores on
a Portuguese cargo boat, I went with him—feeling self-consciously precious and
wondering to what sort of society I had condemned myself.
I
needn't have worried. Jim's background was in keeping with the man—simple and
satisfying. He had a white, single-storied, peasant house, three acres of wheat
and pasture and some terraces of fruit and vine, which wandered up the hillside.
It was one of the highest farms on Graciosa, blazing with sun or hidden under
blowing mist half a dozen times a day and looking out over a full semicircle of
empty, secretive Atlantic.
All this he had married, together with Senhora Hawkes. It was certainly a love match, though
it wouldn't have been possible without her inheritance. Maria Hawkes was a
peasant poppet, with the face of an angel and the body of Humpty Dumpty. She,
too, had got a bargain by her marriage. Her energetic little ex-steward, always
wanting to know why, had doubled the value of her land. They had as yet no
children. That allowed Jim his luxury of Atlantis. His excuse for the journey
to London had been a visit to his brother, but the senhora knew as well as I did that his true motive
was to explain the ivory.
His cave was on a steep, overgrown hillside,
high above their land. The entrance was a horizontal cleft under an overhang of
rock, so that it could be seen only by a man climbing up from below, and even
then he might not spot it through the bushes for what it was. Beyond the cleft
was a roomy, low-roofed chamber which ran back into the hill for seventy feet,
narrowing all the way, until the passage ended at a fallen boulder.
It was just the sort of place to have
sheltered early man. But the islands were uninhabited when the Portuguese discovered
them; so I could not expect to find traces of anything larger than a rabbit. If
I did, the historians and geographers would have a good deal of rewriting to
do. That was a fascinating thought for a holiday, let alone the fact that I
might come across another inexplicable ivory.
I don't normally dig; it's my job to give my
opinion of what others have dug. But the cave would have been easy even for an
amateur. Right inside, where Jim had made his find, there was only a layer of
dust over the bedrock. We sifted all of this. It was quite sterile. I could
trust him absolutely with the sieve. When I tell you that he managed to spot a
rat's tooth you can imagine how keen he was.
Over
the rock at the entrance were eight feet of soil, shallowing rapidly, of course,
as one got farther into the cave. Through this we
drove our trench with the help of two laborers whom Jim had hired. Meanwhile
Maria Hawkes brought up enormous meals of fish and wine on a donkey and loaded
the panniers with earth from our dig to put on her pineapples. She couldn't
understand our professionally slow, patient progress. But if that was how her
man wished to amuse himself she did not complain. Other wives
had to put up with drink or gambling.
For
the first week I was as happy as any fellow let out of an office can be. At the
end of the second week I began to get bored. So did the onlookers, who left us
for good. We found not a trace of man. The authorities are always right. A
pity— except when I am the authority myself.
The
only excitement came when one of our cross trenches hit charcoal only two feet
above the bedrock. Jim Hawkes was bursting with expectancy and quite silent. He
saw what it could mean. So did the laborers. But I had to tell them there was
no evidence of a human hearth; it was undoubtedly blown debris from a forest
fire. I think I shall go out and look at it again.
Jim
wouldn't let me pay for anything, and I knew he could not afford to go on. The
farm was being neglected; ready money was short after his trip to London; and
dear Maria Hawkes had added to the expense by considering it her duty to feed
the spectators as well as us. At the end of the third week I persuaded Jim to
give up and dismiss the laborers. I felt like—well, like a doctor telling him
he must lose his leg. But it had become quite obvious that excavation was not
going to tell us anything of the ivory puma.
When
the first idle day was over—idle for me—I scrambled up to the cave and, of
course, found Jim already there. He had been up before dawn and hoeing ever since,
but now he was chipping away with a cold chisel at the boulder which blocked
the end of the passage.
"Know anything about
explosives, guv'?" he asked.
I
said I did. Not a very likely trade for an antiquarian. But in the war I was a
sapper.
"Then 'ow about it? Think we'd bS muckin' up the evidence?"
Yes.
That was what he said. He had the instincts of a born archaeologist.
I told him Fwas sure there was no evidence to
muck up, but that the boulder would take some smashing. It had fallen from the
roof recently. Say, two or three hundred years ago. To judge by the narrowing
of the cave walls, I decided nothing much could be behind it, except a cleft
or vent. That had to be there, for an occasional draft of warmish air could be
felt at floor level. The air had removed my last, faint doubt of Jim's story.
It accounted for the preservation of the ivory— otherwise rather unlikely in
the moist climate of the Azores.
There was a wide crack down the middle of the
boulder and a useful cavity below it. Doubtfully I told Jim my requirements.
They didn't bother him. He spoke -very serviceable Portuguese and was popular
everywhere. He was back the next evening with a keg of old-fashioned
gunpowder—excellent stuff for shifting rock—from the island's general stores, this
time on my bill, and had got fuse and detonators free from the whalers.
He did not mention what we were doing, even
to Maria— most women are inclined to be excitable in the presence of
explosives—so we had complete privacy. I made a good job of it, although my
main length of fuse turned out to be a lot faster than the sample I had cut.
I'm not sure whether I shot out of that cave together with the blast or just
before it.
When
the smoke had cleared Jim and I opened up the passage. Fortunately, as it turned
out, the whole force of the explosion had been directed outward, showering
debris onto our working floor, cracking the rock, but disturbing nothing beyond
it. We had still a couple of hours of work with pick and crowbar before we
could reduce it to rubble and climb over.
To my surprise the cave had done all the
narrowing it was going to do and continued as a very rough v-shaped passage. I
am not enough of a geologist to bé sure
of its origin. A combination of earthquake and steam pressure, I think.
Keeping
the beams of our flashlights as much on the untrustworthy roof as on the
ground, we cautiously followed the tunnel until it ended at an appalling abyss
in the volcanic rock. That was where the warm air came from. A steam-heated
hell fed by the tricklings-in at sea level or below. We threw down boulders and
heard not the faintest sound. The gap was too wide to jump but fairly easy to
bridge.
While
I was wondering if I could ever pluck up enough courage to cross the homemade
bridge which Jim—I knew it —was going to insist on constructing, he gave a
shout He was lying on his stomach examining from a respectful distance the
sheer edge of that terrifying drop. He pointed to what he had found. Two
shallow grooves for the beams of a bridge had been chiseled out of the rock.
Our flashlights showed two corresponding grooves on the opposite side of the
chasm.
I
have never been nearer to believing in a drowned continent. Who wouldn't in a
place like that? I had quite unjustifiable visions of the very last of the
inhabitants clinging to a barren peak which later became the green island of Graciosa and using the cave as their temple or
treasure house. Nothing impossible about the rock cutting.
Atlanteans, if they existed, presumably had chisels of bronze or obsidian.
Oh,
yes, I thought of that! I took some scrapings and dust home in an envelope. No
trace of bronze or any metal at all. Not conclusive, but in favor of steel.
Particles so tiny as those from a steel chisel would
have been oxidized and blown away on a breath. The microscope did show a glassy
dust like a form of obsidian, but even my Cornish blood refuses to build on
that. A thousand to one that it was a natural component of
the rock.
Farm
work went overboard again. Serious, this time. There
was a sudden squall from the south which laid the heavy, overripe wheat. Maria
wept, but Jim damned the weather and continued to square the ends of two
twenty-foot lengths of pine sapling with a ship-builder's adz so that they
would fit the channels. On to these spars we nailed planks from the bottom of
an old farm cart. The donkey was busy all day hauling timber up the slope.
By the next evening our bridge was ready. I
don't believe we would ever have thrown it across the gap if not for Maria. She
had a marvelous head for heights and just laughed at her husband, whose
distaste for this beastly brink of nothingness was just as great as mine. But
he was far more determined.
The
roof of the passage was not high enough for us to stand the spars of the bridge
in the grooves and lower the far end by ropes. So we mounted the near end on a
pair of wheels and kept up the far end at an angle of forty-five degrees by
pulling on a rope. Maria pushed this contraption forward, or acted as brake if
we raised it too high. When we finally dropped the bridge into position, axle
and wheels went over the edge. We never heard a sound after the first bounce.
Maria
greeted the accident with a merry laugh. She was perfectly happy standing a
foot from the edge—and after all, the old wheels weren't worth anything. She
strolled about on the bridge with plump unconcern. Jim and I went over it on
our hands and knees.
After a few yards the passage opened out into
an irregular rock chamber too large for the beams of our flashlights to
explore. The senhora,
becoming the weaker sex
again, remained at the entrance with a flashlight, of her own. She didn't like
that place at all.
Working
our way round the walls, we had just decided that this was the end of the cave
with no way out of it, when Maria let out a piercing scream. She had sat down
with her back against the rock and a pool of light in front of her to keep off
the bogeys. She stretched out her left hand to make herself more comfortable
and placed it on the face of a corpse.
We
rushed across to her. The dead man was a Spaniard or Portuguese of the early
sixteenth century. Body, clothes and weapons were well preserved in the still,
dry air. He was on his back, with arms crossed on his chest. He knew he had had
it and laid himself down to die with dignity, trusting in the mercy of God. And
there in the dust, undisturbed since his last unsteady steps, were the marks of
his loose boots.
He
had taken a sword or dagger thrust low down on the side of the throat. I should
not have noticed the perforation of the mummified skin if the linen of his
shirt had not been dark with dried blood.
It
wasn't the expert, the scholar trained to facts and nothing but facts, who saw
the vital bearing of a four-hundred-year-old murder on the problem of the ivory
puma. It was Jim, of course—Jim with his passion for never destroying the
record of the past through avoidable carelessness.
"We can find aht what 'appened, Mr.
Penkivel, guv'," he said. "Spend a bit of time on it and we don't
'ave to be Sherlock 'Olmeses."
He
was right. The pointed, rather feminine tracks, though the edges were blurred,
were utterly unlike our own and told the story. Two men had crossed the chasm.
Side by side they walked to the far right-hand corner of the cave. There the
dust was thoroughly trampled and disturbed as if they had been removing
something which they carried away. On their way back to the bridge the man
walking a little behind had stabbed the other.
The murderer's footprints had been overlaid
by ours, and were muddled anyway; but a set of clean impressions which we found
pointing to the gap seemed unexpectedly deep and firm. My astonishing
collaborator was not content with a "seemed." He measured the depth
of the heel prints. No doubt about it at all. The murderer when he left the
inner cave was weighed down by his comrade's burden as well as his own.
The movements of the other were equally
clear. When he fell forward he left impressions of his knees and body. About
where his neck would have been, a patch of dust was caked by blood. Badly wounded
or dying, he had then risen to his feet, staggered to where Maria nearly sat on
him and crossed his hands on his breast.
You see why. Because the
trusted companion who had stabbed him from behind made doubly sure of him by
destroying the bridge. So he lay down to wait for the end. No weeping
and cursing on the edge of that uncrossable abyss for him. His simple act made
me understand the contemporaries of Cortez and Pizarro as no books could.
Probably he had the sense to see that the sword had been merciful, that he
hadn't long to live. Even so I think that if the corpse had been mine it would
have been found on the brink of the chasm with arms outstretched and mouth
open.
I
could now make a plausible guess at how the ivory puma came to be in the outer
cave. The murderer, repacking his loot, had got rid of it as an object of no
value and inconvenient bulk. But it pleased him. He was a man of the Renaissance.
I like to think of him as an Italian. So he stood it on the rock ledge instead
of just throwing it away.
We
found no concrete evidence of what the valuables had been. Maria with her quick
fingers helped us to sift the dust. Nothing. Not even
a spilt coin. But there was no need to drag in Atlantis. Boxes of gold and
silver must often have gone astray in those days when the treasure fleets
called at the
Azores on their homeward voyage from the Spanish Main. The two adventurers, I suggested, could have
been removing from the cave a hoard of stolen loot.
Jim
did not deny it. He didn't stick to his lost continent. He merely pointed out,
as modestly as the more courteous type of Oxford don, that I was ignoring
inconvenient facts without explaining them.
" 'Ow
about the footprints of the blokes what put it there?" he asked.
I
hadn't thought of that. Obviously the prints of the blokes who put it
there—whatever "it" was—were not visible at the time of the murder or
they would be visible still. So in the sixteenth century they had already been
obliterated by slow time. In that case the treasure had been put in the cave
long before the Azores were discovered.
By
now I was unconsciously treating Jim as an authority. I suspect that my voice
echoed through the darkness in a genuine academic falsetto as I tried to
answer his question by complicated theories involving drafts of air cut off by
the fallen boulder. But I had to admit that the case for Atlantis could not be
finally dismissed.
You
would have thought he'd have jumped at it and driven home another point,
too—that the chiseled footings we had found suggested a permanent bridge, not
the casual construction which would have been thrown across the abyss by two
fearless conquistadors hiding or seeking a hoard of loot.
Jim
stuck to the evidence, however, and nothing but the evidence. He squatted on
the floor sucking his teeth—and then he blew his own beloved Atlantis sky high.
"Them two was puttin' somethink in," he said, "not
takin' it aht!"
And he fiddled around some more in the marks
of the heels with flashlight and foot ruler.
He was on to the truth. The tracks which led
from the entrance to the disturbed corner were deeper than the tracks which led
back to the site of the murder. So there it was. The two men were putting something in. They did not find a treasure in the inner cave at
all. They carried it in across their bridge and dumped it.
So far, so good—but if that was what really
happened, the murderer had to return from his victim to the corner in order to
pick up the two loads and make off with them. And his tracks must still be
there.
They were. Along the wall
all the way. That's why we had missed them. Reconstruction was easy.
Torch or candle had gone out in the struggle, so the murderer felt his way back
to the treasure round the wall. Wounded man also had a pistol —a very fine one
for its date—which may have influenced the cautious movements of the other.
"Not
what you wanted, Jim," I said. "I'm sorry. But you're a lot better
off."
"Fifty-fifty, Mr.
Penkivel, sir," he answered sternly.
I
knew he must have noticed it. There was nothing his eyes missed, though, of course, he could not know the value of the
emerald set in the pommel of the dead man's sword. Nor could
I in the beam of a flashlight. But it was worth a lot for its
extraordinary size even if flawed, as it almost certainly had to be.
I turned his offer down flat. In proportion
to his resources, Jim had contributed to an archaeological expedition more than
any millionaire's fund ever dreamed of. He was entitled to the finds, if any.
And
then that amazing man reflected doubtfully, "Would yer say we 'ad the
right to take it aht, guv'? We're 'ere for knowledge, not treasure
'unting."
I assured him that there were plenty of
sixteenth-century swords in the world and that this was of no special value
except for the emerald set roughly and strongly into the hilt. Safest place to
keep it, I suppose.
Well,
yes, I must admit it was a superb weapon. But I wanted Jim to have the emerald;
and I didn't know enough about the Portuguese law of treasure trove to be sure
that if he produced sword and emerald as they were he would be allowed the
value. Take it from me—state museums don't like paying out when they can get
something for nothing.
"O.K.,
guv'nor," he said. "Sell it for me when yer gets 'ome because I
wouldn't know 'ow. And you 'ave the ivory puma for the museum."
Why
isn't it on exhibition? I've told you. Because the blasted thing is impossible!
It asks us to assume a lost culture with affinities to both Old World and New.
Yes, naturally, I had it dated by the radiocarbon method. The very large elephant
which supplied the ivory died not later than 2000 b.c.
Origin unknown. All we can say. Nothing surprising in that.
Every great museum has some lovely thing in the basement waiting for the day
when our successors will know enough to be able to label it.
There
was nothing else in the cave worth recording. Jim and I decided to leave the
body where it was and remove our bridge. Like a couple of idiots we talked of
cementing a ring bolt into the roof so that we could support the far end while
we pulled it back. Maria's feminine common sense soon dealt with that.
"But
why not drop it down the hole?" she asked in her lilting Portuguese.
"We can always make another."
It's
the end of the story. Unsatisfactory, as I told you, except for Jim. I got him
six thousand pounds for the emerald.
The chiseled bridge footings? Oh, those! Well, the romanticist—that's
me—finds them so inexplicable that he is re-examining (please keep it to
yourself!) the case for Atlantis. The cold-blooded authority—that's
Jim—suggested that our two adventurers made a solid bridge because they
intended at some later date to bring over a heavy mule train of stuff which
they did not want to risk losing.
Possible, but odd. Remember they only entered the inner cavern once. They never explored
it at all while they were building their bridge or afterward. They carried in
their mysterious loot straightway and dumped it. Doesn't that look as if the
bridge was already there?
And
doesn't it suggest a sudden, hasty decision, not the behavior of men stacking
away valuables in a carefully chosen hiding place? My own guess is that they
found the cave and the treasure at the same time. They didn't know what to do
with such wealth, how to ship it and dispose of it. So they agreed to carry it
into the inner cave for the moment and perhaps break down the bridge.
Where
did they find it? In the outer cave, of course, where it had remained untouched
ever since it was abandoned by desperate refugees from the sunken cities of the
plain on the lost continent of Atlantis.
THE TRAP
by Kern Bennett
Early
one May morning a flying saucer hovered over the small town of Walker,
California. Nobody was about to see it, and without attracting the slightest
attention, it came quietly to earth on the outskirts of the town on Highway
399. Having settled itself, it then changed—that is to say, it lost the
well-known shape of a flying saucer and acquired instead that of a roadside
eating house, complete with neon signs saying, Charlie's
Lunch—Steaks, Dogs,
Burgers. Southern Fried Chicken a
Speciality.
At six a trucker called Ollie Lindberg, new
to the route and therefore lacking the habit of eating anyplace in particular,
pulled his rig into the forecourt of Charlie's Lunch, got out, tried the door, found it open and
walked inside. He never came out.
Not
far away, a man in pajamas stood at his bedroom window, yawning. When he saw Charlie's
Lunch in the distance, he
blinked and frowned; turned away from the window, shaking his head and
wondering if his eyes deceived him. Taking a second look, he was just in time
to see a flying saucer take off from an empty lot on Highway 399. The police
were at first cynical, but after they had examined Ollie Lindberg's deserted
rig, they changed their tune slightly.
Two
days later, a restaurant landed near Greenway, Virginia, where it abducted a
colored girl called Esmeralda Dingle, who dropped in for a soda on her way to
work.
These
events made happy times for the press. The newspapers went to town with banner
headlines like Sabre Jets Stand By, Don't
Use Strange Eateries, Physicists Say it Can't Happen, and Is This
the Prelude to Invasion? Then reports from France, where a saucer simulated a roadside bistro;
and from England, where another displayed the versatility to turn itself into a
mock-Tudor public house, complete with phony oak beams and plaster-work, spread
the publicity over the face of the world. The only element of the
world's
population who failed to enjoy the sensation were the proprietors of the
remoter eating places, whose trade fell off considerably.
The
farmer stopped his station wagon on the main highway before turning into the
dirt-road entrance to his farm. "This is as far as I go, friend. There's
an intersection a mile up the road. Ain't nothing there but a gas station, but
you should be able to thumb a ride into Gallup easy enough."
Jeremy
thanked him, got out, fished his rucksack out of the back of the wagon, waved
as the farmer drove down the dirt road, and then trudged off in the direction
of the intersection. The vastness of America's Southwest stretched away for
mile after mile on every side. Now for the first time this vastness pressed in
on Jeremy, reminding him of his loneliness, his poverty and his utter lack of
prospects. While he trudged he thought of Los Angeles, where he had been a
writer until the panic impact of three-dimensional pictures had caused his
studio to drop his option like a hot brick. Los Angeles meant the following
things to Jeremy; success, three pictures, three years with money dripping out
of his trousers pockets, marriage to an actress with plenty of shape, no
scruples and a ratlike disdain for sinking ships, an imported car, and a house
off Beverly Glen Boulevard in the Santa Monica Mountains. It had also meant two
years with no pictures, less and less money, less and less house, car and
actress.
Had
he had the wit, he told himself as his tattered boots scuffed up the dust of
the roadside, he would have got out quickly—while there was still enough money
in the bank to buy him a ticket back to England. In England the 3-D scare was
over before it ever arrived. In England, with Hollywood glamour and three
credits to help him, he could hardly have failed to dig a living out of the
picture business.
In
England he might even have been able to go back to writing the sort of thing
writers ought to write—novels, for example, or anyway short stories. Mug!
Five
minutes later, Jeremy lifted his gaze from the dusty black surface of the
highway, already warming up as the moming sun got into its stride, and looked ahead
with narrowed eyes. In the distance he could see the intersection, marked by a
transverse line of telegraph poles and two low, shacklike buildings. One of
these he readily identified by its pumps as the gas station that the farmer had
mentioned, and the other had the look of a roadside cafe.
He put his hand into his trousers pocket,
feeling the shape and pleasant solidity of the silver quarter, which was all
the money he possessed. Coffee? Or
maybe a sandwich? Or a pack of cigarettes? His
mouth watered. Forget the cigarettes.
Jeremy's
pace increased. Head bent, rucksack pushing him forward and downward as he
leaned into his stride, he drove his lankiness toward the intersection.
Then,
sometime later, he stopped. "Ain't nothing there
but a gas station," the farmer had said. Jeremy stared, frowning, toward
the intersection. Two buildings—one of them, by now, unmistakably a gas
station, and the other, equally unmistakably, an eating place. Recent
headlines leaped into his mind's eye. Then he shrugged. Don't be a fool, Jeremy, my boy; the farmer
must have forgotten.
But
the farmer hadn't forgotten. At the roadside two hundred yards from the
intersection, a woman and two children cowered in the ditch while a man in
greasy mechanic's overalls stood above them, staring toward the café. He had a shotgun in his hands.
"Good morning,"
Jeremy said.
The man turned. His eyes were bright with
panic. "It's one of Them! I tell you it's one of Them!" "How do you know?"
"Last night when we went to bed, it
ain't there. This morning it is. It's one of Thern, bud! It's got to be!"
"Well," Jeremy said, "fancy that."
"Come
again?" The gas-station proprietor was looking at Jeremy as if he
suspected he were a Martian. "Who are you, anyway?"
"I'm
an Englishman. Flat broke. Trying to get home. I was a
writer in Hollywood until the roof fell in."
"Oh."
Part of the suspicion died out of the eyes of the man in overalls. "What
are you gonna do?" he said.
Jeremy
had his rucksack on the ground. He opened it and took out a pencil and a notebook.
He was smiling. "I'm going to have a look at it."
"You
must be crazy! You don't know what the thing'll do. You stay away from it, bud.
Maybe it'll go away if we leave it alone."
Jeremy
shook his head. "No. I don't think it'll do me any harm so long as I don't
go in. I'm going to take a look."
The
woman whispered, "Don't go, mister. Those things ain't natural."
Jeremy smiled at her. Then he walked away.
A
pulse beat—thud, thud, thud—inside his head and in the soles of his feet. He
hadn't felt anything like it since Anzio in 1944.
This is it, an inward voice was saying. This is your chance,
Jeremy boy. Eyewitness account—syndicated all over the world. Why did I sell my
camera? My heaven, this is it. He started to wonder how much a first-class
suite on the Queen Elizabeth would cost him.
Rest-a-While Café, the sign said over the door. Come in and Eat! Coffee, Franks, Hot Dogs. Our Beer is Cold!
Jeremy
stopped at a safe distance—thirty yards. Was it safe? It felt safe. He propped
his notebook on his knee, leaning with his back against a telegraph pole, and
sketched the place with careful attention to detail. Then he scribbled down his
thoughts. The windows revealed no movement. He waited.
Nothing
happened. Jeremy took a few paces forward. A few more.
Reluctantly, suspiciously, a few more again. He came
to the porch and stopped. Could this—this monument of American ordinariness—be
a flying saucer in disguise, a visitation, a creation of nonhuman beings? For
heaven's sake!
In a
moment of careless disbelief, he put his foot on the step of the porch. Nothing
happened. He advanced. Nothing happened. He reached out his arm and gently
opened the door. Inside there was a service counter, tables with plastic tops,
peeling chromium fittings, behind the counter, a cash register, and a Man.
The Man was as tall as Jeremy—six feet and a
little more. He had a brown face and graying hair, well-kept brown hands
resting gently on the counter, and a warm welcoming smile. He wore a white
apron with a name embroidered over the breast pocket—Charlie Smith.
"Good morning," he said in English.
"What can I get you, friend?"
"Good morning. I—I don't know. I can't
make up my mind whether to eat or not."
"I should if I were you," the Man
said. "Got to eat to live, you know."
"The trouble is I'm pretty broke. What
can you give me for twenty-five cents?"
"Are
you an American?" the Man behind the bar asked. "No. English." "Down on your luck?" "A bit."
The Man nodded sympathetically. "Can happen to anybody. Do you like roast beef and
Yorkshire pudding?" "Ye-es."
"I thought you would, being an
Englishman." The Man turned, slid open a hatch and reached for a plate of
roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. "There you are—roast beef and Yorkshire
pudding—ten cents, since you're broke."
Jeremy
had taken a pace backward. With a very dry mouth, he said huskily, "Look!
I know! I know what you are —or at least I know you aren't what you seem to
be."
"Don't you want your
roast beef?" the Man said.
"Not likely!"
"Oh." The Man was disappointed. He
took the plate off the counter.
"Where
do you come from?" Jeremy asked. Silence. The Man
wiped the counter with a dishcloth. He looked up. "You wouldn't know if I
told you." "Not Mars?" "No, not
Mars."
"What
happened to the other people who walked into one of your—your traps?"
'They were taken back to
our World."
Jeremy
laughed. "Well, you're not going to get me, chum," he said. "I'm
going to write up every word of this fantastic conversation and it'll be
printed in every newspaper in the world. After that you'll not find it so easy
to get people to walk into your filthy traps."
"I'm
afraid," the Man said, pressing a button, "that
we've got you already."
There were more visitations. Reports came in
from the Argentine, Australia, Japan, France again, Germany, Scotland,
Switzerland and Sweden. In the States, one of the traps caught a mentally
deficient boy of fifteen when it landed on a vacant lot in a
suburban-development area near Detroit. But in the States by now, and in
Europe, too, for that matter, the pickings were less easy for the saucers.
In a
town in England, housing mostly miners working in nearby coal fields, a man
threw a bundle of five pounds of gelignite through the window of a suspect
roadhouse, but before the fuse had burned through, the restaurant changed back
into a saucer and was off.
In
the States again, near Fort Benning, an Army tank crept into range and pumped a
high-velocity three-inch shell into one of the traps. Again it instantly
changed shape and flew away, and nobody was near enough to say whether it had a
hole in it or not. After that there were no more visitations in England or the
United States of America and the newspapers chortled
their triumph for weeks, until their readers were bored to death with the
subject.
The visitations in remoter parts of the world
declined in number and the day came when no human being had seen a flying
saucer land for more than a year. Then, early one chilly November morning, when
the smog was lying thick over Los Angeles, a police prowl car at La Canada
spotted a saucer landing in the valley below, somewhere in the vicinity of
Montrose. Radios yakked and chattered. Police cars like swarming bees flocked
to Montrose to prowl the streets in search of an unfamiliar restaurant. By half
past seven they had found it, a squat, California sort
of eating place, ranch style, calling itself The
Gaucho Grill.
The
National Guard turned out. Reporters gathered. Three television trucks arrived
and half a dozen mobile radio transmitters. While the commander of the National
Guard detachment was waiting for the word to open fire in his command vehicle,
parked in a side street behind The Gaucho Grill, the restaurant door opened and Jeremy
walked out.
In
the street outside, he paused indecisively, looking right and left at the
police cordons. Then, with a shrug, he walked slowly toward the cordon on the
right, holding his hands at shoulder level and eying the battery of pistols and
Tommy guns which were covering him with an expression of apprehensive
distaste. He was wearing a gray suit, as well cut and conventional as one that
his London tailor might have made for him, and he looked very well indeed.
When
Jeremy was a few paces away from the cordon, a police captain snarled,
"Hold it! One false move and you get the lot, buster!"
Jeremy stopped. He swallowed, finding it
difficult to know what to say.
"I'm human."
"Yeah?"
"I'm called Jeremy Standing. I'm an
Englishman. I'd been living in the States for five years when I walked
into—into one of those places at an intersection on Highway 66 near Gallup, New
Mexico, on the fifth of May the year before last."
A
woman in the crowd shouted, "Don't you believe him, officer! He's a
monster in disguise! Whyn't you shoot? You never know what he'll do!"
"I'm not a monster in disguise,"
Jeremy said huskily.
"Please believe me. I'm an Englishman. My name's Jeremy
Standing. I told you-------- "
"Funny name," the police captain
said. "Where've you been, mister?"
"On
a planet outside our galaxy, hundreds of millions of
miles from the earth. I--------- "
"What's
it called?" "They call it Zinfandel." "Never
heard of it."
"I don't expect you have. It exists,
though. I'm not lying.
Why should I lie? I-------- "
"What
do you want?" the police captain growled.
Jeremy shrugged. "I've come back, that's all. I don't know
what I want, really. I want to write about it, I suppose. I've
got ideas for a film, and I thought maybe---------- "
A
man with a microphone was pushing his way through the crowd, trailing cable
behind him. "Make way there! Make way, please! ... I bet you got ideas, Mr. Standing! I bet you have, yes, sir!
Now, what about telling the people of
America
what it was like on—on Zin----------- What'd you say the
planet was called?"
"It
was called Zinfandel!"
"No need to shout, Mr. Standing. Now
what was it like?
Just tell the nation everything you know about this far-flung
planet. You're the first man alive---------- "
"It
was beautiful," Jeremy interrupted. "Green. Mountainous—at any rate in the place where I spent most of my
time. That was a city called Arryl. The houses are built of a
crystalline material which lets in the sunlight. There are strange trees
everywhere, and flowers—just like the earth, but different in that much of the
vegetation is different. They have daffodils, though, and narcissi that you
couldn't tell from terrestrial ones. There must be a lot of other things that
are the same there, but it depends upon a coincidence of evolution, you see—I
don't know. I couldn't see everything, after all. Zinfandel is a planet
slightly bigger than Earth."
"What
did you do?" a voice shouted from the crowd.
"I—I
lived," Jeremy answered. "I told my friends all that I could about
Earth."
"Friends! You mean the inhabitants of Zinfandel, Mr. Standing?" the radio
reporter queried.
"Of
course—and my other friends, too, the people who had walked into one of the eating
places as I did; there were about ten of them in Arryl and others in other
cities. There were three Americans in Arryl. I have their names, if you'd like
me to broadcast them."
"Sure, sure. Carry on, Mr. Standing."
"Well,
there was a James Minden from New York; and a Miss Esmeralda Dingle, a colored
lady from Greenway, Virginia; and an Ollie Lindberg, of Santa Monica,
California. I'd
like their relatives to know that they're well and happy." ]
The police captain rubbed his cheek with the barrel of his |
police positive. "Why were you taken, Standing? What's the I
reason behind all these
abductions?" )
"Curiosity," Jeremy said simply.
"The scientists on Zinfandel wanted to know how human beings
worked."
A woman standing up in the back seat of a
convertible shrieked, "Oh, my heaven! He means vivisection!"
"No!"
Jeremy was angry. "No," he shouted, "nothing like that! Some of
us volunteered for physical examinations, but mostly we just talked, and
answered questions. All about our life on Earth, and wars, and politics, and
things like that."
The
police captain nodded slowly. "O.K. That may be
true. But now tell me this: You're back, why aren't the others?"
"Because
they didn't want to come."
"Didn't want to come! Don't give me that stuff! You mean
to say------ "
For almost the first time now, Jeremy smiled. There was an i air of knowledge about him, an almost professorial assurance. The threat
of dying under the impact of police bullets seemed to have gone. He was holding
himself easily, and he looked j like a
man without a worry in the world.
"Life on Zinfandel is pleasant to
live," he interrupted ■»
quietly. ■
"Better than here on Earth?" the radio reporter queried. "Better than life in the United States of America?
That's mighty hard to believe, Mr. Standing."
"I'm sorry if I
seemed not to appreciate the American way
'
of life," Jeremy said. "But believe me, life
on Zinfandel is far
and away happier than anything we have ever known." 1
"How come it's so good?" the police
captain wanted to know.
"There is no poverty, hunger or
disease," Jeremy answered. "What one needs is there for—for the
making. One works if one wants to, not unless. One just lives. And the air on
Zinfandel contains a higher proportion of oxygen than terrestrial air. One's
brain is marvelously alive, like a child's brain—curious, seeking, unworried,
infinitely free to be used. Do you see what I mean?"
"More or less," the police captain said. "Sounds to me
like the mountains. I go to the mountains every summer with my kids. Got a shack up there."
Silence. A
fat man behind the police captain said suddenly, "What did you eat,
mister?"
"Anything," Jeremy answered. "Broiled steak and fried potatoes, Chesapeake Bay oysters,
fried fish and chips, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding."
"Do
you mean to say their food's just like ours, for
Pete's sake?"
"Oh, no. Their food is so much better than anything we know that most of us
stopped making things like steak and oysters after a while. We ate Zinfandel
food because we liked it better."
"What's
this 'making things,' Mr. Standing?" the radio reporter cut in. "You
keep on talking about making things. Would you care to explain?"
Jeremy
looked at the crowd. His expression became a little doubtful. Then he shrugged.
In for a penny, in for a pound. "It's very
simple," he said. "One can make things by thinking them into
existence."
Silence. The
crowd took the information, chewed on it, said
nothing.
Then,
raucously, from the back, a voice shouted, "How's about making me a
blonde, buster? Make her like Marilyn Monroe."
Jeremy
said, "You can't make anything with a soul—that is, you can make the body,
but it wouldn't be inhabited, if you see what I mean."
"Inhabited,
hell!
Just make the body, that's all!"
"You wouldn't like it
if I did!" Jeremy shouted.
A
quiet, pinched little woman ducked beneath a policeman's arm. "Make
something," she said. "Go on, sir. Show us. Make something we can
see."
"What?"
"A—a
diamond bracelet."
Jeremy
held out his hand. The bracelet glinted and glittered in the pale November
sunshine.
"What
are we waiting for?" shouted the man beside the police captain.
From
the windows of The Gaucho Grill the Man who liked to call himself Charlie
Smith on his visits to Earth saw the crowd stampeding down the street. He
hesitated no longer than a split second. Too many. Dangerous. If they overflowed from the restaurant out into
the street many might be injured during the time of the metamorphosis. Then
there was accommodation on the journey to be considered; he could expand the
saucer up to certain limits, but not beyond. Poor creatures.
Standing
in the road outside the restaurant, he let ten people past him—the police
captain and the man beside him, because they had a flying start and were first,
several younger people who could run faster than the majority and, last of the
ten, the quiet little woman who had asked Jeremy to make something. Behind her
there was a gap in the crowd.
Charlie
Smith held up his arms—and they changed into tentacles. His body became
insectlike, scaly; it thickened; it took on a greenish-yellow color and a
metallic sheen. His eyes increased in diameter, became multilensed, like the
eyes of a housefly and shone dully and terrifyingly red. Four more tentacles
grew from his thorax, and his legs took on the shape of a beetle's. His gross
metallic body canted forward until it was on all fours, more or less, supported
by his beetle legs and two of the tentacles. The terrible eyes shone redly at
the leading members of the crowd, and the remaining four tentacles waved
slowly in the air—in readiness, it seemed, to grasp or to flicker out like
striking snakes.
The
crowd came to a standstill. The ones in front pressed backward and the ones
behind readily gave way. There was a deathly silence and a stillness that was
as brittle as ice.
Jeremy
worked his way through the crowd. He held up his arms. "I'm sorry!"
he shouted. "I'm afraid you've frightened him!"
Silence.
A
woman's voice shrieked, "He's afraid we've frightened him!" Her
hysterical laughter shattered the stillness.
Jeremy held up his arms again. "There
are too many of you, that's the trouble. I expect
they'll be back for more, but they can't take everybody, don't you see?"
A
man said, "My heaven, look at it! Horrible! Just like a beetle!"
Jeremy turned. He went up to the beetle.
Tentacles wavered, feeling his face. A sensitive man at the back of the crowd
frowned as it dawned upon him that this was affection —a parting.
The beetlelike creature scuttled into the
restaurant. The building shimmered, dissolved, became a silver saucer-shaped
machine, rose a hundred feet vertically from the ground and was gone.
In
the road, Jeremy stood still, looking up in the air, following the flight of
the saucer until it was no longer even a speck in the sky.
After
a while, as their confidence returned, the people advanced again. When Jeremy
tore his eyes from the blueness of the sky and looked at the crowd gathered
around him, a burly individual in the uniform of an ice-cream peddler said,
"O.K., mister. How about making me a gold
brick for a start?"
Jeremy
saw greed entering the faces of the crowd. He waited for a moment; then
shrugged and held out his hand. A small block of gold materialized in the
palm—yellow, yellow as sunlight! A great gasp of awed delight rose from two
hundred throats.
Jeremy
threw back his right arm. With the powerful round-arm swing of the
grenade-throwing infantryman, he hurled the gold block far over the crowd's
heads onto the open space the saucer had just vacated. For a split second the people in the crowd were paralyzed. Then they moved.
The gold block disappeared beneath a heap of struggling, cursing human beings.
A
police car nearby had its door open. A gruff voice said, "Better get in,
Mr. Standing. Looks as though you're going to need a
bodyguard from now on."
"Yes," Jeremy said. 'Thank
you."
He
got in. The door slammed shut. The car edged forward. One of the two cops in
the front seat sucked his teeth and said, "You shouldn't have let on you
could make things, Mr. Standing. You'll never get any peace, now that folk know
about it."
A thought was coming to Jeremy across a
thousand miles of sky. It was coming from the Man who called himself Charlie
Smith. "When you are ready, Jeremy."
Jeremy
opened his eyes. "Yes," he said to the cop on the front seat.
"But, then, I can always go back. . . . Now, what can I make for you two
boys?"
SPACE SECRET
by
William Sambrot
I am
sending this report by special courier. I am personally unable to deliver it
because I wish to be on hand to forestall any possible repercussions which
might yet arise from the charges made by Dr. John Lassiter, of the Rand
Corporation. Lassiter insists that the original video tape taken by the successful
American moon rocket yesterday was stolen during the night and a substitute put
in its place.
As
you know, the successful moon shot was made with a rocket that carried an
electronic camera, operating with photoelectric cells which transmitted
pictures onto electronically sensitized tape. The rocket made the run to the
moon and swung around, photographing the far side, which has never been seen
from earth. Then continuing on around, executing a vast figure 8, the rocket
shot back toward earth, circled it and finally made a successful reentry in the
Pacific Ocean.
Although
it was anticipated that the far side of the moon was in no way different from
the near side, the prestige of being the first to have taken pictures of it was
enormous. And quite naturally the Air Force made every effort, once the nose
cone was recovered, to keep the video tape secret. It was rushed by special jet
to the Air Force's Research and Development building in Santa Monica, known as
Rand Corporation. There it was to be processed by Doctor Lassiter.
After
the tape was processed, apparently Lassiter had viewed it privately—a breach of
security. What he saw caused him to send urgent summonses to all the top
echelon of the Air Force and Rand Corporation. I was able, because of my
position at Rand, to be among the four or five who were permitted to view the
second showing.
John
Lassiter, Ph.D., a theoretical physicist, topflight mathematician and
electronics expert, is in his early forties, tall, rather thin, with
penetrating eyes. He is a stand-out, intellectually, in a building full of
geniuses. Rand Corporation, in Santa Monica, consists of about eight hundred
bril-
liant
people: scientists, economists, mathematicians, physicists, cybernetics and
electronics experts, and the like. Also, they have a list of another two
hundred fifty consultants on the outside, on whom they
draw from time to time for expert advice.
For
the record, the business of Rand Corporation is that of evaluating any given
idea and projecting its inherent possibilities into the future. They have been
correct on a great many occasions. For example, working from known data concerning
the U.S.S.R.'s rocket potential, they accurately forecast the first Sputnik—an
event of some importance, you will agree.
We
assembled in the viewing room in the Rand building, with Air Police outside the
door and scattered throughout the entire building and grounds. Security was
complete.
Before
he showed the tape, Lassiter made an impromptu speech which I consider well
worth repeating:
"Gentlemen,"
he said quietly, "history has always interested me. Not the history of the
textbooks, but the history of legends, of primitive peoples; the stories handed
down through the millenniums. And among these, without fail, in any
civilization, we come across a strangely similar belief—a legend of gods who
descended from the sky to walk the earth like men."
He
held up a hand, ticking off on his fingers as he talked. "On the American
continent we have the Mayans, the Incas, with their beliefs that bearded white
gods would once more come back—gods who taught them their science, their mathematics,
how to smelt ore, cut rock; gods who came from the sky. And there are the
Polynesians, surrounded by the vast Pacific, who worship the redheaded bearded
white god, who landed on Easter Island—the Eye to Heaven, as they call it.
Everywhere throughout the world primitive men lifted their eyes to the skies
for salvation, longing for the return of those kindly brilliant far-travelers,
whose science so far outstripped their own."
He
paused. "The pattern continues down to our time. Only, now, it appears to
be one of watching—and waiting. But I won't bore you with flying saucers or
Fortian proofs of visitors from other worlds. We have here"—he touched
the kinescope—"our own proof. Proof that our planetary
system teems with life, with science that is to our atomic piles what our
atomic piles are to bonfires. Proof that we are not
alone, not lost in the immensity of the infinite universe. We are not
alone—and here's the proof, in color."
He switched on the kinescope. Instantly the
screen came alive, showing the brilliant blue-black velvet of outer space, the
stars, glowing in colors seen only outside the earth's atmosphere—greens,
yellows, fiery reds, icy blues, burning steadily, without a flicker. The men in
the room gasped. The rocket was approaching the moon closer and closer, the
chilling whites and dead blacks looming closer and clearer.
"Now,"
Lassiter whispered. "Now you'll see. It's going to the far side—the side
never before seen by man."
The
scene on the screen moved along. Formidable mountains—sheer, fantastic slender
needle spires, defying even the faint gravity of the moon. Immense pits, filled
with the rubble of ancient disasters. More pits, more mountains, slashing crazy
patterns of eye-hurting light and utter black of shadow without depth—and
slowly, slowly the moon moved under the rocket until, visible faintly, the
swollen greenish-blue rim of earth appeared, off in space. The rocket began
leaving the moon and approaching the earth again. The tape came to an end. The
lights came up. We turned, as one, and looked at Lassiter.
He
was seated, motionless, eyes unblinking, only his large sensitive hands tightly
clenched before him. He stared at the screen.
"It's
beautiful," I said, "but no more so than we'd expected. Other than
the prestige of having been first—well, really, Lassiter, the far side is no
different from the side we've seen since the beginning of time."
"It's
not the same!" He stood up, and his voice was a terrible broken shout in
the soundproofed room. "That's not the tape I saw last night!"
There
was an immediate stir in the room, and some of the Air Force people looked
alarmed.
"Listen to me! Please!" He stood
up, his face gray, his eyes stricken, like a man who
has seen glory suddenly leave him forever. "Listen!"
We
quieted. Already I heard one of the Air Force officers muttering something
about, "Crazy as a hoot owl."
"Last night"—Lassiter began,
pointing to the screen—"last
night, on that screen----------- " His voice trembled slightly, as
though in despair at ever being able to convey what
he'd seen.
"How can I begin to explain what I saw?" he whispered. We
sat tensely, watching, listening. "How can I tell of the build-
ings there? The colors, the smoothly flowing lines of archi-
tecture? Slim, airy, yet full of strength. Serene,
mature.
Yes, that it—mature. Water, trees, parks. And the space-
ships------ "
He paused, and when he repeated it, it was
more a groan
than a phrase. "The spaceships. One of them was
taking off.
Rising straight up, gently, swiftly, like a huge iridescent bub-
ble. Light, incomparably lovely." His voice was suddenly sub-
dued. "They have a source of power so far beyond us. So far
beyond us------- "
An Air Force man came to his feet. "Are
you telling us that someone has had access to this room during the night and
switched tapes on us?"
Lassiter turned and looked at him, his eyes
peculiarly inward-looking. "Yes," he said.
"And the—the original tape showed a—a
civilization on the other side of the moon?" There was frank disbelief in
the officer's voice.
"A civilization compared to which we're
still savages, crouching over a fire in a cave," he said.
The
room was a hubbub of noise. I stood up and shouted for silence. When I got it,
I looked at Lassiter. "Isn't the manufacture of that electronic tape a
Rand Corporation top-secret process?"
He nodded. His mind was
obviously far away.
"Who
could possibly duplicate that process, then use the tape to take these
obviously authentic shots of the moon approach—steal the original and
substitute the duplicate— and all in one night?" I asked.
There was a murmur in the
room—subdued laughter even.
Lassiter
looked at me, and suddenly his eyes became keen, blazing with that truly great
intelligence of his. "The same ones who are living on
the other side of our moon."
There was a sudden silence in the room.
His
glance swept us. "They're here—in this building. They switched the tapes.
I repeat—the tape you saw just now is not the one I saw last night. And yet
this substitute is authentic. It shows an actual moon-rocket approach."
"Whom
do you suspect—Martians?" I said gently, giving the others in the room a
significant look. They looked back, nodding slightly. One of the officers
scribbled a hasty note and went to the door.
"Call
them Martians, if you wish," Lassiter said softly. "Those ancient
ones who visited here so many millenniums ago; who, out of pity or kindness—or
maturity—taught the savages they found here the rudiments of civilization. Those far-travelers who still watch—and wait."
"You
can't be serious, Lassiter," one of the Rand men said unhappily.
"Even if there were such—such space people— why would they try to keep us
in ignorance?"
"Because we're still savages!" he
shouted. "Clever, murderous children, developing our
brains, our skills, but never our emotions. How could they permit us to
join them, the society of other worlds, until we achieve adulthood—genuine
maturity? That's why they switched these films—so we couldn't really
know."
He
said more—much more. He pointed out the consistent pattern of failures that had
harassed man's burgeoning space hopes. Failures he now understood to be
deliberate stumbling blocks placed in mankind's path as it clawed—prematurely—
for the stars. An altogether remarkable synthesis.
After exhaustive chemical analysis of the
tape, it was proved to be of the same composition as stock still on the lab's
shelves, which of a necessity, ruled out its being a substitute. After a few
more reruns of the tape, the Air Force announced itself as well pleased with
the brilliant success of the moon shot.
Lassiter,
it was decided, had suffered a mental collapse because of overwork and the
disappointment at discovering that the other side of the moon was no different
from the side the earth has always seen. He is, as of this writing, undergoing
a series of psychiatric examinations which ought to disclose— but in all
likelihood won't—that he is more sane than most of mankind. He is a remarkable
individual, and I suggest that he be placed on the list of those to be watched
most closely in the future.
Also,
I recommend that steps be taken hereafter to intercept all camera-bearing
rockets from earth while in flight, and prepared films or tapes substituted,
thus avoiding another untoward incident, such as developed here.
For
the Archives:
Enclosed herewith is the original video tape which the U.S. Moon Rocket took
of our lunar base.
Though
I've made the journey from earth to moon and back innumerable times, I found
Lassiter's description of this tape strangely moving. Especially
his remark concerning the rather good shot of my own ship rising from the moon
as I left with the substitute tape last night. He is right—it does
indeed resemble an iridescent bubble.
THE UNSAFE DEPOSIT BOX
by Gerald Kersh
You
have a sharp eye, sir, a very sharp eye indeed, if you recognize me by those
photographs that used to appear in the newspapers and the sensational magazines
about 1947. I fancy I must have changed somewhat since then; but yes, I am
Peter Perfrement, and they did make a knight of me for some work I did in
nuclear physics. I am glad, for once, to be recognized. You might otherwise
mistake me for an escaped convict, or a lunatic at large, or something of that
sort; for I am going to beg you to have the goodness to sit in this shadowy
corner and keep your broad back between me and the door. Have an eye on the mirror
over my head and you will in due course see the reflections of a couple of
fellows who will come into this cozy little bar. Those men will be looking for
me. You will perceive, by the complete vacuity of their expressions,
that they are from Intelligence.
They'll
spot me, of course, and then it will be, "Why, Sir Peter, how lucky to
find you here!" Then, pleading business, they'll carry me off. And evading
those two young men is one of the few pleasures left me in my old age. Once I
got out in a laundry basket. Tonight I put on a workman's suit of overalls over
my dinner suit and went to a concert. I intend to go back home to the Center
after I've had my evening, but I want to be left alone a bit. Of course, I have
nobody but myself to blame for any slight discomfort I may at present suffer. I
retired once and for all, as I thought, in 1950. By then the inwardness of such
atom bombs as we let off over, say, Hiroshima was public property. My work, as
it seemed, was done.
So I
withdrew to a pleasant little villa at the Cap des Fesses just outside that
awful holiday resort Les Sables des Fesses in the south of France. Fully
intended to end my days there, as a matter of fact—set up library and study
there, and a compact but middling-comprehensive laboratory. I went to all the
music festivals, drank my glass of wine on the terrasse of
whatever café
happened to take my fancy, and continued my academic battle with Doctor Frankenburg.
This battle, which was in point of fact far less acrimonious
than the average game of chess, had to do with the nature of the element
fluorine. I take it that esoteric mathematics are,
mercifully, beyond your comprehension; but perhaps you were told at school
something of the nature of fluorine. This is the enfant terrible of the elements.
Fluorine,
in temperament, is a prima donna and, in character, a born delinquent. You
cannot keep it pure; it has such an affinity for practically everything else on
earth, and what it has an affinity for, it tends to destroy. Now I had a theory
involving what I can only describe to a layman as tame fluorine—fluorine
housebroken and in harness. Doctor Frankenburg, whose leisure is devoted to
reading the comic papers, used to say concerning this, "You might as well
imagine Dennis the Menace as a breadwinner." However, I worked away not
under pressure nor under observation, completely at my leisure, having access
to the great computer at Assigny. And one day I found that I had evolved a
substance which, for convenience, I will call fluorine 80+.
I do not mean that I made it merely in
formula. The nature of the stuff, once comprehended, made the physical
production of it really absurdly simple. So I made some— about six ounces of
it, and it looked rather like a sheet of hard, lime-colored gelatin. And
potentially this bit of gelatinous-looking stuff was somewhat more potent than
a cosmic collision. Potentially, mark you—only potentially. As it lay in my
hand, fluorine 80+ was, by all possible calculations, inert. You could beat it
with a sledge hammer or burn it with a blowlamp, and nothing would happen. But
under certain conditions—conditions which seemed to me at that time quite
impossible of achievement—this morsel of matter could be unbelievably terrible.
By unbelievably, I mean immeasurably. Quite beyond
calculation.
The notebook containing my formula I wrapped
in paper with the intention of putting it in the vault of the Banque Maritime des
Sables des Fesses. The sheet of fluorine 80+ I placed between two pieces of
cardboard, wrapped it likewise, and put it in my pocket. You see, I had a
friend in the town with whom I often had tea, and he
had a liking for the weird and the wonderful. Like the fool that I am, I
proposed to amuse myself by showing him my sample and telling him that this
inoffensive little thing, in a suitable environment, might cause our earth to
go pssst!—in about as long as it takes for a pinch of
gunpowder to flash in a match flame. So in high spirits I went into town, paid
my visit to the bank, first having got a pot of Gentlemen's Relish and a jar of
Oxford Marmalade for tea, and so called on Doctor Raisin.
He
was another old boy who had outlived his usefulness, although time was when he
had some reputation as an architect specializing in steel construction.
"Something special for tea," I said and tossed my little package of
fluorine 80+ on the table.
"Smoked salmon?" he asked.
Then
I brought out the marmalade and the relish, and said, "No," chuckling
like an idiot.
He
growled, "Evidently you have just paid a visit to the Cafe de la Guerre
Froide," and sniffed at me.
"No, I've just come
from the bank."
"So,"
he said, "that's a parcel of money, I suppose.
What's it to me? Let's have tea."
I
said, "I didn't go to the bank to take something out, Raisin. I put
something in."
"Make me no
mystifications, if you please. What's that?"
"That,"
I said, "is proof positive that Frankenburg is wrong and I am right,
Raisin. What you see there is half a dozen ounces of absolutely stable fluorine
eighty-plus and a critical mass, at that!"
Dry
as an old bone, he said, "Jargon me no jargons. As I understand it, an
atomic explosion takes place when certain quantities of radioactive material
arrive, in certain circumstances, at what you call 'critical mass.' This being
the case, that little packet may, I take it, be considered dangerous?"
I
said, "Rather so. There's about enough fluorine eighty-plus there to
vaporize a medium-sized planet."
Raisin
said, "A fluorine bomb, an ounce of nitroglycerin— it's all the same to
me." Pouring tea, he asked nonchalantly, "How do you make it go off?
Not, I gather, by chucking it about on tables?"
I
said, "You can't explode it—as you understand an explosion—except under
conditions difficult to create and useless once created; although, perhaps,
while valueless as a weapon, it could be put to peaceful uses."
"Perhaps me no perhapses. A fighting cock could be used to make chicken broth. What did you want to bring it here for,
anyway?"
I
was a little put out. Raisin was unimpressible. I told him, rather lamely,
"Well, neither you nor anyone else will ever see fluorine eighty-plus
again. In about fourteen hours that piece there will—as you would put it—have
evaporated."
"Why
as I would put it? How do you put it?"
"Why, you see," I explained,
"in point of actual fact, that stuff is exploding now. Only it's exploding
very, very gradually. Now, for this explosion to be effectual as an explosion,
we should have to let that mass expand at a temperature of anything over sixty
degrees Fahrenheit in a hermetically sealed bomb case of at least ten thousand
cubic feet in capacity. At this point, given suitable pressure, up she'd go.
But when I tell you that before we could get such a pressure under which my
fluorine eighty-plus would undergo certain atomic alterations, the casing of
our ten-thousand-cubic-foot bomb would need to be at least two or three feet
thick."
Being
a Russian, Raisin stirred marmalade into his tea and interrupted. "It is a
chimera. So let it evaporate. Burn your formula. Pay no further attention to
it. . . . Still, since you have brought it, let's have a look at it." He
undid the little parcel, and said, "I knew all along it was a joke."
The paper pulled away, there lay nothing but a notebook.
I
cried, "Good heavens—that ought to be safe in the bank! That's the formula!"
"And
the bomb?"
"Not a bomb, Raisin—I've just told you that fluorine eighty-plus
can't possibly be a bomb of its own accord. Confound it! I must have left it at the
grocer's shop."
He said, "Is it
poisonous?"
"Toxic? I don't think so. . . . Now wait
a minute, wait a minute! I distinctly remember—when I left the house I put the
formula in my right-hand coat pocket and the fluorine eighty-plus in the left.
Now first of all I went to the Epicerie Internationale to get this marmalade
and stuff, and so as not to crowd my left pocket I transferred. . . . Oh, it's
quite all right, Raisin. There's nothing to worry about, except that this is
not the kind of notebook I like to carry about with me. The sample is safe and
sound in the bank. It was a natural mistake—the packages are very much alike in
shape and weight. No cause for anxiety. Pass the Gentlemen's Relish, will
you?"
But Raisin said, "This horrible little
bit of fluorine—you left it in the bank, did you?" "Fluorine
eighty-plus. Well?" "You bank at the Maritime?" "Yes, why?"
"So
do I. It is the safest bank in France. Its vaults—now
follow me carefully, Perfrement—its vaults are burglarproof, bombproof,
fireproof, and absolutely airtight. The safe deposit vault is forty feet long,
thirty feet wide and ten feet high. This gives it a capacity of twelve thousand
cubic feet. It
is maintained at a low humidity and a constant temperature
of sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit. The walls of this vault are of
hard steel and reinforced concrete three feet thick. The door
alone weighs thirty tons, but fits like a glass stopper in a
medicine bottle. Does the significance of all this sink
in?"
"Why," I said, "why "
"Yes, why? You can say that again. What you have done, my irresponsible
friend," said Doctor Raisin, "is put your mass of fluorine
eighty-plus in its impossible casing. That's the way with the likes of you. It
would never dawn on you that a bomb might be an oblong thing as big as a bank.
Congratulations!"
I said, "I know the manager, M. le
Queux, and he knows me. I'll go and see him at once."
"It's Saturday. The bank's
closed."
"Yes,
I know, but I'll ask him to come over with his keys." Raisin said, "I
wish you luck."
A
telephone call to M. le Queux's house got me only the information that he was
gone for the weekend to Laffert, about eighty miles inland, up the mountain,
where he had a bungalow. So I looked about for a taxi. But it was carnival
weekend, and there was nothing to be got except one of those essentially French
machines that have run on coal gas and kerosene, and have practically no works
left inside them, and yet, like certain extremely cheap alarm clocks, somehow
continue to go, without accuracy, but with a tremendous noise. And the driver
was a most objectionable man in a beret, who chewed whole cloves of raw garlic
all the time and shouted into one's face as if one were a hundred yards
distant.
After
a disruptive and malodorous journey, during which the car had twice to be
mended with bits of wire, we reached Laffert, and with some difficulty found M.
le Queux.
He
said to me, "For you—anything. But to open the bank?
No, I cannot oblige you."
"You had better," I said to him, in
a minatory tone.
"But
Sir Peter," said he, "this is not merely a matter of turning a key
and opening a door. I don't believe you can have read our brochure. The door of
the vault is on a time lock. This means that after the lock is set and the door
closed, nothing can open it until a certain period of time has elapsed. So, precisely at 7:45 on Monday morning—but not one instant
before—I can open the vault for you."
I
said, "Then as I see it, you had better send for the locksmith and have
the lock picked."
M. le Queux laughed. He said, "You
couldn't open our vault without taking the door down." He spoke with a
certain pride.
"Then
I'm afraid I'll have to trouble you to have the door taken down," I told
him.
"That
would necessitate practically taking down the bank," M. le Queux said; and
evidently he thought that I was out of my mind.
"Then,"
I said, "there's nothing for it but to take down the bank. Of course, there'll be compensation, I suppose.
Still, the fact remains that, by the sheerest inadvertence, for which I hold
myself greatly at fault, I have turned your bank-vault into a colossal bomb—a
bomb compared with which your Russian multimegaton bombs are milk-and-water.
Indeed, you would no more weigh or measure my fluorine eighty-plus in terms of
mere megatons than you'd buy coal by the milligram or wine by the cubic
centimeter."
"One of us is going
crazy," said M. le Queux.
"Call
a Hiroshima bomb a megaton," I said. "Dealing with my fluorine
eighty-plus we have to make new tables. So a million megatons equal one
tyrrannoton. A million tyrranno-tons equal one chasmaton. A million chasmatons
make one brahmaton. And after a million brahmatons we come to something I call
an ultimon, because it is beyond even the scope of mathematical conjecture. In
a certain number of hours from now—and we are wasting time talking, M. le
Queux—if you don't get that vault of yours open, the universe will experience
the shock of half a chasmaton. Please let me use your telephone."
So I
called a certain branch of Security, and after that told a minister, who shall
be nameless, to be so kind as to get a move on—referring him, of course, to
several other nuclear experts, in case my own name was not enough for him. Thus
I was able, within twenty minutes, to tell M. le Queux, "It's all
arranged. Army and police are on the way. So are some colleagues of mine. The
Custodia Safe Company, who installed your vault, are
flying their best technicians into Fesses. We'll have your vault open in a
couple of hours or so. I'm sorry if this inconveniences you, but it's got to be
done, and you must put up with it."
He
could only say, "Inconveniences me!" Then he shouted, "After
this, Sir Peter Perfrement, you will kindly take your banking business
elsewhere!"
I
was sorry for him, but there was no time for sentiment just now, for I found
myself caught in a sort of whirlpool of giddy activity. Accompanied by the
usual quota of secret police from Security, four highly regarded nuclear
physicists were rushed to Fesses. I was pleased to see among them my dear old
enemy Frankenburg, who would have to admit that in the matter of fluorine he
was totally confuted. There was also, of course, a swarm of policemen, both
uniformed and in plain-clothes, and, goodness knows
why, two doctors, one of whom kept talking and talking without rhyme or reason
about fluorine being found in relatively high concentration in the human embryo
and how good it was for children's teeth. An expert from the quiet old days of
the high-explosive blitzes said that since one invariably evacuated the area
surrounding an unexploded bomb until it was defused, it would be wise to
evacuate Sables des Fesses.
At this
the maire went into ecstasies of Gallicism. To evacuate
this place at carnival weekend would be to ruin it—death rather than dishonor,
and so forth. I said that if my fluorine 80+ blew, the problem of evacuation
need not arise; for nobody anywhere, ever, would be any the wiser. The chief
of police, giving me a suspicious look, said that the present danger was only
hypothetical; but the panic that must attend a mass alarm would be inevitably
disastrous. It would be necessary only to surround the block in which the bank
was situated. This being in the business district of the town, and most of the
offices shut up for the weekend, the matter might be accomplished—a
hairsbreadth this side of impossibility.
So
said the chief of police, filling a pipe as a pioneer fills his muzzle-loader
with his last hard-bitten cartridge, and pointing it right at me. He made it
clear, without speaking, that he thought this was all a put-up job, to get that
bank vault open.
M.
le Queux said, "But the armored car has been and gone, and the bank is
just about empty of cash until Monday." Still the chief of police wasn't
satisfied. Watching him tamp down the charge in his pipe, I could not help
reciting a hunting proverb of my grandfather's: Ram tight the powder, leave loose the lead, if you want to kill dead. He made a note of that. Meanwhile, Frankenburg
and the others were poring over my notes, which I had been compelled to hand
over.
Frankenburg growled, "I
want to check, and doublecheck. I want a computer. I want five days."
But
little Doctor Imhof said, "Come, we must grant the possibility that what
we read here is valid. Even for the sake of argument we must grant it."
"Well, for the sake of
argument," said Frankenburg. "So?"
"So,"
said Imhof, "any
relaxation of pressure must
render Perfrement's so-called fluorine eighty-plus harmless, must it not? This
being the case, a hole drilled in the vault door should be an ample measure of
precaution. This hole made, why, let the matter wait until Monday."
"So be it," said I. "He talks
sense."
So
now the engineers from the Custodia Company, having come in by plane, unloaded
their massive paraphernalia in the bank. And among the cylinders and eye
shields and other gear I noticed a number of gas masks. "What are they
for?" I asked le Queux.
Frankenburg,
unwilling to be convinced, was complaining, "Yes, yes, bore holes—leave
Perfrement's thing until Monday. But unless I misread this formula, his
so-called fluorine eighty-plus will by that time have ceased to exist."
A
certain Doctor Chiappe said in a glum voice, "Metaphysics: If we leave
it, it ceases to exist; if we don't leave it, it ceases to exist; but, as I
read Perfrement's notes, if we leave fluorine eighty-plus, we shall be involved
with it in a state of co-nonexistence. Better bore holes."
I said, "I asked you, M. le Queux, what
are those gas masks for?"
He said, "Why, when the door is in any
way interfered with, the alarm automatically goes off. We omit no precautions,
none whatsoever. As soon as the alarm goes off, the vault fills with tear gas
from built-in containers."
"Did you say tear
gas?" I asked.
"In
a high concentration."
"Then," I cried, "get away from that door at once!" I appealed to
Frankenburg. "You hate every word I say, old fellow, but you're an honest
man. Conceding that my notes are right—and I swear they are—you'll see that my
fluorine eighty-plus has one affinity. One only. That
is with CeH7C10 —chloroacetophenone. And that, damme, is
the stuff tear gas is made of!"
Frankenburg nodded. Chiappe said, "Slice
it as you like— we've had it!"
And old Raisin grumbled, "This, I
believe, is what the dramatists call a perfectly damnable impasse. Correct me
if I'm wrong."
It was little Imhof who asked, "Is there
no part of this place at all that's not guarded by alarms, and what not?"
Le Queux said, "Technically, there is
only one part of our
vault that's reachable from the outside—if you can call it the
outside. The back of our vault abuts on the back of the
jeweler's, Monnickendam's, next door. His vault, you see, is
itself two feet thick. Hence--------- "
"Aha!" said the chief of police.
"Get Monnickendam," said the
Minister of Security, and that famous jeweler and pawnbroker was duly produced.
He
said, "I'd open my vault with pleasure, but I have a partner, Warmerdam.
Our vault opens by two combination locks which must be operated simultaneously.
These locks are so placed that no one can operate both at the same time. I have
my own secret combination and Warmerdam has his. We must both be present to
open the vault."
"That's how one gets
rich," old Raisin muttered.
Monnickendam
corrected him, "That is how one stays rich."
"Where's Warmerdam?" they asked. "In London."
London was telephoned, and Secret Service
agents dragged poor Warmerdam shrieking from a dinner table and rushed him to a
jetport and fired him over to Sables des
Fesses with such dispatch
that he arrived in a state of semiobfuscation, with a napkin still tucked under
his chin.
But
now, by the chief of police's expression, it was evident that the whole matter
was an open-and-shut case to him. I was some sort of master criminal, a
Moriarty, and my real objective was the jewelers' strong room. He strengthened
the police cordon, and Monnickendam and Warmerdam opened their vault.
The men from Custodia went to work—but not before
the two jewelers had got a signed and witnessed indemnity from the president of
the bank; they wouldn't trust the minister— and so the heavy steel and concrete
of the strong room cut through, we began to bite into the back of the bank.
"Time runs out,"
I said.
Raisin irritated everybody by saying,
"Imagination, my friends, and nothing but imagination, is making us all
sweat. All things considered, do you think that a megaton, a tyrran-noton, or
an ultimon could do us—us personally—more harm than, let us say, a pound of
dynamite?"
The
chief of police said, "Ha! You know a lot about dynamite, it seems."
"I
should hope so," said Raisin. "I was sabotaging Nazis, my friend,
when you were swinging a truncheon for the Deuxième Bureau."
I
had better be brief, however. At about five in the morning we broke through.
I
said, "Fine. You can take it easy now. Fluorine eighty-plus can't
blow." And when I then suggested a hot cup of tea, M. le Queux tried to strangle me.
But the men worked on, until the hole was about
two feet in diameter; and then one of the smallest of them took my key,
wriggled through, and came back with the contents of my safe-deposit box—the
little paper package of fluorine 80+.
I
pointed out to Frankenburg how greatly it had diminished. "By George, we
had a close call then!" I said.
And
that, as you might think, was that. Ah, but you'd be wrong. For you see in the
course of that mad night, when every policeman in Sables des Fesses and its
environs was mounting guard at the bank and at Monnickendam's, a gang of
thieves broke into the Prince of Mamluk's Galleries, said to contain one of the
four finest art collections in the world.
They
stripped the place at their leisure. They took a priceless collection of
antique jewels, three Rembrandts, four Hol-beins, two Raphaels, a Titian, two
El Grecos, a Vermeer, three Botticellis, a Goya and a Greuze. Greatest art
burglary of all time, I'm told. They say that Lloyds would rather have lost a
fleet of transatlantic liners than what they underwrote those pictures and
things for.
Taking
it by and large, I suppose it's for my own good that I was shipped back to
England and put under guard.
If I'd had any sense, of course, I'd have
kept quiet about
that confounded fluorine 80+. As it is, I've made a prisoner
of myself. They regard me—of all people!—as a compulsive
chatterbox. As if fluorine 80+ is anything to chatter about.
Why, you could make it yourself. Take 500 grams of fluor-
spar------
Oh-oh! Here come my two friends, I'm afraid.
I will take my leave of you now, sir. . . . Good night to you. Good evening,
gentlemen!
THE
SECOND TRIP TO MARS by
Ward Moore
Until
its report was known, the Murphy-Gobiniev-Langois-Alemeda-Mutsuhara expedition
to Mars in 2002 was thought to be the first successful one. Truth is, the first flight was achieved, quite accidentally, by a
Humphrey Beachy-Cumber-land in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden
Jubilee.
His
full name was Humphrey Howard Clarence Beachy-Cumberland, and he was a
distant—very distant—connection of the Churchills. Humphrey rather considered
the Churchills pushing; he had no handle in front of his name, and held a low
idea of peerages.
There
had been Beachys at Agincourt and Crecy; Beachy-Cumberland was a good name at
Naseby and Ramillies, Pres-tonpans and Salamanca; he didn't propose to change
it for Lord Whatsis or the Earl of Nowhere. Even at twenty-five— he'd been born
a twelvemonth after the Prince Consort died —he had solid principles. He had a
lively interest in progress (improved housing for tenants; free lectures for
the laboring classes); and a sense of responsibility (inspection of drains;
pensions for superannuated servants).
Progress
accounted for his interest in Giles Pundershot. Certainly not
compatibility. Pundershot was a cad in every sense: he was base-born, he
misplaced the letter h, he borrowed money without meaning to repay,
he read other people's mail, he seduced housemaids, he
wore the tie of a school he had not attended. Given the opportunity, he would
probably have shot foxes. He was also a genius of the first magnitude, a
physicist so far ahead of his time no university tolerated mention of his
name, no scholar of standing bothered to refute him. Humphrey gave him a pound
a week, rooms in the servants' wing, and a reasonable charge account at an
ironworks of which he was a director. He also allowed him an undergardener and
a half acre of ground for the construction of a flying machine. Both Humphrey
and Pundershot were sure heavier-than-air flight would come before 1900.
Pundershot's flying machine was along
revolutionary lines. It was, in fact, a projectile—a projectile without a
cannon. "Megnetism," explained Pundershot; "ettrection and
repulsion. Enti-grevity in a word. Spurns
the earth."
"Rilly?" asked
Humphrey politely.
"Trouble
so far is it spurns it too bloody"—Humphrey winced—"too bloody much.
If I'm right, it will go three hundred miles a second."
"Too much,"
commented Humphrey. "Too fast altogether."
"Eighteen thousand miles a minute,"
said Pundershot. "Million miles in an hour.
Speed like thet is worthless."
"Rah-ther,"
agreed Humphrey.
"Well,"
said Pundershot, gloomily cheerful, "expect I'll have to tear it down and
put it together eggayne."
Humphrey
looked faintly dubious. He knew to a farthing what the projectile had cost him;
experience taught that a second one would be at least four times as expensive.
"Er—what's
it like inside?" he asked, putting off the moment of approving
Pundershot's revised experiment.
"Nothing
an emeteur'd understend. False 'ull, suspended and padded, oxygen
tenk—machine's airtight—megnetic controls: 'on' and 'off.' Bit crowded because
of the shock-ebsorb-ing mechanism between inner and outer 'ulls. Barely room for one, and dark. Want to 'ave a look
round?"
Humphrey
didn't particularly, but tact (mightn't Pundershot be offended if he showed no
interest?) and shrewdness (after all, with a fellow like that the whole thing
might be papier-mache) made him peer through the open hatch.
"Get in if you want," invited
Pundershot. "Can't see much, but you can morrcrless feel things."
"Well," said
Humphrey doubtfully, "well. All right."
Pundershot's
description of the interior was understatement. Humphrey saw nothing, felt only
a foretaste of the coffin, tried to squirm back.
" 'Ere!" exclaimed Pundershot. "Watch
what you're doing. Ottermatic 'atch closer's right next to your arm."
Naturally,
Humphrey jerked his arm. It hit a button; the hatch cover snapped shut. "I
say!" he cried, struggling to open the cylinder again.
Instead he connected with the unseen "on"
button. The projectile rejected the gravity of earth with utter repulsion.
Forty-eight million miles off, give or take a few furlongs, the planet Mars
winked redly. The nose of the machine pointed precisely for it.
Humphrey Beachy-Cumberland's last thought as
he tore through the earth's gaseous envelope was that
he had provided a pension for Pundershot in his will. He wished
he hadn't.
The
Martians who surrounded him forty-eight hours later had reverted to barbarism a
thousand generations before. The great cities had eroded into dust, knowledge
had faded into fable and incantation; the delicate balances of a completely
free, egalitarian, nonviolent society had collapsed. Small tribes, so barbarous
that leadership was not inherited, but assumed by the strongest or most
cunning, warred perpetually on one another, eager for new victims. Even so,
Humphrey was lucky; practically all Martians had abandoned cannibalism.
He looked up into the impassive faces—the
Martians all topped him by at least a head—noting the coarsely woven garments,
the pale skins, wide chests, loosely held iron knives and hatchets.
"Water—please!"
he gasped.
A Martian uttered some sharp syllables. Bother, thought Humphrey; I shall have to teach them English. What a
nuisance.
The
unintelligible sounds must have been humorous; the others laughed briefly. Ominously. Humphrey raised an imaginary glass to his lips.
When there was no sign of comprehension, he cupped his hands and made
exaggerated drinking noises. The joking Martian drew an ugly iron knife.
"Here!" said Humphrey sharply.
"Put that down. You might hurt someone." He never enjoyed crude
humor. He turned half away, repeating his pantomime. The knife wielder paused.
"Water,"
repeated Humphrey, raising his voice despite his dry throat, knowing foreigners
always managed to understand sooner or later, if spoken to loudly and slowly
enough.
Much
later, after being threatened with mutilation or death in many ingenious
ways—avoided by staring at the would-be assassin and assuring him coldly that
this was no way to behave—Humphrey was on his knees at the edge of an unbelievably
wide canal, assuaging his thirst with the dark, brackish water. His captors
stood behind him, by no means intimidated by this stunted creature who seemed
without normal fear—without normal sense either—and who did not speak as
everyone else spoke. Not intimidated, but certainly puzzled.
Humphrey
gazed across the canal and peered up and down to where it disappeared in the
horizons. "No real rivers, I suppose. Well, have to make a start somewhere; call this the Thames. Thames
Canal."
He turned to the Martians.
"Thames," he said distinctly, "Teh-mmms. Cah-nal."
He pointed to the engineering work built by their ancestors sixty thousand
years earlier.
"Fenutch goobra,"
muttered a Martian.
"No,
no," insisted Humphrey. "Thames. Thames Canal." He moved back to the water to wash his
face and hands. "Have to do something about a decent bathe. The beggars
have iron; ought to be easy enough to make some sort of tub."
Daily
tubs were a necessity, but other necessities took immediate precedence. He
judged his hosts primitive enough to sleep in the open—a course he did not
propose to follow. Discomfort hardened a chap, made him fit, but privacy was
the basis of civilization. And Humphrey wasn't giving up civilization, even
under the present trying circumstances.
"Well,"
he said briskly, "can't stand about all day. What about a spot of food
now? Food, you know. Foo-ood."
Humphrey was distressed to discover just how
backward the Martians were. After the childishness of threatening a stranger
with beastly tortures, he hardly expected the culture of Manchester or
Birmingham. He did not look for niceties like umbrellas or Punch. But they didn't even have the institution of the family. Tribes were
divided along the lines of— h'm—gender. Boys remained with the women till they
were old enough to join in the endless war with other tribes, returning only
for—for carnal purposes. It was all thoroughly immoral.
Worse, there was no inheritance,
primogeniture or entail. Humphrey could not stand by while this sort of thing
went on without seeming to give it his approval.
His
captors still strove to nerve themselves to kill him, but merely trying was a
little harder every day. It was quite absurd and a trifle indecent to violate
custom and the fundamental code—you shall not let a stranger live—this way,
but never before had a stranger been so completely un-co-opera-tive. He refused
to shrink from a down-chopping ax or thrusting knife. He could not even be
properly finished off in his sleep; attempts at stealthy approach to the rough
shelter he had made were always met by an alert and disconcerting questioner.
Well, so long as convention had been flouted
by failing to bash his brains or cut his throat instantly, Mister—this was as
much of "Mr. Beachy-Cumberland" as they found it convenient to
pronounce—could just as well be dispatched next month. Or even the month after.
Meanwhile, now that they understood some of his words, possibly they could learn
a few tricks to overcome the neighboring tribes.
Humphrey
had no intention of being useful that way. To fight for Queen and country was
an occasional disagreeable— and glorious—necessity. There was neither necessity
nor glory in these aboriginal clashes. They were merely nasty.
Nevertheless,
he inadvertently increased the power of the tribe and his own prestige. In
these regions, at least, there were neither trees nor animals—as a lover of
roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, he regretted the absence of animal life—
only abundant variety of annual vegetable growth by the canal banks. So weapons
which at a similar stage of development would have been of wood or bone were
crudely forged from the oxidized iron lying so abundantly on the sands. Coal,
too, was plentiful, cropping up in ridges.
Humphrey,
as a stockholder and director, had conscientiously studied the ironworks.
Though no metallurgist, he could make coke from coal for a stronger, lighter
metal than the Martians used for their clumsy tools. Working at first alone,
then with a few who thought it amusing to imitate him, he produced knives which
cut rather than sawed, hoes to cultivate with, for heavier food crops and
stronger fibers for weaving, shovels and picks to dig the less common ores.
The
Martians saw the advantages of his methods and made themselves better
battle-axes. Humphrey considered battle-axes contrary to progress.
"Look
here," he said to a young Martian who had been among the first to copy his
manner of smelting and forging. "This won't do, you know."
"Squirrup
chedges," murmured
the young Martian.
"Nonsense,"
said Humphrey. "You can talk properly enough if you put your mind to it.
Now then, why do you people want to fight among yourselves all the time?"
"Kerestheme," said the Martian.
"Speak
up," ordered Humphrey. "None of your
gibberish." "Foo-wud," tried the Martian haltingly. "Wo-min." "Yes," reflected Humphrey. "To be sure. Of course."
He pondered. "Your name's Tom Smith, isn't it?" "Mogolum
Tu."
"That's
not a name, it's a whatyamacallit for a slide trombone.
Believe me, you're much better off as Tom Smith. Now then, about food and—er—women. You see how easy it is to
grow bigger plants by using better hoes. Now we can rig up a plow—no animals,
nuisance—and by planting instead of trusting to luck, there will be more than
this tribe can eat, even if all feast every day. Food enough
for all the tribes.
"As for—uh—women, that can be managed
better, too." Delicately he explained the advantages of monogamous marriage.
The
problem on Humphrey's mind had nothing to do with the iron water wheel now
creaking and clanking in the Thames Canal to bring irrigating water to sands
uncultivated for millennia, nor the improved looms for finer weaving,
nor negotiations with still another tribe considering joining the
peaceful and prosperous federation. It did not even concern the group of
dissidents around Henry Green—formerly Thot-cho Gor—who protested that Tom
Smith and Mister were going too far and too fast.
Humphrey's
problem was holy orders. Broad Church himself, he knew little theology, always
having left such matters to the vicar. The phrase, "apostolic
succession," floated through his mind: one could not instruct selected
natives in the gist of the Book of Common Prayer—he could remember long passages—and
set them up to administer the sacraments. To think of it smacked of
nonconformity. Yet how were the marriages he had arranged to be regularized?
True, even irregular monogamy was preferable to the old conditions, but it was
still irregular. And what of baptism and burial? When
he himself was committed to the earth—Mars, then—he wanted the prescribed
service read decently over his body.
Meanwhile
he kept a growing group of assistants vastly busy. Tom Smith remained his
closest disciple, but Tom had his hands full carrying out the projects Humphrey
originated, explaining, placating, persuading. For new
reforms and inventions, Humphrey depended on men who only recently stalked
human game. He was amazed at how quickly they grasped ideas or theories, often
hazy in his own mind, and translated them into practice. He knew paper could be
made by pulping woody fibers; they found the plant best suited and devised
means of production. He outlined the principles of type cutting and setting;
they contrived a press. He had rough notions about glass and cement; they
formed panes and bowls which were at least translucent; mixed concrete and
mortar which promised to remain hard.
Reluctantly he compromised on holy orders. A
ship's captain, he argued, performed valid marriages and committed bodies to
the deep. Why not the captain of a planet beyond the seas of earth? He knew his
logic grew shakier the further he extended it, but something had to be done. He
soothed his conscience by telling himself he was not ordaining clergy, merely
delegating functions; he had his students call themselves
"deputy vicar" or "acting curate." Now, whatever happened
to him—and he was aware that Henry Green's anti-Mister faction had grown
dangerously since the extension of civilization to the tribes beyond the
Serpentine and Avon canals—there would be men to teach the young and instill
decorum into those whose behavior might otherwise become scandalous.
In 1897 they launched the first steamship on
the Thames Canal. Humphrey had worked out a Martian calendar using earth years;
its defect lay in his uncertainty of the exact date of his arrival, so he was
never entirely easy about celebrating the Queen's Birthday, and Boxing Day was
distinctly a hit-or-miss affair. But the launching unquestionably occurred in
1897, ten years after the projectile landed. The ship was small, shallow draft
and cranky, with an unpredictable boiler and inefficient paddle wheels, but it
carried Humphrey's emissaries to strange places where exotic plants grew and
copper and tungsten were plentiful as iron, where Mister was only a name in a
vague legend, and they were met with missiles as often as listeners to the
message of progress.
This
was the year bank notes were engraved and the Martians taught the fine points
of property and to sell things for eight shillings sixpence ha'penny instead of
giving them away. Wages and real estate and commerce, profits, dividends and
unemployment—what a blessing civilization was.
The
issue of Henry Green and the grumblings of his followers could be put off no
longer. Humphrey had broadsides printed explaining the parliamentary system,
responsible government and constitutional rule. At the first election, Tom
Smith was returned for New Brighton on the Tweed Canal. Enough supporters were
elected for him to form a government with himself as Prime Minister and
Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Robert Jones—born Poromby Lusu—as First Lord
of the Admiralty. Henry Green was, of course, Leader of the Opposition.
Tactfully, the adjective Loyal was not insisted upon.
One
of the first acts of the new House was to forbid marriage with a deceased
wife's sister, another provided a postal service, a
third decreed that judges and barristers wear wigs. A Defence of the Realm bill
was vigorously fought by Green, who protested it would stamp out the last
vestige of ancient liberties ("Shall we yield our own customs to the airy
theories of an alien from an inferior planet?" Cries of "Hear!
Hear!" from the Opposition, and "Shame! Savage! Slander!" from
the Treasury Bench). Parliament was prorogued and the Prime Minister appealed
to the country.
New Brighton on Tweed again returned Tom
Smith, but Green's party won a majority of seats. During the polling this
possibility had fathered dark prophecies, yet the new Conservative—for so
Green called his party—government took office without friction and immediately
passed a Defence of the Realm Act over the bitter outcries of Smith's Liberals.
The
political situation settled, economic and religious conditions flourishing,
Humphrey turned to culture. A weekly Times foreshadowed a daily; a public
school was begun, an Encyclopaedia Martiana projected. A Philosophical Society
and an Art Academy were discussed and steps taken to form a Philharmonic
Orchestra. Humphrey had the alloyed pleasure of turning the first telescope
earthward and the pure joy of eating the first Martian crumpet.
He
was only fifty-five in 1917, when the last wild tribes gave up their
independence. That was the year Tom Smith finally resigned the Liberal
leadership to Herbert Noro. Humphrey's influence in the matter of name
changing was weakening; the clergy buttressed it so far as first names went,
but the tendency to retain the old Martian surnames grew. It was also the year
Humphrey started building Cumberland House and landscaping the flower gardens
leading from it down to the Severn Canal.
Though
fifty-five was a ridiculously early age to consider retirement, he found less
and less to do. Everything was in good hands. If he looked askance at some of
the doings of his protégés
he would not deny the
Martians had taken hold. There was good stuff in them.
He
did not travel much; when you've seen one Martian canal you've seen them all.
He revised and enlarged the plans for Cumberland House; he supervised the
masons and glaziers; he kept gardeners busy. He gave some time to compiling an
edition of Landed Martian Gentry.
But
largely he spent his days talking over old times, often with those who had once
plotted to kill him. Cumberland House was staffed with men who had not adapted
well to the new ways or backslid from them. Humphrey and they recreated the
past, and both, for different reasons, felt better for it.
One Guy Fawkes Day he sat down,
dressed for dinner, in
excellent spirits. His butler served a plate of lichen broth and
was withdrawing when Humphrey called, "Wait! I----------- "
The
man rushed to catch his collapsing form, but, himself an old campaigner,
he knew death when he saw it.
He was buried in his gardens; a stone he had
designed was put up over his grave.
Humphrey Howard Clarence
Beachy-Cumberland Esquire Formerly of Buckinghamshire Who always remembered the land of his birth.
Sean McDairmuid Murphy, an American, led the
United Nations Interplanetary Expedition of 2002, so far as the other nationals
in it—Yasu Matsuhara excepted—acknowledged any
leadership. More accurately, Doctor Murphy was the senior scientist of the WAC
Field Marshal, and its anthropologist.
Sergei Goviniev, the ethnologist, carried on
a cold feud with the philologist, Hyacinthe Langois, on whether Martian
civilization would have terrestrial analogies. Luis Alemeda, the geologist, was
convinced neither humans nor any history of them would be found.
Doctor
Matsuhara felt that Alemeda was biased by his vocation; he himself had an open
mind on all subjects but botany and baseball. He was as sure he would find
bamboo, or something very like it, as he was that San Francisco would win the
pennant and series in '03. Anyway, '04.
The
expedition was to have included a sixth member, Sir David Rabinovits. But since
the United Kingdom withdrew from the Canadian-Australian-New
Zealand-African-West Indian Commonwealth in 1990, Westminster had shown little
interest in new horizons. Sir David had been dropped and the expedition left
without a biologist.
"As
well," said Langois. "Who can tell what comes from perfidious
Albion?"
" 'Perfidious,' yes," muttered Gobiniev. "A rootless cosmopolitan, gilded
by a corrupt, imperialist Labor government; undoubtedly he was ordered to work
against the People's Democracies. Like the toadies of the so-called Fifth
Republic."
"Don't
be silly," said Sean Murphy. "There's much to be laid at the door of
Johnny Bull—Ireland is still divided—but using Dave Rabinovits as an agent
wouldn't be part of it. They wouldn't pay Dave's way because they don't care
about Mars or the UN or anything else but some silly celebration they're having
this year."
The
WAC Field Marshal made a beautiful landing not ten miles from where Humphrey's
projectile had plowed up the sands. It was now a Planetary Park, kept
primitively intact.
"Desert," crowed
Doctor Alemeda. "Sterile desert."
Langois
shook his head obstinately, scanning the sands through field glasses. A dust
cloud appeared, resolving into a crowd of people. "What did I tell you?
Men! And, I hope, women also."
"Those
bits of color seem to be flags," said Matsuhara. "Impossible,"
said Murphy. "Some evolutionary quirk."
"Union Jacks," identified Alemeda.
"A plot!" cried
Gobiniev. "A trick to discredit the U.S.S.R.!"
An
engine on wide iron wheels puffed black smoke ahead of a multi-doored, enclosed
car. It stopped short of the WAC Field Marshal; the crowd on foot pressed close
behind. The carriage doors opened and Martians came forward, dressed in tubular
trousers and double-breasted coats. One of them, high hat in left hand,
extended his right.
"From earth,
what?" asked the Martian. "Good show."
"Oh, no," said
Murphy. "Oh, no."
"How is it you don't
speak Russian?" growled Gobiniev.
"Are
you Russians?" inquired the Martian coldly. "Crimea
and Turkestan? The bear that walks like a man?"
"Only
one," explained Alemeda; "I am myself of Uruguay."
"Ah, the Banda Oriental—'the land we
lost.' I presume there is also a Frenchman? Possibly an
American?"
Matsuhara said diffidently, "We are
surprised to find that your language is English."
"Really? Yet we aren't surprised to find you using
it. But let bygones be bygones. I'm Austen Aboxu, Prime Minister and Secretary
of State for Defence. Welcome—officially this time—to Mars. Since we first sighted
you we've been getting up a reception at the New Oxford Guildhall. Come as you
are—heh-heh—I don't suppose you're prepared to dress anyway."
A slightly dazed expedition heard his
apologetic offer of a lift in his railway carriage. "It's a bit primitive;
we're not much on land vehicles. Ships now—well, we rather pride ourselves
there. Rules the waves and so on, you know."
Martian
Coldstream Guards with imitation-bearskin busbies being placed around the WAC
Field Marshal, they entered the carriage. "Naturally, we were
disappointed this wasn't a British go," said the Prime Minister. "But
I expect there'll be one along any day or so. Muddling through, of course;
England loses every battle but the last one."
"So they say,"
mumbled Murphy.
"Now
let me give you an idea of what will be going on at the Guildhall. The Acting
Archbishop of Mars first; afraid you'll find him a bore. The Dean's worse.
However, we must respect the cloth. I hope now they send us out some proper
chaps, ordained and all that sort of thing."
"No doubt," said
Murphy numbly.
"Then the Leader of the Opposition will
have a few well-
chosen. He'll pitch into me properly for not welcoming you
as he would if the last by-elections had gone the other way.
You mustn't mind; it's all in the way of business and I should
do the same if he were the right honorable and I only the
member for New Basingstoke. Then there'll be the Gentleman
Ushers of the Black Rod, the Warden of the Cinque Ports,
the Lord Leftenant of the Martian Poles----------- "
There were indeed. All
these and many more, all with
exceedingly long speeches of welcome to the intrepid ex-
plorers from "our foster-mother planet." Between speeches
they nibbled at filet of pressed Martian grass, Mars sprouts a
la Gladstone, and Canalgae au pommes de Mars. At length
Sean Murphy asked permission to speak. This being granted
—to the discomfiture of the leader writer for the Times, who
had been about to make a very witty speech—Murphy began
doubtfully, "I was commissioned by the United Nations to
take possession of this planet in the name of the UN for
all------ "
Prime Minister Aboxu stopped him with a wave
of the hand. "I'm afraid you can't do that, you know."
"Well,"
said Murphy, "I can see you're civilized; it's not like taking over an
empty world. Perhaps you'll want to join the UN yourselves?"
"I'm afraid you don't understand,"
said the Prime Minister gently. "We're not a nation. At
least not as you use the word. We owe our first and full allegiance to
the Crown. After all, this is Her Majesty's Dominion of Mars and it is entirely
up to Her Majesty—acting upon my advice—whether we join this —uh—United Nations
thing."
"The fourth British Empire,"
muttered Sean Murphy brokenly. "Kathleen ni Houlihan, is there no
justice?"
"Tomorrow,"
said the Prime Minister, suavely forestalling the Times' leader writer,
"we've rather a treat. There'll be a march past of bobbies
in the morning; a cricket match before tea; and a reconstruction—we've all the
songs, but the words are a bit sketchy—of Pinafore in the evening. I hope
you'll overlook our colonial shortcomings. But there are things we're most
anxious to hear about. First, the Queen, Her Majesty.
She is—dead?"
"Not as far as I know," answered
Murphy carelessly.
"But------ It
hardly seems possible. She is so old."
"Old? Oh, not so very, the way they look
at age now."
Mr.
Aboxu was puzzled. The Crown was immortal—but the Queen? No, no; he remembered
his history too well. Still alive? He understood the
difference between earth and Martian years, even with the confusion of a Martian
calendar based on terrestrial rotation, and could usually translate them in his
head, but the exciting day and his brief but telling defense of the dignity of
the Crown confused him. It did seem that Her Majesty must be nearly two
hundred, but perhaps there were new ways of reckoning since Mister's day.
No, that would hardly-----------
Ah, but science; Mister always
regretted not
knowing more of science and spoke of the time when life would be greatly
lengthened through its discoveries.
"Ah, yes. Quite."
Langois
dredged his memory to please his hosts, "They rejoice in England this
year. It is the Queen's Jubilee."
The Jubilee? But that was the year Mister had arrived. The Golden
Jubilee, the fiftieth anniversary of her reign. This must be—the hundred
and sixty-fifth. No doubt of some special significance Mister had neglected to
mention. "The Jubilee. Naturally.
We're celebrating here too."
The
master of ceremonies tapped impatiently. "Port, if you please. I know we
all wish to drink to our visitors."
"Ah," sighed Gobiniev.
"So, first, our
customary toast. . . . Mr. Prime Minister."
Mr. Aboxu rose and held his wineglass.
Everyone at the table, including the explorers, followed his example.
"Gentlemen,"
said the Right Honorable Austen Aboxu, PC, MP; Member, Royal Martian Society
for the Diffusion of Knowledge, his voice trembling slightly, "the
Queen!"
They
drank, and all snapped the stems of their glasses so no lesser toasts might
ever be drunk from them again. In this, as in so much else, they did as
Humphrey had taught them. It had new meaning now, now that, for the first time
since Mister's day, Home seemed so close.
THE VOICE IN THE EARPHONES
by Wilbur Schramm
It
had never happened before in the history of aviation. The chances of its
happening again are one in a number that has zeros stacked across the page like
eggs in cold storage. And yet the fact remains that it happened. For a long
time, people who saw it will tell their children and grandchildren how Shorty
Frooze, who had never flown an airplane, found himself suddenly at the
controls of an airliner 8000 feet up in the blue air over Kansas, and how, like
a farm boy breaking the new colt, he calmly decided to ride the big ship in to
a landing.
But
to appreciate what really happened that July afternoon you have to know
something about Shorty. His real name wasn't Frooze, of course. It was Habib el
Something or Other, one of those Asia Minor names that
are like nothing in English. They began to call him Frooze in the years when he
was a fruit peddler in a little town near Kansas City. I can still remember him
driving his donkey cart through the streets, jingling a bell and singing his
wares in a high voice that penetrated every kitchen in town.
"Can'aloupe!" he would call. "Wa'ermelon! Fresh
frooze!" And the name stuck, even when he learned to say
"fruits" and retired the patient little donkey and set up a sidewalk
stand in Kansas City— Shorty Frooze.
The
most important thing about Shorty was his son. Had you ever guessed Bill James
was his boy? Bill dropped his last name when he went to the University of
Kansas. He was as different from his father as could be. He was big and handsome
and popular, and a great athlete. Shorty told me once that Bill resembled his
mother, who died when Bill was bom. And inevitably Shorty's boy grew away from
nervous little Shorty, who couldn't even talk plain English. Bill wasn't exactly
ashamed of his father, but when he took him to father-and-son banquets in high
school, Shorty didn't enjoy it, and other people were ill at ease, too, and
thereafter Shorty faded into the background. He stayed away from Bill's
fraternity
house in
Lawrence. Whenever Bill played ball, I would see Shorty there, with a happy
mist in his eyes, but always in some inconspicuous corner, and I could never
find him when the game was over.
One
big area of Bill's world was closed to Shorty. That was aviation. Bill was a
natural flier. He soloed at seventeen. By the time he was eighteen, they said,
he could fly a barn door if anyone would put an electric fan on it. He went to
the airlines before he finished Kansas. When the shooting started in Europe, he
wanted to go right into the RAF, but Shorty said no. He said Bill was all he
had left. Wait at least long enough to finish out the year with the airlines,
he pleaded. Because Bill wasn't quite twenty-one, Shorty had
to give consent. They said some pretty bitter words before Bill stomped
out of the house, back to his job. And then came the
accident, barely a week later, with Shorty watching.
Shorty
grieved unnaturally over Bill's death. He kept blaming himself, torturing
himself. I always passed his little stand on my way to work, and for days at a
time it would be closed, while Shorty sat at home, grieving. Then he took to
hanging around the airport, talking to the mechanics and the pilots, and
watching the ships slide in from every point on the compass. They knew why he
did it; he felt closer to Bill there. But after a while he became a nuisance,
and they had to ask him to stay away.
Then he went back to work again, frantically.
I could find him at the stand any hour of the day or evening. To save money, he
went often without food as he had when he was helping put Bill through
Lawrence. And whenever he had a few dollars saved up he took an airplane trip.
He would come to the airport hours before flight time. People stared at him and
smirked behind their hands. The first time I saw him there, I stared too. I
didn't know him. He had got out his Sunday suit, and it must have been the suit
he was married in. It had tight trousers and a long coat, and made him look
like something out of a musical comedy. But when the plane was announced,
Shorty was always first in line, and he would scurry out to be sure of the
front seat. That was as near as possible to the place where Bill had sat when
he was pilot; there Shorty could see as nearly as possible what Bill must have
seen from the pilot's cockpit. It would have seemed pitiful, his trying so hard
to get closer to the boy in death than he could in life, if it hadn't been laughable.
And that was how Shorty happened to be on the front seat of an airliner bound
from Denver to Kansas City on the July day when it happened.
The other passengers confirm Shorty's story
of what happened. They were well out of Denver toward Kansas City when the
stewardess opened the door of the pilot's compartment and stepped into the
passenger's part of the ship. She was as white as her blouse, they said. She
sat down unsteadily beside Shorty in the front seat. Apparently only Shorty
heard what she said. She pointed to the front compartment. "My God, see
what's in there!" she gasped, and fainted dead away.
Shortly himself
didn't know exactly why he did what he did in the next few minutes. Why he took
the stewardess' keys and went into the pilots' compartment, instead of giving
the stewardess first aid, is something that could be explained only in terms of
some larger pattern of which that act was a part. The important thing is that
he did go through the door forbidden to passengers. He locked the door behind
him and looked along the passageway, which he had never seen, but which Bill
had seen so often, past the radio equipment, past the baggage compartment, to
the cockpit where pilot and copilot sit surrounded by windows and instruments.
At
first he comprehended only that there was something vaguely wrong with what he
saw. It came to him slowly that there was no pilot and no copilot, and no hand
was on the controls, and no eye was watching where the ship flew.
Still
slowly, like a man lifting an unknown weight, he mastered other details. One
pilot stretched out on the floor. The other slumped down behind his seat.
Shorty touched them, fearing he might be touching dead men. He listened to
their hearts. He propped them up, then stretched them out and poured water from
a vacuum bottle on their faces. You have read the story in the newspapers, of
course, and you know that pilots and stewardess were suffering from a violent
attack of food poisoning, from a lunch they had eaten before flight. But Shorty
did not know that. He knew only that both pilots were unconscious, and he could
not revive them, and he was alone with the controls of a transport plane high
above Kansas.
The
sensible thing, he admitted to himself, would be to go back and see whether a
doctor or a pilot was among the passengers. He tried to weigh the possibility
of there being a doctor or a pilot against the possibility of panic if there
was none. And partly because of that judgment, partly because he was at last
where Bill had sat on so many flights, he decided not to go back to the
passengers—not for a little while.
He
sat down in the pilot's seat, trembling, but not with fright. This thing with
the little steering wheel on the end must be the "stick" Bill had
mentioned so often. There was one for each pilot, and two pedals like clutch
and brake in front of each stick. He tried to see how many of the dials and
switches on the instrument panel he could identify from hearing Bill talk
about them. One he was sure of—down at the lower left center, a handle marked Automatic
Pilot. He judged that was
what was keeping the plane level and straight. Things would be all right until
the gas gave out. Here was the radio headset. Acting on a sentimental little
impulse, he put on the earphones and picked up the microphone Bill must have
addressed so often.
Bill
would have said something professional like "Pilot to tower," he
knew, and given the flight number and position. But the only thing Shorty could
think of to say, in a high, embarrassed voice was "Hello there. Hello,
Kansas City."
Nothing
happened for a minute, and then a voice came into his earphones. He felt like a
boy caught playing with forbidden toys. But the voice was calm and
matter-of-fact. "Hello, old fellow," it said. "Been wondering
where you were. Anything wrong?"
Shorty
thought at the time that the voice would be engraved in his memory like chisel
cuts in stone, but later he had trouble describing it for me. The radio didn't
leave much color in it, of course, and it was like any other airways voice
—flat, calm, sparing of words, the kind of rhythm men develop from dealing
much with elements and refusing to get excited over mere man-made things. All
afternoon Shorty kept trying to identify it with some
person he knew, but not quite succeeding. It was a friendly voice, for all its
impersonal quality. It invited confidence. And before Shorty really thought
about what he was doing, he was pouring the whole story of his situation into
the microphone.
When
he stopped, there was a long, low whistle from the earphones.
"My kid Bill ought to be here,"
said Shorty. "He was a flier."
"Yes, I know," said the voice. Then
it was silent so long that Shorty said anxiously, "Hello?"
"Well,"
said the voice thoughtfully. It took a long time to say, "Well."
"What shall I do?" asked Shorty.
"If
I were you," said the voice, "I'd fly her into Kansas City."
"But
I don't know how," said Shorty. "I'll teach you," said the
voice. "You'll do what?" gasped Shorty.
"Put your hands on the stick and your
feet on the pedals," said the voice. "Don't be afraid. They won't
bite."
Shorty
swore to me that is what happened up in the plane. That is how he came to do
what he did. He says he didn't feel frightened at first; he felt foolish, like
a man on a quiz program. Then he wondered how soon he would wake up. It took a
long time, Shorty said, before the reality of the situation swung around in
his mind and hit him like a fist.
And
by that time the voice in his earphones had taken over, and wasn't giving him a
chance to be frightened.
"Don't
be scared of the instrument board, either," said the voice. "You
won't need most of the things on it. They're luxuries. See if you can find a
dial marked Altimeter and tell me what it says."
"Eight," said
Shorty.
"That means eight thousand feet,"
said the voice. "Now look for a handle marked Automatic Pilot."
"Here it is," said Shorty. "Turn it to OFF."
"Take off the
Automatic Pilot?" gasped Shorty.
"Sure,"
said the voice. "You're going to learn to fly this crate, aren't
you?"
Shorty's
hand shook as he took off the Automatic Pilot. The left wing dropped slightly.
"Keep the stick
center."
The wing went up.
"How did you
know?" asked Shorty incredulously.
"Everybody
does it the first time," chuckled the voice.
"Now let's try a few things. Landing's simple, but you'll have to know how
to bank. Let's try a left bank first. Put the stick a little left and a little
forward. Push the left pedal a little. Just a little."
Bill
had talked about that, Shorty remembered. He had said that the pedals worked
just the opposite of a bobsled crossbar.
The big ship came around grandly. Shorty took
one hand off the stick and wiped something wet out of his eyes. In that instant
he understood more of what flying had meant to Bill than ever before. The
thrill is the same—your first jump on a horse, your first racing turn in a
sailboat, the first time you do a good bank in your plane.
"Level
it off," said the voice. "Press the right pedal a little. Stick back
to center. Pull it back a little to put the nose up. How was it?"
"A little jerky,"
said Shorty.
"You probably lost
some altitude too," said the voice. "That's because you didn't keep
your nose on the horizon." "My nose?" asked Shorty.
"The plane's nose. Now let's try another left bank." The voice seemed to hypnotize
him into it, Shorty said. "Now another," it said. "Better? . . .
You know," said the voice, "you might fool me and come in on the
other side. Let's try a right bank. Just the opposite.
Right pedal, and so on. Come on, now; let's do
it."
"That
was pretty bad," said Shorty. "I remember, Bill said a right bank
seemed harder than a left one at first."
"That's right. Now
let's practice another one."
"What
do you suppose the passengers think?" asked Shorty.
"What they don't know won't hurt them.
Are you flying along the railroad tracks now?" "Pretty close."
"East or west? Look at your compass. Top
of the instrument board." "East."
"Good.
How are you at glides?" "I never tried one," said Shorty.
"Better
try two or three. About all there is to landing is a good long glide. Push the
wheel a little forward and try one. Not too far forward. What does the
altimeter say now?"
"Seven
and a half.
Does that mean seventy-five hundred?"
"Yes,"
said the voice. "Now look around and find the switch that lowers the
wheels. You'll need that."
Shorty said he surrendered himself to the
voice like a man floating downstream. What it told him to practice, he practiced.
What it told him to push and pull and press, he did. Once there was a prolonged
pounding on the door behind him. "Shall I open the door?" he asked
the microphone.
"I
wouldn't," said the voice in the earphones. "Why take a chance? You
can fly this job, pappy. You don't need help."
That was one of the sweetest moments in
Shorty's life.
"They
told me I was too old to learn to fly," he confessed. "They even
kicked me out of the Kansas City airport."
"They won't today," said the voice.
Shorty
said he wished he had a fifty-cent cigar. That was the first moment in his life
when he had felt like smoking one. He felt like leaning back in a big chair
with his thumbs hooked in his vest.
As
they flew on across Kansas, Shorty said he got a kind of physical pleasure out
of living he hadn't experienced for thirty years. His senses seemed peculiarly
alert to the blueness of the air above him, the sweep of the Kansas plain, the
wind waves in the wheat and prairie grass below him. He saw another plane,
headed southwest along the distant horizon, and felt the warm sense of
brotherhood that ships feel at sea. Bill had told him about that feeling, but
he hadn't understood it.
He
even began to feel like talking—more so than he had ever felt with anyone
except Bill, when Bill was a boy. With his customers, with the few neighbors he
knew, he always tried to say as little as possible and to cover up his awkward
English and his funny accent. This fellow talking into his earphones actually
seemed to want to hear him talk. Shorty told him about himself, and about Bill,
and about some of the things he could see from the plane. When he saw what
looked like wheel tracks curving across the prairie, it was the most natural
thing on earth to ask the voice what they were.
"That's
the old Santa Fe Trail," Shorty's earphones said. "That's the road
they took before there were railroads. They went to the old Spanish cities in
Mexico and brought wagon-loads of goods home to sell. That's one of the most
famous roads in America."
"Why,
that's what I do," said Shorty, becoming excited. "That's how I do
it. I get the stuff down south and bring it up here to sell. I used to sell it
in wagons too. Can'aloupes and wa'ermelons and frooze."
Unconsciously he dropped back into the old immigrant English.
"Sure," said the
voice.
Shorty
tried to imagine prairie schooners and caravans creeping along the ruts in the
brown plain. And he fancied he could see another vehicle in the parade. It was
pulled by a patient little donkey, and the driver jangled a bell and sang his
wares in a high, loud voice. It was the first time he had ever thought of it
that way.
Impulsively,
he told about the quarrel with Bill, and how sorry he was that Bill's last
words had been spoken in anger.
"I don't think Bill
held any anger at you," said the voice.
"How well did you know
Bill?" asked Shorty.
"Pretty well." There was a little silence, and then the voice asked, "How do you
feel, old fellow?"
Over
to the north was the yellow River Kaw, and the
Lawrence hill was rising out of the endless plain. The hill, crowned by shining
university buildings, had always seemed very high and insurmountable to Shorty.
From this angle it looked different.
"You're going to take her down now, old
fellow," said the voice. "You're going to make a good landing. Your
kid Bill would be proud of you."
Shorty
said that was the last time he felt any indecision about it.
"Better
start to lose altitude now. Take her down to two thousand. Slow. Plenty of time. Slow. . . . Slow."
Shorty pushed the stick
forward . . . slow . . . slow.
The
smoke of Kansas City was on the sky and the taller buildings were beginning to
separate from the horizon. When Shorty first saw the field he wondered how a
plane could hit anything so small, but when he approached it a second time with
motors throttled down as far as they would go, landing flaps down, wheels
reaching for the ground, he felt a great surge of strength and knew he could do
it. He banked around, feeling all the firmness and power of the ship as it
turned into the wind. A sea captain's phrase went through his memory—"a
taut ship"—and he knew suddenly what that meant.
In that instant, too, he understood something
else about flying: you fly, the plane doesn't. Or at least there is a time of
merger when you and the plane become one and fly. He wondered how often Bill
had felt this same oneness with his plane. He felt very near to Bill at that
moment, perhaps closer than ever in life. It was almost as though he and Bill
were one.
Then he was steering into the white stripe of
the runway, pulling back the stick little by little as the voice in the earphones
told him to, cutting the airspeed, trying to bring the tail down level with the
nose, trying to hold the wings level, knowing that the next ten seconds would
tell whether it was a good landing or a crash.
Even in those seconds he remembered a plane
he had once seen overrun a field and stand awkwardly, with nose buried in a
swamp and tail high in the air, until everything above the ground burned away. Bill's plane.
Then
the wheels hit the ground. The left one hit first—left wing low, he guessed—and
the plane gave a great awkward bounce, turned a little oil the runway and
settled down. Shorty cut the ignition and let the ship roll. He didn't feel up
to taxiing it. After it stopped rolling, he put his head down on the stick and
closed his eyes.
When the field attendants rushed out in their
little cars to bawl him out for not taxiing to the landing apron, his first
impulse was to crouch down, so they wouldn't see him, or try to vanish in the
crowd before anybody saw who he was. Then he remembered some things that had
happened during the afternoon, and he sat up straight.
The
attendants saw his civilian coat in the window, and stopped growling and were
silent in astonishment. And then he had his little moment of triumph. Little Shorty Frooze who sold cantaloupes. Little Shorty who was kicked off the airport because he was a
nuisance. He sat up as straight and tall as he could. He leaned out the
window and spoke to them in what he imagined to be the authoritative voice of
an airlines captain.
"We
have sick men aboard," he said. "Take care of them before you touch
anything else in the plane."
And
that is all of Shorty's story except one very
important incident. When they had shaken his hand and snapped his picture, he
said he wanted to go to the tower to thank the person who had helped him bring
in the ship. They laughed at the joke, and then saw he was in earnest.
The
airport manager took him aside a moment. "Mr.—er —Frooze," he said,
"you know, don't you, that we've been trying to contact your plane all
afternoon? Nobody in the tower has been talking to you."
Well,
you explain it. What happened in the blue air over Kansas I have told you just
as Shorty told me. It doesn't seem possible that he
could have imagined it all. On the other hand, it doesn't seem possible that he
could have remembered enough from Bill's old aviation chatter to bring in that
plane without help. Shorty swears someone was talking to him, and he thinks he
knows who it was. I don't for a moment believe it was
who he thinks it was, but strange things happen. And the important thing, after
all, is what Shorty thinks, because he has stopped grieving over Bill now, and
walks with his head up, and doesn't hide from people, and looks at the sky with
the squint of a flier.
MOON CRAZY
by
William Roy Shelton
This
was the third night that Ralph had watched the moon. He kicked off his shoes at
the base of the cypress, then reached up to the lowest
board he had nailed to the tree and began the long climb. A few boards behind
him followed a seven-weeks-old opossum which paused and searched at each rung
like a puppy climbing his first stairs.
Ralph
climbed slowly, holding his body just far enough from the trunk so that the
hair on his chest did not catch in the bark. When he reached the eighteenth
rung, at the halfway mark, the moonlight struck in a diagonal line across his
bare, freckled shoulders and glinted off the watch on his outstretched wrist.
He hugged the trunk for a moment, hearing only his breathing in the forest,
watching the moon. Then he felt the nose of the opossum nuzzle his feet and he
began to climb again, pulling himself, finally, upon the slab-pine platform he
had built at the top. Without pausing to catch his breath, he reached down,
gripped the nape of the trembling opossum and hoisted him gently to the
platform.
"There
you are, Whitcface," he said, stroking the coarse fur. "Now you're
the highest 'possum in the swamp and maybe in the whole state of Florida, and
you're sure the scaredest. Just look round you. Don't you wisht you was an
eagle, boy?"
A
moment later, Ralph got to his feet and struck his palm solidly against the
crude shack which covered most of the platform. He gave a low laugh at the
sturdiness of his work; then, as the sound of his blow fell away through the
trees, he placed his hands on his hips and looked about him. The bald crown of
the cypress did not begin to flare until it had cleared the rest of the trees,
and to (he south he could see three quarters of a mile straight down the
silvered path of the St. Johns River. To the north he could see a large island
whose palisades of cypress and water oak gave it the almost exact shape of a
diamond. In all other directions he could see far over the tops of trees. And
he could see the moon clearly.
He stood thus till he was breathing easily
again, then he smiled down at Whiteface, already curled on the platform, and
opened the door of the shack. Inside, he paused, listening. A tripod made from
bay saplings stood in the center of the floor directly beneath a rectangular
slit in the roof. Underneath the tripod, and covered with a worn army comforter,
was a homemade reclining chair with slabs of pine bark still clinging to its
sides. When he was certain he could hear no mosquitoes, he reached up and
removed the canvas from a short, squat telescope aimed at the sky. Then, removing
his trousers, he placed himself on the chair, propping his head with the
comforter until his eye was directly beneath the small end of the telescope.
When he had made himself thoroughly comfortable, he raised his arms and
focused the telescope upon the face of the moon.
What
had been, only a few moments before, a flat and indistinct disk, loomed now as
a huge, gleaming orb dazzling with light. It appeared
as unevenly rounded as a peeled orange, and so nearly filled the inside of the
telescope that only a thin band of aureate mist encircled it.
Already,
with only three nights' watching, there were mountains and even entire land
masses which were becoming familiar. His eye searched the depths of the large
crater in the lower right quadrant, then darted upward to the series of low,
twisted ridges near the receding top of the. moon.
Ralph's lips parted in smileless wonder. There were mysteries in its shadowed
craters, and an unearthly stillness about its bright, flat plains which
quickened his pulse and started his fingers, which had been relaxed at his
side, to drumming gently against the comforter.
He
smiled to think how people called this or that pattern the man or the woman in
the moon, when there were so many other and far more interesting pictures. Here
was a suckling pig resting on its side, and, there above, a leaping porpoise
with a hunk bitten out of its tail by a shark. Near the bottom was a claw
hammer and, beside it, a drifting parachute with a hole in the silk.
When
he tired of his images, he placed his hands behind his head and stared fixedly
at the moon. He could almost imagine that he felt a slight, not unpleasant
tickling sensation well behind his eye, and he laughed to think of his head as
a camera taking a picture of the moon. He remembered that his father used to
say that "lunatic" came from the word "lunar," and that
moonlight could sometimes affect a person in strange ways, but Ralph laughed
again at this, because the moon was only a cold mass with neither light nor life
of its own. . . .
And
here was another picture of the head of a cow with one of its horns
disappearing around the side of the moon.
At
first, so absorbed was he in his images, he did not clearly perceive the small,
trespassing shadows which invaded his vision from the left and made slow
passage across the face of the moon to merge silently with the opposite
blackness. At the instant of their exit, however, he pressed his hand tightly
across his eyes, and, in an after-vision, he saw them again. He counted three
separate silhouettes this time, moving in leisured, phantom flight like
interstellar couriers intent on a mission. He decided the three silhouettes
were herons and reached for his pad and pencil. This was the third time, he
noted, that the after-image had been successful, and he knew Professor Brooks
would like to hear about it.
Ralph
had first seen Professor Brooks one evening at sunset when he looked up from
his bait cage and saw a stranger step out on the dock. He wondered how the
stranger found the rut road through the palmettos and how he got his heavy car
through the sand. And when the man asked for a rowboat Ralph had wondered why
anybody without any fishing gear wanted to rent a boat, particularly if he had
to have someone else to row it.
"Let's
just drift, son," the professor had said when they reached midstream. So
they drifted down the cool trough between the trees, and as the sky deepened
the stranger began to talk about the birds which flew overhead or made their
roosting cries back in the swamp. Ralph regarded the stranger with new respect
after he had identified a limpkin by its mewling cry and caused a kingfisher to
circle them twice as he mimicked its call.
"You
know more about birds than I do, mister," Ralph said.
The stranger laughed. "That's my job;
that's why I came out here. I'm an ornithologist; ever hear of it?"
"Maybe you ain't never
seen the nest of a flamingo?"
The
professor laughed again. "Few people have, son; you have to penetrate the
everglades, and have a lot of luck as well, before you can ever see a
flamingo."
"I'll show you
one," Ralph said.
He
butted the rowboat against Highbanks and led the way along the ridge that
marked the old river bank through the swamp. Suddenly Ralph pointed, but the
professor had already seen the flash of pink sail off the nest, exposing a
single white egg.
They moved forward, and
Ralph smiled at the way the professor kept cleaning his glasses and squatting
all around the mud nest muttering, "It is, son. It is, son. It really is," like a man who had discovered something too
precious to touch.
"I
seen her up close," Ralph said, "and she's got a band on her leg. I
figured she escaped from some place to come raise her family. I knowed her
wings been clipped from the way she works herself when she flies."
"I
have to leave for the North, tomorrow," the professor said, when they
returned to the boat, "but I'm coming out in the morning to take some
pictures of this flamingo. And I'm bringing you a box of stationery so you can
send the society regular reports on the nesting habits. You'll watch the nest,
won't you, son?"
"I been watching it
right along."
"And you won't let
anybody molest it?"
"Nobody
ever comes out here 'cept fishing parties renting my boats on week ends. I
don't aim to tell them about my pink lady."
The
next morning after the professor took his pictures, he asked Ralph if he had
seen any other rare birds.
"I
wouldn't know about 'em being rare," Ralph said, "but one day I seen
a fish hawk that drops grasshoppers on the water so he can dive on the fish
what comes up to feed."
"That's
just what I want," the professor said, recording Ralph's comments in a
notebook. "Anything else?"
"I
reckon that's all I recall, unless you ain't ever heard of ospreys flying
eleven thousand feet high."
The
professor stopped writing and glanced skeptically at Ralph. "Now that
would be pretty hard to tell, wouldn't it, son?"
"I seen 'em up close," Ralph said, "during wartime.
I was a steward in the Air Transport Command and one day I looked out the
window, and there they were, two of 'em. I knowed it was eleven thousand 'cause
I checked it on the altimeter up front."
"You'll
make a good naturalist, my boy," the professor smiled as he started his
car. "Don't forget to send me your reports. The society will send you a
regular check."
Each week after the professor left, Ralph
rowed the eight miles into Curlew to mail his report. On the fourth trip, when
he wrote that the flamingo egg had successfully hatched, he found a
twenty-dollar check and a long letter from Professor Brooks asking him to send
in reports on bird migrations for the society. He wanted to send Ralph a
spotting telescope and forms to fill out, and he was to count the birds as they
passed in front of the moon. Ralph pondered the letter all the way home.
"It
may seem strange to you," the professor wrote, "but this is the only
way we've found to count the birds at night when most of them fly. You pick out
a good high place, watch the moon four hours a night, and from your count the
society can estimate the number of birds migrating down the St. Johns
River."
It
had taken him less than a week to hoist up the lumber and nail his shack
together at the top of the cypress. The first night after the telescope
arrived, he counted forty-seven birds migrating in front of the moon, then fifty-four,
and now he reached for his pad and pencil and made his first entry for the
third night: "Number, 3; Time, 11:15; Direction, south; Flight, high and
slow."
From time to time he made other entries or
re-aimed the telescope as the moon traversed, but, for the most part, he gazed
steadily upward. He grew drowsy occasionally, but his right eye never left the
telescope for more than an instant.
He
did not know how long he had gazed thus, only partially hearing the singsong
of the tree frogs beneath him and an occasional hoot of an owl off in the
swamp, when he first became aware of the odd sensation of staring, not up, but
down at the moon. He was startled, at first, and consciously exerted his will
to overcome the strange inversion. It was exactly as if he were floating
dizzily above the moon and gazing down upon its splendor from some tenuously
arrested position in space. Then, quite gradually, he felt himself to be slowly
falling. He could even imagine the faint rush of air past his ears and feel the
languorous tumbling of his body through space. It was a pleasant fall,
luxurious and mesmeric, and he watched in fascination as the moon grew larger
and slowly darker, becoming, finally, a purplish-brown in color. There were
shifting forms on its surface which settled, after a moment, into a vaguely
familiar shape.
Puzzled
and somewhat disappointed, he identified the shape, finally, as the geographic
form of North America. The glistening rivulet which rose from the Gulf of
Mexico to intricately divide into tiny capillaries of silver, he knew to be the
Mississippi River system, and in the wan, greenish light he could easily
recognize the tangled ridges of the Rocky Mountains and the distant, serene
arc of the Pacific.
With
a sudden sickening fear at his stomach, he glanced directly beneath him and
realized that, should his fall continue, he would strike the earth near the
Mississippi River, somewhere in the vicinity of Memphis. Instantly, however,
almost as if he had willed it, his fall was broken.
As the rush of wind faded, he hung motionless
above the land, too awed by the vast and silent panorama below to remember his
terror. With the exception of a curious bank of clouds which lay like sullied
snow over the northwest, he could see the entire United States and could even
make out the dim electric glow above the larger cities. To his amazement, he
found he could move at will in any direction he chose. Tremulously, he flew
over the New England area, trying to summon the courage to descend to the
earth.
"I'll
do it now or never!" he told himself, finally. But as he tried to fall,
his arms and legs suddenly felt weighted with fatigue, and the galaxy of cities
grew milky and indistinct. He felt himself rising swiftly through the night
skies, and when he next blinked his eyes he was again looking up at the bright,
round face of the moon.
As Ralph stepped out on the platform, he had
to brace himself against the shack and blink his eyes to shake away, the tiny
moons which dogged his vision. After a moment he let himself over the side,
feeling clumsily with his feet for the narrow planks. When he reached the
bottom, he sank to the ground with his back to the trunk, squinting up only
once at the usually absorbing spectacle of Whiteface swinging down by his tail
from rung to rung. A few moments later his chin fell forward against his chest.
He
awoke at dawn and pushed Whiteface from his lap. As he made his way along the
path to his hut by the river, he paused from time to time and glanced up
curiously. The pale dawn sky was cloudless. There was no sign of the moon.
Later,
after he had washed his face in the river and was squatting over his breakfast
fire, he continued to cast thoughtful glances at the sky and his loft in the
cypress, struggling to recollect the details of the previous night. After he
had eaten, he placed a can of tar on the fire, and when it had heated he began
to paint the bottom of an upturned rowboat. As he worked the sticky tar into
the boat bottom, he tried to account for his strange flight above the earth.
He
remembered that as a boy on his father's farm in Georgia he had often watched
the hawks and wished he could look down like the birds and see a whole county
at one look. Then, one day after the war broke out, he
remembered he had actually flown above the earth. It had happened about four
months after he had been drafted and he had just been assigned to work on the
gas trucks at MacDill Field. He was refueling a newly arrived transport named The Brown Dragon when he overheard the
pilots as they stepped down from the plane. One of them, a captain who needed a shave,
was exclaiming over a rainbow they had just seen below them as they
flew over the Gulf of Mexico.
As
Ralph watched them saunter away, he wondered if there were sights in the sky
more marvelous even than a rainbow curving down to the sea. He wondered if it
might even be possible to fly through a rainbow and become drenched in all the
colors.
That
evening after dark, he hid himself behind the cargo in the slender portion of
the tail of The Brown Dragon. Sometime the next morning he heard the engines
cough and start, and after a while he heard their roar and felt the lift and
then the dip of the tail. And he knew he had left the earth. Twenty minutes
passed before he dared to crawl forward and press his face against the nearest
window. He closed his eyes for a moment,
opened them, then caught his breath.
For
the next two hours, his eyes never left the miniature world of still lakes and
streams and the caterpillar trains beneath him. It was just as he had imagined
it from his father's farm in Georgia, except he could see even more than a
single county.
Some time later, there was a slight bump like
a small wave under the bow of a rowboat, and a chill, gray light closed about
the windows. He decided they had flown into a cloud and started to return to his hiding place. Suddenly the door to
the pilots' compartment opened. A captain entered, the
same one who still needed a shave. Ralph stiffened. He watched the captain open
a bag hanging on the wall and remove a pint
bottle of whisky. As the bottle came down from the captain's lips, two black,
sober eyes looked directly into Ralph's.
"Who the hell are you?"
Ralph
struggled to his feet and had difficulty standing in the moving plane.
"I come from—-I mean—I put gas in this airplane yester-
day. I just wanted to sec how it is to fly. I mean---------- "
"What's your name?"
"Ralph Teeler."
The
captain looked him over slowly and carefully, then put
the bottle back in his bag.
"Well,
we're not going to hurt you, Teeler," he said. "We're landing at
Mitchell Field, and tomorrow you can get a courier
back to MacDill. So you like to fly, do you?"
"Yes, sir."
After
the captain closed the door, Ralph sank back on the bucket seat and stared into
the gray cloud. After a moment there was another bump as they left the cloud,
and he pressed his face to the window again. He did not look up till almost an
hour later when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
"You
had anything to eat?" the captain asked. "Now that you're here, you
may as well ride up front with us. You can see more up there."
Obediently,
Ralph followed him through the plane till they stood behind the pilots' seats.
"Chick,"
the captain said to the copilot, "let the boy sit there a moment, will
you? He looks like he's getting the wild blue fever."
Ralph eased into the seat and looked across
at the captain gratefully.
"Well, what is it
like?" the captain grinned after a moment.
"It's
good," Ralph said, "except in them clouds. Then it's like being shut
up, like in a closet. But it's good now, like being in a church."
The
captain laughed. "Hear that, Chick? Like being In
a church. That's pretty good, Teeler. Go ahead; what's it
look like to you down there?"
Ralph
pressed his face against the window. "It's all good," he said, after
a moment. "If a farmer knowed what a pretty thing he was fixin' when he
plowed under a green field, he'd be wanting to come up
here and look at it."
Ralph
gulped down his sandwich without taking his eyes from the earth. From time to
time, Captain Pollard called his attention to objects below, then
Ralph, growing bolder, began to point out things to the captain. It was after
they crossed the Virginia line that Captain Pollard suddenly turned to Ralph
and asked him how he'd like to be the regular flight steward.
"Sure, I can fix it," he said.
"You like to fly, don't you? A man who likes to fly shouldn't be a gas
monkey on the ground."
During the next few weeks, Ralph discovered
The Brown Dragon was a sort of gypsy airplane that hauled spare parts and light
freight to airfields all over the country. Then, one day when they flew into
Amarillo to get their pay, Captain Pollard received transfer orders. From then
on, The Brown Dragon was flown by a series of strangers. Ralph began to ride
regularly in the back of the plane, sitting long hours by the window. The only
pilot he disliked and whose name he remembered was a Lieutenant Statler, a
short man with a thick mustache. They were flying over New England one day when
Lieutenant Statler made one of his infrequent trips to the back of the plane.
"What's
the matter with you, corporal?" he said. "Why don't you give us a
little company occasionally? What do you do back here all the time?"
"I
just look out the window," Ralph said, "and watch the ground and
think about things down there."
"What the hell do you
find to think about?"
"I think about lots of things,
lieutenant. I like it back here."
Lieutenant Statler had frowned and slammed
the door; and until there was another transfer and he got a new pilot, Ralph
had worried about being sent back to the gas trucks.
He remembered he decided, finally, to sleep
in The Brown Dragon to avoid the noisy transient barracks at the various
fields, and during the day he spent his free time sitting under the wing,
waiting for the plane to fly. Sometimes an officer or guard asked him who he
was. "I belong to The Brown Dragon," he answered, and they didn't ask
any more questions.
He didn't actually mind the loneliness, Ralph
recalled, as he finished tarring the bottom of the rowboat; what was most
important was that he got to fly. He figured that, during his two years in the
A.T.C., he flew over every state in the union except those four or five which
were hidden last night by the curious cloud bank.
Ralph
tossed the empty tar bucket far out into the river. Then he glanced up at the
sky and smiled; the sun was already starting downhill. He turned over another
rowboat and began to scrape the bottom. Perhaps, if he kept busy, it would soon
be dark and the lime of the moon.
That evening, after he climbed to the loft
with Whiteface, he took his place quickly beneath the telescope and immediately
tried to fall toward the moon, but it was not until nearly midnight when he had
almost despaired of trying and was lying with his hands behind his head,
picking out pictures on the moon, that the descent began.
After
a few seconds, he found himself hanging above the earth in the same position he
had occupied the previous night. Again, he found the United States incredibly
still and beautiful. "Why, it's better'n the first time I ever climbed a
tree!" he told himself. "And now I got real maneuvering power. I aim
to go all the way down this time."
He drifted easily downward over the New York
area, settling, finally, on the comer of a building above Times Square. He sat
on the cold stone and gazed down in fascination at the theater crowds spreading
out along the sidewalk, jostling one another to get into the taxis.
After
the crowds had thinned to little knots of hurrying people, he stood up,
steadied himself in the night breeze and gave a slight upward dive, with his
arms still relaxed at his sides. Almost instantly, he zoomed high enough to see
the entire Atlantic coast line; he paused, trying to decide where he would next
land. Then he saw Florida, with its three large lakes and the St. Johns River
tracking down from Jacksonville.
"That's
it!" he decided suddenly. "I'll go down there to my river. I'll drop
down near Curlew and find my place on the river!"
Then,
just as it was on his first flight, he felt the fatigue begin to spread through
his arms and legs. Quickly he tried to fall, but the earth began to waver as
though it were under moving water. And he was rising instead of falling, and
Florida became lost in the dazzling light of the moon.
The next morning, as Ralph rowed up the river
to collect the channel cats and bass from his trotlines, he worried about the
clouds in the sky for fear he wouldn't be able to see the moon that night and
take his flight down to Florida. But he felt that somehow the clouds would go
away.
"But
I ought to have me a good name," he told himself. "Ralph don't sound like an angel name. I got it; I'll call myself
Raphael. That's a pretty name, kinda like an angel in the Bible."
Several
times during the day he said the name aloud, smiling at the nice way i^ came
off his tongue.
About
five o'clock that evening some men came down to rent a boat. While the party
was up the river, Ralph sat on the bank, wondering why flying down to his own
place had not occurred to him sooner. The first time, he recalled, that he had
seen this spot on the river was from the rain-streaked window of The Brown
Dragon, but he knew it would look different now, with his tree house and seven
rows of com. He was proud of the changes he had made since the day, just after
the end of the war, when The Brown Dragon got lost in a storm. They had been
flying down to Atlanta, and a solid overcast settled down near the Georgia
line. Before the radio went out, he inquired up front and learned that Florida
had reported clear weather. As they flew steadily south and the overcast grew
darker, he watched the gas gauges flicker downward and the sweat soak up the
back of the new pilot's shirt.
Later,
when the air became really rough and threatening, he remembered he went back to
his window in the rear and stared at the rain beading over the wing. He
wondered, if he got out alive, where he would go when he was discharged. He
thought of the last letter he received from his father, sent from a little town
in Arkansas.
"It
ain't fitten, Ralph," he had read, "to be
grubbing in the land when there's good living in building Army camps. I ain't
regretting selling the farm. Why, I got me a
automobile, son, and a shiny trailer house, and I'm going up as a union man.
When you get out, I aim to get you a hammer-and-saw job with me. I don't aim
for us ever to go back to plowing. The land don't pay
no more."
It was then that the window began to brighten
and Ralph saw the beads on the wing spread farther apart. As they broke into
the clear, he could see the ground just a few hundred feet below and the
brilliant sunshine pouring down on the green trees which were still wet and
misting. There was a river below, and white herons were soaring over a
diamond-shaped island. He leaned far forward, imagining how a shack and a patch
of corn would look. Then, as the plane banked sharply, he saw a sandy rut road
winding through the trees to the river bank.
A
few minutes later, he heard the flaps grinding down, and he ran up front, his
heart beating in wild fear of a crash. To his surprise, The Brown Dragon kicked
up mud and water on a short dirt runway, then skidded
to a halt in a patch of palmettos. When the pilot started to taxi, the
starboard engine ran out of gas.
Later,
over coffee in the roadside hangar, the copilot tried to keep his hand from
shaking as he held out a navigation chart.
"There's the little gift from God that
saved our necks, corporal—that sweet little ace of diamonds sitting in the middle
of the river. If I hadn't recognized that island and seen this flivver field on
the chart, we'd be feeding the fishes by now."
Ralph
took the map and looked at the red circle drawn around the island which was
shaped like a diamond.
It was not long after his discharge that he
remembered looking up, one day, from his corn planting and wondering if he ever
had been up in the sky, wishing he had a place on the river. Ever since he had
traded his mustering-out pay for the property, with six rowboats thrown in, he
had the odd feeling of having become exactly what he had dreamed.
When
the fishing party returned his rowboat, Ralph was still musing on the river
bank. After he had bidden them a cheerful good night, he turned the boat over
on the bank so the early morning sun could dry it out for the tar. Then he
looked up and saw that the clouds were thinning out.
"It'll
be a clear sky for Raphael tonight," he said. "I bet my place will
look real good from up there."
Some
time after dark, when he eached the base of the tall cypress, he started to
clap his hands for Whiteface; then he remembered seeing him in the persimmon
tree near the corn patch. "I'll just let him be," he decided. He
stretched up his arms and began the long climb to the top of the tree.
Again,
he had to stare at the moon for almost two hours before he felt himself
released in space. As he fell toward the United States, he searched the moonlit
bends in the St. Johns for the island which was shaped like a diamond. When he
reached the mounded treetops, he leveled off just above the river, slowing his
flight to the pace of a downstream canoe. He knew he was not far from his tree
house, and he wanted to prolong the sensations of coming home.
He
heard a black bass smack a floating island of hyacinths, and spotted a night
ibis perched like a swamp ghost in the foliage; he could even catch the subtle,
horizontal fragrance of the bay trees mingled, occasionally, with an oversweet
cloud of jasmine. From the banks came the constant serenade of the green frogs,
their wet eyes, he knew, glistening like yellow fire in the moonlight. It was
the most vivid flight of them all.
He
was delighted to notice that he was not in the least tired, despite the fact
that his pesent flight was already longer than either of the two others. He
realized, with a sense of confidence and power, that he had mastered the
strange fatigue that had brought the previous flights to an end; it would not
bother him tonight. He could zoom in the heavens to his heart's content.
Then,
just as he expected it to be, he saw his loft ahead of him, sitting like a boxy
nest in the dead cypress.
Raphael
dipped briefly toward the water, picked up speed, then
as he coasted upward in a slowing arc toward the loft he brought his feet
forward and landed with a slight jar upon the platform.
Ralph pulled back from the telescope and
rubbed his eyes. Then he rose and opened the door. Outside, he stretched his
arms and squatted to loosen the stiffness in his knees. When he looked up he
saw several small moons gliding across the heavens. He blinked, but the moons
jerked back to a new starting position and glided again. He looked down the
long, gray column of the cypress and gave a slight chuckle as the moons swam
along with his glance, brighter than ever against the dark foliage.
It
was the time of morning when a moist haze hovered above the trees, catching and
holding the moonlight in a gauzy, luminous veil. It always came with such
gradualness that he was never able to mark its transition at all. He just
looked out and it was there, like a blanket, he thought, that finally covers
the trees, quieting them even beyond their usual quietness, and hushing all the
green frogs and all the night birds, and calming the fish in the river, grown
tired of their nocturnal feeding.
Ralph
knew the veil was not very thick. It was like the morning fogs he remembered
around the airports before the sun burned them off. He knew he could rise
through it easily in a matter of seconds, and could soar on up to where he
could see the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico and, finally, the
Pacific Ocean itself.
He
placed his toes over the edge of the platform and gave a slight upward dive,
with his arms still relaxed at his sides. For a brief instant, his body was
serenely poised above the swamp in attitude of expected flight.
A
few seconds later, the nesting flamingo on the far side of the river suddenly
extended her long neck in alarm. After a moment when the noise was not
repeated, she drew her neck back down upon her breast and resumed her wary
sleep. And on the near side of the river, Whileface, startled by the jarring
thump against the ground, scurried swiftly to the top of the persimmon tree,
where he sal sniffing the air with his whiskered nose and blinking his round
eyes in the moonlight.
THE LITTLE TERROR
by
Will F. Jenkins
There
was no crashing roll of thunder when the principles of psychological acosmistic
idealism became practicalities in the world inhabited by Nancy. Her mother had
no twinge of uneasiness, and her father was reading his newspaper. There was no
breathless hush over the earth at the bloodcurdling instant, though possibly
Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), up in heaven, was pleasantly interested. Joe Holt,
who was a practicing psychiatrist and might be presumed to have a feeling for
such things, hadn't the trace of an intuition of it. The skies did not darken
suddenly, nor were there deep rumblings underground. There was not even an
unnatural gray twilight in which birds chirped faintly and cattle affrightedly
rolled their eyes. There was no sign whatever that the most alarming
moment in history was at hand. But still----------
Nancy
went to the gate with her grandfather. She was six and he was sixty, and they
were very congenial. Nancy skipped, because she never walked when she could
skip or, preferably, run. It was nearing dusk, but there was still a ruddy
sunshine in the air, yet the sky was perceptibly darkening.
At
the gate Nancy permitted her grandfather to kiss her good-by, in the benign,
smug condescension of little girls who know they are irresistible.
Then she said, "Make a penny go away,
granddaddy."
Her
grandfather obediently took a copper penny from his pocket. He put it between
his thumb and middle finger and offered it gravely for Nancy's inspection. She
held her breath. Her grandfather snapped his fingers. The penny vanished.
Nancy beamed. "Do it
again, granddaddy!"
Her
grandfather prepared to repeat. Nancy put her eyes within inches of the coin.
She watched with rapt fascination.
The penny vanished a second
time.
"It's
real magic?" asked Nancy hopefully. She was beginning to discover that
one could not count on fairy god-
mothers—not
confidently, at any rate—in moments of despair. But still she hoped.
"It's real
magic," agreed her grandfather.
"Show me how!"
begged Nancy. "Please!"
Her
grandfather whispered confidentially in her ear, "I say 'oogledeboo' and
it vanishes. Can you say that?"
Nancy whispered, "Oogledeboo."
"Splendid!"
said her grandfather. He straightened up. "Now you say 'oogledeboo' at
this penny, and see whar happens!" He held the penny as before, between
thumb and middle finger.
Nancy giggled at it. She said,
"Oogledeboo!"
Her grandfather's fingers snapped. The penny
vanished.
Nancy beamed. "Again,
granddaddy?"
"Once more," conceded her
grandfather. He proffered the penny. It was the same one, but Nancy did not
reflect upon that. He took it in his fingers. Her eyes sparkled. She said,
"Oogledeboo!"
The
penny vanished. Her grandfather looked slightly surprised. But it was natural.
He had never heard of Bishop Berkeley's dictum that esse is percipi,
nor drawn inferences from
the statement. However, he beamed at Nancy.
"Now I have to go,
Nancy. Good night."
Nancy
waved cheerfully as he walked down the street. When he was out of sight, she
skipped back to where she had been playing. She did not notice that her
grandfather was shaking his coat sleeve absently, as if to make something come
out of it—something that did not come.
Nancy
settled down placidly to play alone. There was a caterpillar on the doll she
had neglected for her grandfather. Nancy regarded it with disfavor. She said
sternly, "Oogledeboo!"
The
caterpillar vanished. Nancy played with her doll. The sunset proceeded.
Twilight fell. Nancy's mother called her, and she went in cheerfully, dragging
the doll by one arm. She ate her supper with excellent appetite and beamed at
her father and mother. There was only one alarming incident, and it happened to
pass unnoticed. Nancy did not want to finish her milk. Her mother said firmly
that she must. Then the telephone rang, and her mother got up to answer it.
Nancy
looked confidently at the milk in her glass and said, "Oogledeboo."
The milk vanished.
Nancy
went happily to bed later, after kissing her father and mother with extravagant
affection. She went dreamlessly and placidly to sleep. She slept blissfully all
night long.
All was serene through all the cosmos. There
was no hint of the appalling thing that had happened. Nobody cringed in
nameless horror. Nobody trembled in justified apprehension. Nobody, it appears,
happened to be thinking of the Right Reverend George Berkeley, of the Anglican
Church, who wrote books of philosophy and died in 1753.
Nancy
woke next morning in her customary ebullient mood. She sang lustily as she was
dressed, and there was no hint of disturbance until breakfast was served. Then
there was a slight collision of wills over Nancy's reluctance to eat her
cereal. But just then the milkman came to collect, and her mother went to pay
him. When her mother came back, the cereal bowl was quite empty. Nancy's mother
praised her warmly. Nancy giggled.
It
was a charming morning. Nancy, scrubbed to radiance and wearing a playsuit of
healthful brevity, went out to play in her sand box behind the house. She sang
as she played. She was a delightfully happy child. Presently Charles, the
little boy next door, came over to play with her. She greeted him with that
cordial suspicion with which little girls regard little boys. He stepped on a
sand house she had decorated with small stray sticks and cherished bottle caps.
She scolded.
"Huh!"
said Charles scornfully. "That's no fun! Let's play going to the moon.
Let's fight the cat men. Rnnnnnnnh! Bang-bang!"
Nancy demurred.
"Let's
play space ship," insisted Charles. He began to hop excitedly. He shouted,
"Whoooooooom! Three gravs! Four! Turn on the stern rockets!
Whooooooooooom! There come the space pirates! Warm up the disintegrators! Shoot
the space warp! Bang! Bang! Rnnnnnnnnnnh! Bang!"
He rushed about madly, fighting a splendid
space battle with space pirates from the rings of Saturn, while Nancy placidly
practiced interior decoration in her sand pile. She set a wilted buttercup on a
dab of sand which to her represented a sideboard—undoubtedly Sheraton. She
reflectively arranged another dab of sand into a luxurious sofa. She began to
smooth out wall-to-wall carpeting, with the intent to add a grandfather's
clock next to her sand-pile scheme for gracious living.
Charles got into difficulties. A fleet of
black space ships from Sirius winked into existence from the fourth dimension
over by the back-porch steps. They sped toward him, disintegrator rays
flaming. He flashed into faster-than-light attack, throwing out atomic bombs
and with tractor and pressor beams busy. Then came a
despairing call from an Earth passenger space liner under attack by pirates
near the hydrangea bush.
"Whoooooooom!"
shouted Charles ferociously. "Coming, Earthship, with all jets firing!
Rnnnnnnnnh! Take that! And that! Bang! Bang! Here's an H-bomb for you! Boom!"
Disaster
struck. Charles, rushing to the defense of the helpless passenger craft, cut
across the sand pile. One sandaled foot landed in the kitchen of Nancy's
ranch-type sand house. Kitchen sink, dishwasher and breakfast nook—they were
marked by rather wobbly lines of pebbles—were obliterated as if by collision
with a giant meteor in space. Sand sprayed on Nancy.
"Bang,
bang!" roared Charles in his high treble. "Rnnnnnnnh!
Take that, you old pirates! Calling Earth! Space-patrol ship reporting pirates
wiped out! I'm taking off for Pluto!"
Nancy
trembled with indignation. She said sternly, "You go home!"
"Huh?"
said Charles. He stopped short. "I'm Captain Space! I've got to fight
space pirates and things, haven't I?"
"You
go home!" said Nancy sternly. "You stepped on my house! You go home
or I'll say something at you!" * If she had threatened to tell her mother
on him, it might have been effective. But this threat had no meaning to
Charles. He shouted, "Whooooooom! Taking off for Pluto! Invaders from
space! Coming, Earth garrison! Hold on, I'm coming with all jets firing! Whooooom!"
He started for Pluto. Unfortunately, it
appeared that Pluto lay somewhere in the general direction of a yellow tea-rose
bush at the edge of the lawn. Charles' orbit would coincide with the sand pile
again.
Nancy said vengefully,
"Oogledeboo!"
Charles vanished.
Silence fell, and Nancy returned to the
building of a sand-pile ranch house. Presently she sang happily as she worked.
Presently, again, she went into the house and asked for cookies. Having
skipped her breakfast cereal, she was hungry.
Her
mother said, "Where's Charles? Didn't I hear him playing with you?"
Nancy bit into a cooky and said placidly,
"I said 'oogledeboo' at him and he went away."
Nancy's
mother smiled absently and went about what she thought were more important affairs.
Which was a mistake. There were no more important
affairs. According to the principles laid down by Bishop Berkeley between 1685
and
1753,
things exist because a mind thinks of them as existing. Nancy had acquired the
ability to think confidently of things as ceasing to exist—a gift no adult can
acquire. So—by a natural extrapolation of Bishop Berkeley's principle—when she
thought of something as ceasing to exist, it did. All of us have wished for
such a talent at some time or another, but Nancy had it.
When
she was at lunch, the voice of Charles' mother could be heard, calling him. He
did not answer, and presently she was at the door. Nancy had arrived at the
custard-with-straw-berry-jam stage of her lunch then, and she worked zestfully
with a spoon. Her mother went to confer with Charles' mother about his
whereabouts.
"Why, no," Nancy heard her say.
"He was playing with Nancy, but he left." She called, "Nancy! Do
you know where Charles went?"
"No, mother-r!" Nancy sang out happily. She worked further
on the custard. She was absorbed.
There
was talk at the door. Nancy got some strawberry jam on the large napkin her
mother spread over her at mealtime. She was enjoyably licking it off when her
mother returned.
"Charles'
mother is worried," said Nancy's mother. She frowned a little. "He
doesn't usually wander away. You're sure you didn't notice which way he
went?" Nancy shook her head. "He didn't go with anybody?" her
mother asked uneasily.
Nancy
got a big spoonful of custard. "No," she said placidly. "I said
'oogledeboo' at him and he went away."
Her
mother did not inquire further. But she looked unhappy. A parent of a small
child always shares the anguish of another parent when a small child can't be
found. But it didn't occur to Nancy's mother that she might have heard a
complete and accurate description of Charles' disappearance.
Immediately
after lunch, Nancy's mother dressed her up to go downtown. There was to be a
parade, and Nancy's mother was making the sacrifice of an afternoon to Nancy's
pleasure. Of course Nancy loathed being dragged through stores, but since her
mother was devoting an entire afternoon to her, it was only reasonable that
they should start early, to do some shopping, and do more shopping later. This
is what is called thinking only of one's children.
Nancy
had no forebodings. She adored being dressed up, and wriggled with pleasure as
her mother attired her in a very frilly dress, a very frilly hat, a smart
little coat and tiny white gloves which to Nancy were the ultimate of bliss.
She sang and paraded before a mirror as her mother prepared for the outing.
She
sang, also, as her mother drove downtown. When the traffic grew thick and they
stopped at traffic lights, Nancy continued to sing lustily and without
self-consciousness. People looked at her and smiled, thinking of innocent and
happy childhood.
There
were mobs in every store. Other self-sacrificing mothers were out to show their
children the parade. They constituted an outrageous crush by a ladies'-purse
counter. A fat woman jammed Nancy against a counter. She was enraged. Somebody
protested, and the fat woman turned indignantly, and in pivoting, that
protruding part of her body which was at the height of Nancy's six-year-old
head sent Nancy reeling.
Nancy said wrathfully,
"Oogledeboo!"
There was no fat woman.
Somebody
screamed in a stifled fashion. But nobody believed it. There was a surging of
bodies to fill the space where a fat woman had been, and Nancy was banged again
and wailed, and grabbed her mother hysterically by the legs.
Her
mother completed the purchase of a handbag and harassedly got Nancy out of the
crowd. Nancy's frilly hat was dangling and she was very unhappy.
"There,
darling!" said her mother penitently. "I shouldn't have brought you
into such a crowded place! We'll go upstairs where there won't be so many
people."
They
got into an elevator. Then a mob charged it. A horde of women resolutely thrust
and pushed and shoved, while small children howled. Women arc less than
ladylike when there are no men around. The elevator operator tried to stem the
flood, to no avail.
Nancy was crushed ruthlessly. She became
terrified. She gasped, "Oogledeboo!"
There were only five people in the elevator.
There was not even a crowd trying to push in.
Nancy's
mother trembled lor a considerable time after that. Of course it could not
possibly be true. Even the elevator operator merely stammered unintelligibly
when a floorwalker questioned him. There was nothing to tell. The elevator had
been crowded, and suddenly it wasn't. There had been no outcry. The crowd
hadn't even visibly faded. It just was—and then it wasn't. So the elevator
operator, completely overwrought, was relieved of duty and the floorwalker
apologized to the few passengers remaining. They were all remarkably pale, and
they all went quickly out of the store. But of course they didn't believe it
either. Not even Nancy's mother.
But
Nancy felt much better. More confident. Now, she knew
placidly, she could always get room around her if people pushed. Her mother
drank a cup of tea in the nearest tea room, and tried tremblingly to remember
the psychiatric meaning of the delusion that people vanished before one's eyes.
But while her mother trembled, Nancy ate a small plate of vanilla ice cream,
with relish.
Nancy's
mother really wanted to go straight home then. Already she had made up her mind
to ask Joe Holt about the experience. He was the only psychiatrist she knew
personally, but he and his wife were fairly close friends. She could mention
it in an offhand manner, perhaps. But Nancy had been promised the parade. So
they saw it.
It
began appropriately with motorcycle policemen, at whom Nancy waved
enthusiastically. Her mother had been able to get a place at the very curb, so
nothing would interfere with Nancy's view. There came a high-school band, with
drum-majorettes strutting in costumes which would have caused their
great-grandmothers to die of heart failure. There came a cadet corps. And then the floats.
Nancy
was thrilled by a float in the shape of a swan, decorated by young girls in
tinsel dresses and fixed smiles. There was a float showing embarrassed Boy
Scouts about a campfire. A float resembling a battleship.
A Girl Scout float.
There came a traveling squealing down the
street. Chil-
dren's shrill voices shrieked and shouted. Nancy squirmed to
look. Her mother held her tightly. But Nancy's mother was
thinking desperately that she'd never expected to call on Joe
Holt professionally, but, after all, he was a psychiatrist and he
played golf with-------
Nancy squealed in pure excitement. Her mother
looked numbly at the float which caused all the high-pitched tumult. It
represented a dragon. It was a very ambitious job. The body of the beast
completely hid the truck on which it was built, and a long and ungainly hooped-canvas
tail trailed three car lengths behind. But it was what went on before that
caused the excitement.
The dragon had a twenty-foot movable neck of
hooped canvas painted red, with a five-foot head at the end of it. The head had
short, blunt horns. It had eyes the size of saucers,
and an expression of imbecilic amiability, and smoke came lavishly out of its
nostrils. And its head moved from side to side on the movable neck, and it
turned coquettishly and seemed to gaze at the spectators wherever it turned with
an admirable look of benign imbecility.
Children
squealed and shrieked and cheered as the dragon proceeded down the main street.
Those at whom it seemed to look shrank back in delighted terror. Those from whom it looked away yelled in sheer excitement.
Nancy
trembled in delicious thrill. She jumped up and down. She squealed.
Opposite
her, the long, articulated neck swung in her direction. The dragon's head
turned toward her. It seemed to look directly at her, in a sort of wall-eyed
cordiality. Smoke welled from its nostrils. It swung still closer, as if to
take an even closer and even more admiring look.
Nancy said zestfully,
"Oogledeboo!"
A
smoke pot fell to the pavement and smashed. It scattered strangling, smoldering
stuff over five yards of asphalt. A man fell with a clank, landing astride the
hood of a battered motor truck which had been hidden by the dragon's body. His
expression was that of stunned bewilderment, and he stared at his hands. They
had held ropes by which he moved the dragon's neck and head. Now they were
empty. There were four men in their undershirts, riding in the truck, and they
regarded their public incredulously, because there was no longer a dragon to
hide them.
There
was, though, an impressive smoldering conflagration on the street. It called
for fire engines. They came.
Nancy's
mother was in a chaotic state of mind when she managed to fight her way, with
Nancy, to where her car was parked. Her expression tended to be on the
wild-eyed side, but she got Nancy into the car and herself behind the wheel.
Then she doubted frcnzicdly whether she was in a fit state to drive. She
started off, finally, on the dubious premise that somebody who is really crazy
never suspects it.
They
were late getting home, and Nancy's father was beginning to be worried. He'd
been informed of the disappearance of Charles, next door, and of the feverish
hunt for him by police and all the neighbors.
He was relieved when Nancy and her mother
turned up, but Nancy's mother got out of the car and said tautly, "Get Joe
Holt to come here at once." Nancy's mother spoke in the level, tense tone
of one who is likely to scream in another split second. "He's a
psychiatrist. I have to see a psychiatrist. Everything's happened today!
Charles disappeared. An eleva-torful of people vanished before my eyes and a
dragon faded to nothingness while I was looking at it. Things like that don't
happen! I'm going crazy, but maybe Joe Holt can do something! Get him,
quick!"
Then
she collapsed, blubbering. She was thinking of Nancy. Already she envisioned a
broken home, herself a madwoman and divorced, Nancy's father
remarried to someone who would be cruel to Nancy, and Nancy haunted by the
specter of madness looming ever before her. Nancy's mother did not worry about
her husband. Perhaps that was significant.
But Nancy's father knew when not to try to be
reasonable. Also, he was frightened. He grabbed the telephone and spoke with
such desperate urgency that in five minutes Joe Holt, that rising young
psychiatrist, had got into his car, raced the necessary five blocks, and was
looking anxiously at Nancy's mother, in his house slippers and without a
necktie.
"What the hell?"
asked Joe Holt unprofessional^.
Nobody
noticed Nancy. Her mother began to tell her wholly incredible story. Her tone
was pure desperation. She suddenly remembered the fat woman. She told about it,
shrilly.
Nancy said reassuringly, "But that was
all right, mother-r! I said 'oogledeboo' at her!"
Her
mother paid no heed. Nancy's father moved to take her out of the room. She
clung convulsively to her mother, and her mother to her. Nancy's father was in
an unenviable spot for a moment, there.
"Don't
take her away!" panted her mother despairingly. "Not yet! Wait! . . .
And five minutes later an elevatorful of people vanished before my eyes!"
She
sobbed suddenly. Nancy's father ran his hands through his hair.
Nancy's
voice said consolingly, "But mother-r, they were crowding us! That's why I
said 'oogledeboo' at them. Like Charles was bothering me and I said
'oogledeboo' at him and made him go away."
Her
mother's whole body jerked. She stared at Nancy. And then her anguished face
smoothed out suddenly. She said in a quiet and interested tone, "Did you,
darling?" But she turned tragic eyes upon Joe Holt. "You see, Joe?
Listen to her! The things that've happened have turned her little brain too!
Don't bother about me, Joe! Do something for Nancy!"
Joe
breathed a small sigh of professional relief. All this
business was completely bewildering, but he did know that sometimes a woman
will do anything for her child—even stay sane, if necessary.
So he said cheerfully to Nancy, "So you
made things go away? That's interesting, Nancy. Tell us about it."
Nancy
beamed at him. She liked people. They found her irresistible. So she told how
her granddaddy had told her how to do magic. One said "oogledeboo" at
things and they went away.
"I
said it to the penny," she finished happily, "and to a caterpillar on
my doll, and my milk last night, and my cereal this morning, and Charles, and a
fat woman, and the people in the elevator, and the dragon. It's easy," she
finished generously. "Want me to show you?"
Her
mother gasped. But Joe Holt noticed that she wasn't thinking of herself any
longer but of Nancy. And as a practical matter, nobody is neurotic who
sincerely cares about anybody else. Joe didn't understand anything, but he
began to have hope.
"Why,
yes, Nancy!" he said blithely. "Make this—h'm— this vase of flowers
go away, will you?"
Nancy's
mother said involuntarily, "That's my best vase." But then she said
calmly, "Yes, darling, make that go away."
So
Nancy, blithe and beaming and six years old, looked at
her mother's most-prized almost-Ming vase and said happily,
"Oogledeboo."
And of course the vase went
away.
It was two o'clock in the morning and raining
heavily when they got Nancy's grandfather out of bed to answer the bell. Then
Nancy's father and Joe Holt crowded inside the door to talk desperately to him
with rain-wet, disheveled faces. He stared.
"You've got to come to the house,
sir!" said Nancy's father feverishly. "Nancy's got a psychological
acosmistic idea from you, and it's got to be cured!"
Joe
Holt said reprovingly, if harasscdly, "Not idea. Ability.
It's a psychokinetic ability."
Nancy's
grandfather said in a rising tone, "Nancy's sick? Sick? And you talk? Come
on!"
He grabbed an overcoat and flung out of the
house, pulling the coat on over his pajamas. Rain poured down. Lightning
glinted on it as it fell. They piled Into Joe's convertible and he started it
off at frantic speed.
Nancy's
grandfather snapped, "How's she sick? When did it start?"
"She says 'oogledeboo' at things!"
panted Nancy's father. "And they vanish! We've got her to bed now, but
she's got to be cured! Think what she may do next! She says 'oogledeboo'!"
Nancy's
grandfather barked, "Oogledeboo? What's the matter with saying
'oogledeboo'? I say 'oogledeboo' if I feel like it! I taught her to say
it!"
"That's
just it," said Joe Holt, swallowing. He turned to gesticulate. "You
showed her that a penny vanished when she said it. She believed it!
It's—idealistic immaterialism! . . . Oops!"
He
yanked at the wheel and pulled the car out of a skid as it headed for a
telephone pole aglitter with wetness.
"It was Bishop Berkeley," panted
Nancy's father. "Joe just showed me! In a book! Bishop Berkeley said that
matter cannot exist without mind. A mind has to perceive something in order for
it to exist. It's been a big argument for years. Locke, Hume,
Kant, Hegel and all the rest."
The
car plunged through a black puddle on the pavement, pockmarked with falling
rain under an arc light. Sheets of water, like shining wings, rose on either
side of the car.
"Esse,"
said Joe Holt, gulping,
"is percipi.
If a thing isn't perceived
by some mind somewhere, it isn't. But when we know something is, we have to let
it go at that. Nancy doesn't. You fixed it so she doesn't. When she says
'oogledeboo' at something, she's able to think of it as ceasing to exist. So
it does cease to exist. Nobody else in the world, thank God, can do that! But
Nancy can!"
In
the racing, leaking car, Nancy's grandfather stared suspiciously at the
water-soaked and nerve-racked individuals beside him. His pajama collar rose
out of his overcoat. His white hair bristled.
"And
you're telling me Nancy's sick!" he roared. "You
two lunatics!"
They
babbled further details. Preposterous details. They
explained what he had to do. Then, suddenly, Joe Holt swung into the driveway
of the house Nancy lived in. As if on signal, the rain stopped. The two younger
men piled out of the car and raced into the house. Nancy's grandfather plodded
after them. He entered to hear the chattered query, "She's—still
asleep?"
"Yes, the darling!" said Nancy's
mother in a warm, throaty
voice. She hugged Nancy's grandfather. "Daddy!
I'm so
glad------ "
The
living room looked like a shambles. The piano was gone. The
almost-Ming vase—of course. The picture over the
mantel. Two chairs. A scatter rug.
"We experimented!" babbled Joe Holt
desperately. "She
made the vase vanish. We couldn't believe it. So she said
'oogledeboo' at the piano. It wasn't there. The picture over
the fireplace! It got to be a happy game! She stood there
beaming and saying 'oogledeboo.' She looked at me
once------ "
He shuddered violently.
Nancy's
grandfather could not believe. Naturally! But Nancy's mother pleaded with him.
The three of them— Nancy's parents and the psychiatrist—argued hysterically.
Their voices rose.
Then
there was a delighted giggle from the doorway. Nancy stood there, smiling
brightly at her grandfather. She wore her very favorite blue pajamas with
Mickey Mouse figures printed on them.
She was sleepy-eyed, but
very glad to see her grandfather.
"Hello,
granddaddy!" she said happily. "You waked me up. I can do magic like
you told me. Want to see?"
Her
grandfather gulped suddenly. He had a moment of dreadful doubt. His daughter
had turned wholly pale. Nancy's father was speechless. Joe Holt wrung his
hands.
"Wait,
now," said Nancy's grandfather shakily. "Just try it on a little
thing, Nancy. Just a little thing."
With
the sure instinct of a grandfather, he remembered that his overcoat was wet. He
put it down on a remaining chair before he took Nancy in his arms. Stout
elderly man and beaming six-year-old, they made a pleasant picture in their
pajamas.
"There, there,"
said Nancy's grandfather fondly.
"Su-su-suppose," said Joe Holt,
"you make your grand-daddy's overcoat go away, Nancy?"
Nancy
giggled. Her soft, happy voice pronounced the fateful syllables. Her
grandfather's overcoat abruptly was not. Her grandfather sat down suddenly.
Nancy slipped from his arms to his knee.
She
said benignly, "Arc you cold, granddaddy? You're shivering!"
Nancy's grandfather swallowed, loudly. Then
he said with infinite care, "Why, yes, Nancy. 1 am
cold. I shouldn't have taken off my overcoat. I need it back. Will you get it
back for me, Nancy?"
Nancy said fondly, "But I don't know
how, granddaddyl"
"Why—er—you say 'oogledeboo' backwards, Nancy. But
you have to say it. You made my overcoat go away, so you
have to make it come back. 'Oogledeboo' backwards is—ah—
is------ "
" 'Oobedelgoo,' " said Nancy's father hoarsely. "
'Ooglede-boo' spelled backwards is 'oobedelgoo.' Oobedelgoo!"
Nancy
considered, and snuggled against her grandfather. "You say it,
granddaddy!"
"It's no good when I say it," said
her grandfather, with false heartiness. "See? Oobedelgoo! But it will work
for you!
And—now------- Wait a moment, Nancy! When you say it,
don't say
it at just my overcoat. You say it at all the things you said 'oogledeboo' at,
all at the same time, and they'll all come back at once. Won't that be
nice?"
"No," said Nancy.
"Charles bothers me."
Joe Holt moaned.
Nancy's
mother said softly, "But he won't any more, darling! Just say
'oobe—oobedelgoo' nicely, darling, for mother, at all the things you said the
other word to!"
Nancy
considered again. Her mother stroked her hand. And presently Nancy said,
without enthusiasm, without verve, but with a sort of resigned acquiescence,
"Oobedelgoo."
The
almost-Ming vase came back, and her grandfather's overcoat, and the piano, and
the picture over the mantelpiece and a scatter rug and two chairs. Out on the
lawn there was suddenly the howling wail of a scared small boy,
"Wa-a-a-ah!" That was Charles, who found himself suddenly in the dark
on a rain-wet lawn. He howled. Those in Nancy's house heard doors open next
door and shrieks of joy. Nancy's mother closed her eyes and imagined other
screams: A fat woman suddenly finding herself alone in
the ladies'-purse department of a closed-up department store. An elevatorful of
people finding themselves parked in the cellar of the same store, to wait for
morning. The night watchman of that store would have a busy half hour.
The
policeman who suddenly found a dragon in the middle of the street would be
upset, too, as would the hard-working detectives now busily hunting for a small
boy who would insist frantically that he hadn't been anywhere. And he hadn't.
He'd been nowhere.
Even
a caterpillar, which had been crawling on Nancy's doll until she said
"oogledeboo" at it, would have a difficult time finding a proper
place to hide from the rain. It happened to be a diurnal caterpillar, not used
to being out at night.
Then
Nancy's grandfather spoke with very great care and painstaking charm.
"I
forgot to tell you, Nancy," he said with seeming ruefulness, "that
now you've said 'oobedelgoo,' saying 'oogledeboo' won't work for you any
longer. That's why I can't work that magic any more myself. But you won't mind
things not going away when you say 'oogledeboo,' will you?"
"Won't
they?" asked Nancy disappointedly. She said loudly,
"Oogledeboo!"
Her father and mother and
Joe Holt jumped a foot.
But
nothing happened. The four grownups sat still, weak with relief. Nancy cuddled
against her grandfather. She sighed. Presently her eyelids drooped sleepily.
There
had been no rolling of thunder or flashing of lightning, or earthquakes when
the most bloodcurdling instant in history began. But, now that everything was
all over, there was a blinding flash of lightning and a reverberating roar of
thunder, and the rain began to pour down again.
THE ANSWER
by
Philip Wylie
"Fifteen
minutes!" . . . The loud-speakers blared on the flight deck, boomed below,
and murmured on the bridge where the brass was assembling. The length of the
carrier was great. Consonants from distant horns came belatedly to every ear,
and metal fabric set up echoes besides. So the phrase stuttered through the
ship and over the sea. Fifteen minutes to the bomb test.
Maj.
Gen. Marcus Scott walked to the cable railing around the deck and looked at the
very blue morning. The ship's engines had stopped and she lay still, aimed west
toward the target island like an arrow in a drawn bow.
Men passing saluted. The general returned the
salutes, bringing a weathered hand to a lofty forehead, to straight, coal-black
hair above gray eyes and the hawk nose of an Indian.
His
thoughts veered to the weather. The far surface of the Pacific was lavender;
the nearby water, seen deeper, a lucent violet. White clouds
passed gradually—clouds much of a size and shape—with cobalt avenues
between. The general, to whom the sky was more familiar than the sea, marveled
at that mechanized appearance. It was as if some cosmic weather engine-—east,
and below the Equator—puffed clouds from Brobdingnagian stacks and sent them
rolling over the earth, as regular and even-spaced as the white snorts of a
climbing locomotive.
He
put away the image. Such fantasy belonged in another era, when he had been a
young man at West Point, a brilliant young man, more literary than military, a
young man fascinated by the "soldier poets" of the first World War.
The second, which he had helped to command in the air,
produced no romanticists. Here a third war was in the making, perhaps, a third
that might put an end to poetry forever.
"Ten
minutes! All personnel complete checks, take assigned stations for test!"
Copyright 1955 by The
Curtis Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
General
Scott went across the iron deck on scissoring legs that seemed to hurry the
tall man without themselves hurrying. Sailors had finished stringing the
temporary cables which, should a freak buffet from the H-bomb reach the area,
would prevent them from being tossed overboard. They were gathering, now, to
watch. Marc Scott entered the carrier's island and hastened to the bridge on
turning steps of metal, not using the shined brass rail.
Admiral Stanforth was there—anvil shoulders, marble hair,
feldspar complexion. Pouring coffee for Senator Blaine with a
good-host chuckle and that tiger look in the corners of his
eyes. "Morning, Marc! Get any sleep at all?" He gave the
general no time to answer. "This is General Scott, gentlemen.
In charge of today's drop. Commands base on Sangre
Islands.
Senator Blaine------- "
The
senator had the trappings of office: the embonpoint and
shrewd eyes, the pince-nez on a ribbon, the hat with the wide brim that meant a
Western or Southern senator. He had the William Jennings Bryan voice. But these
were for his constituents.
The
man who used the voice said genuinely, "General, I'm honored. Your record
in the Eighth Air Force is one we're almost too proud of to mention in front of
you."
"Thank you, sir."
"You know Doctor
Trumbul?"
Trumbul
was thin and thirty, an all-brown scholar whose brown eyes were so vivid the
rest seemed but a background for his eyes. His hand clasped Scott's. "All too well! I flew with Marc Scott when we dropped
Thermonuclear Number Eleven—on a parachute!"
There
was some laughter; they knew about that near-disastrous test.
"How's everybody at
Los Alamos?" (he general asked.
The
physicist shrugged. "Same. They'll feel better later today—if this one
comes up to expectations."
The
admiral was introducing again. "Doctor Antheim, general.
Antheim's from MIT. He's also the best amateur magician
I ever saw perform. Too bad you came aboard so late
last night."
Antheim
was as quietly composed as a family physician—a big man in a gray suit.
"Five minutes!"
the loud-speaker proclaimed.
You
could see the lonely open ocean, the sky, the cumulus
clouds. But the target island—five miles long and jungle-painted—lay over the
horizon. An island created by volcanic cataclysm millions of years ago and
destined this day to vanish in a man-patented calamity. Somewhere a hundred
thousand feet above, his own ship, a B-lll, was moving at more than seven
hundred miles an hour, closing on an imaginary point from which, along an
imaginary line, a big bomb would curve earthward, never to hit, but utterly to
devastate. You could not see his B-lll and you would probably not even see the
high, far-off tornadoes of smoke when, the bomb away, she let go with her
rockets to hurtle off even faster from the expanding sphere of blast.
"Personally," Antheim, the MIT
scientist, was saying to
General Larsen, "it's my feeling that whether or not your
cocker is a fawning type depends on your attitude as a dog
owner. I agree, all cockers have Saint Bernard
appetites. Nev-
ertheless, I'm sold on spaniels. In field .trials last au-
tumn------- "
Talking about dogs. Well, why not? Random talk was the
best antidote for tension, for the electrically counted minutes
that stretched unbearably because of their measurement. He
had a dog—his kids had one, rather: Pompey, the mutt,
whose field trials took place in the yards and playgrounds of
Baltimore, Maryland, in the vicinity of Millbrook Road. He
wondered what would be happening at home—where Ellen
would be at—he calculated time belts, the hour-wide, orange-
peel-shaped sections into which man had carved his planet.
Be evening on Millbrook Road---------
John
Farrier arrived—Farrier, of the great Farrier Corporation. His pale blue eyes
looked out over the ship's flat deck toward the west, the target. But he was
saying to somebody, in his crisp yet not uncourteous voice, "I consider
myself something of a connoisseur in the matter of honey. We have our own
apiary at Hobe Sound. Did you ever taste antidesma honey? Or the honey gathered
from palmetto flowers?"
"Two minutes!"
The
count-down was the hardest part of a weapons test. What went before was
work—sheer work, detailed, exhausting. But what came after had excitements,
real and potential, like hazardous exploring, the general thought; you never
knew precisely what would ensue. Not precisely.
Tension, he repeated to himself. And he thought, Why do I feel sad? Is it prescience of
failure? Will we finally manage to produce a dud?
Fatigue,
he answered himself.
Setting up this one had been a colossal chore. They called it Bugaboo—Operation
Bugaboo in Test Series Avalanche. Suddenly he wished Bugaboo wouldn't go off.
"One minute! All goggles in place!
Exposed personnel without goggles, sit down, turn backs toward west, cover
eyes with hands!"
Before
he blacked out the world, he took a last look at the sky, the sea—and the
sailors, wheeling, sitting, covering their eyes. Then he put on the goggles.
The obsidian lenses brought absolute dark. From habit, he cut his eyes back and
forth to make certain there was no leak of light—light that could damage the
retina.
"Ten seconds!"
The
ship drew a last deep breath and held it. In an incredibly long silence, the
general mused on thousands upon thousands of other men in other ships, ashore
and in the air, who now were also holding back breathing.
"Five!"
An
imbecile notion flickered in the general's brain and expired: He could leap up and
cry "Stop!" He still could. A word from Stanforth.
A button pressed. The whole shebang would chute on down, unexploded. And
umpteen million dollars' worth of taxpayers' money would be wasted by that
solitary syllable of his.
"Four!"
Still, the general thought, his lips smiling,
his heart frozen, why should they—or anybody—be doing this? "Three seconds . . .
two . . . one . . . zero!" Slowly, the sky blew up.
On
the horizon, a supersun grabbed up degrees of diameter and rose degrees. The
sea, ship, praying sailors became as plain as they had been bare-eyed in full
sun, then plainer still. Eyes, looking through the inky glass, saw the universe
stark white. A hundred-times-sun-sized sun mottled itself with lesser
whiteness, bulked up, became the perfect sphere, ascending hideously and
setting forth on the Pacific a molten track from ship to livid self. Tumors of
light more brilliant than the sun sprang up on the mathematical sphere; yet
these, less blazing than the fireball, appeared as blacknesses.
The
thing swelled and swelled and rose; nonetheless, instant miles of upthrust were
diminished by the expansion. Abruptly, it exploded around itself a white lewd
ring, a halo.
For
a time there was no air beneath it, only the rays and neutrons in vacuum. The
atmosphere beyond—incandescent, compressed harder than steel—moved toward the
spectators. No sound.
The
fireball burned within itself and around itself, burnt the sea away—a hole in
it—and a hole in the planet. It melted part way, lopsided, threw out a cubic mile
of fire this way—a scarlet asteroid, that.
To greet the birthing of a new, brief star, the regimental sky hung a bunting on every cloud. The
mushroom formed quietly, immensely and in haste; it towered, spread, and the
incandescent air hurtled at the watchers on the circumferences. In the
mushroom new fire burst forth, cubic miles of phosphor-pale flame. The general heard Antheim sigh. That would be the
"igniter effect," the new thing, to set fire, infinitely, in the wake
of the fire blown out by the miles-out blast. A hellish bit
of physics.
Again, again, again the thorium-lithium
pulse! Each time— had it been other than jungle and sea; had it been a city,
Baltimore—the urban tinder, and the people, would have hair-fired in the
debris.
The
mushroom climbed on its stalk, the ten-mile circle of what had been part of
earth. It split the atmospheric layers and reached for the purple dark, that
the flying general knew, where the real sun was also unbearably bright.
Mouths
agape, goggles now dangling, the men on the bridge of the Ticonderoga could look naked-eyed at the sky's exploded
rainbows and seething prismatics.
"Stand by for the
blast wave!"
It
came like the shadow of eclipse. The carrier shuddered. Men sagged, spun on
their bottoms. The general felt the familiar compression, a thousand boxing
gloves, padded but hitting squarely every part of his body at once.
Then Antheim and Trumbul
were shaking hands.
"Congratulations! That
ought to be—about it!"
It
for what? The enemy? A city? Humanity?
"Magnificent,"
said Senator Blaine. He added, "We seem O.K."
"Good
thing too," a voice laughed. "A dozen of the best sets of brains in
America, right in this one spot."
The
general thought about that. Two of the world's leading nuclear physicists, the
ablest member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a senator wise for all his
vaudeville appearance, an unbelievably versatile industrialist, the Navy's best
tactician. Good brains. But what an occupation for human brains!
Unobtrusively
he moved to the iron stairs—the "ladder." Let the good brains and the
sight-seers gape at the kaleidoscope aloft. He hurried to his assigned office.
An hour later he had
received the important reports.
His
B-lll was back on the field, "hot," but not dangerous; damaged, but
not severely; the crew in good shape. Celebrating, Major Stokely had bothered
to add.
Two
drones lost; three more landed in unapproachable condition. One photo recon
plane had been hit by a flying chunk of something eighteen miles from
ground zero and eight minutes—if the time was right—after the blast. Something
that had been thrown mighty high or somehow remained aloft a long while. Wing
damage and radioactivity; but, again, no personnel injured.
Phones rang. Messengers came—sailors—quick,
quiet, polite. The Ticonderoga
was moving, moving swiftly,
in toward the place where nothing was, in under the colored bomb clouds.
He
had a sensation that something was missing, that more was to be done, that news
awaited—which he attributed again to tiredness.
Tiredness: what a general was supposed never to feel—and the burden that
settled on every pair of starred shoulders. He sighed and picked up the book he
had read in empty spaces of the preceding night: Thoreau's Walden Pond.
Why had he taken Thoreau on this trip? He
knew the answer. To be as far as possible, in one way, from the torrent of
technology in mid-Pacific; to be as close as possible to a proper view of
Atomic-Age Man, in a different way. But now he closed the book as if it had
blank pages. After all, Thoreau couldn't take straight Nature, himself; a
couple of years beside his pond and he went back to town and lived in Emerson's
back yard. For the general that was an aggrieved and aggrieving thought.
Lieutenant Tobey hurried in from the next
office. "Something special on TLS. Shall I
switch it?"
His
nerves tightened. He had expected "Something special" on his most
restricted wire, without a reason for the expectation. He picked up the
instrument when the light went red. "Scott here."
"Rawson. Point L 15."
"Right." That would be instrument site near the mission school on Tempest
Island.
"Matter
of Import Z." Which meant an emergency.
"I
see." General Scott fell almost relieved. Something was wrong; to know
even that was better than to have a merely mystifying sense of wrongness.
Rawson—Maj.
Dudley Rawson, the general's cleverest Intelligence officer, simply said,
"Import Z, and, I'd say, general, the Z Grade."
"Can't clarify?"
"No,
sir."
General
Scott marveled for a moment at the tone of Raw-son's voice: it was high and the
syllables shook. He said, "Right, Raw. Be over." He leaned back in
his chair and spoke to the lieutenant, "Would you get me Captain Elverson?
I'd like a whirlybird ride."
The
helicopter deposited the general in the center of the playing field where the
natives at the mission school learned American games. Rawson and two others
were waiting. The general gave the customary grateful good-by to his naval
escort; then waited for the racket of the departing helicopter to diminish.
He
observed that Major Rawson, a lieutenant he did not know and a technical
sergeant were soaked with perspiration. But that scarcely surprised him; the
sun was now high and the island steamed formidably.
Rawson
said, "I put it through Banjo, direct to you, sir. Took
the liberty. There's been a casualty."
"Lord!" The
general shook his head. "Who?"
"I'd rather show you, sir." The
major's eyes traveled to the road that led from the field, through banyan
trees, toward the mission. Corrugated-metal roofs sparkled behind the trees,
and on the road in the shade a jeep waited.
The general started for the vehicle.
"Just give me what
particulars you can-------- "
"I'd rather you
saw—it—for yourself."
General
Scott climbed into the car, sat, looked closely at the
major.
He'd seen funk, seen panic. This was that—and
more.
They sweated like horses, yet they were pallid. They shook—
and made no pretense of hiding or controlling it. A
"casualty"—and they were soldiers! No casualty could------------
"You said 'it,' " the general said. "Just
what----------- "
"For
the love of God, don't ask me to explain! It's just behind the mission
buildings." Major Rawson tapped the sergeant's shoulder, "Can you
drive O.K., Sam?"
The
man jerked his head and started the motor. The jeep moved.
The general had impressions of buildings, of
brown boys working in a banana grove, and native girls flapping along in such
clothes as missionaries consider moral. Then they entered a colonnade of tree
trunks which upheld the jungle canopy.
He was afraid in some new way. He must not
show it. He concentrated on seeming not to concentrate.
The
jeep stopped. Panting slightly, Rawson stepped out, pushed aside the fronds of
a large fem tree and hurried along a leafy tunnel. "Little glade up here.
That's where the casualty dropped."
"Who found—it?"
"The missionary's youngest boy. Kid named Ted. His dad
too. The padre—or whatever the Devoted Brethren call 'em."
The
glade appeared—a clear pool of water bordered by terrestrial orchids. A man lay
in their way, face down, his clerical collar unbuttoned, his arms extended,
hands clasped, breath issuing in hoarse groans.
From
maps, memoranda, somewhere, the general remembered the man's name. "You
mean Reverend Simms is the victim?" he asked in amazement.
"No," said Rawson; "up
ahead." He led the general around the bole of a Jacaranda tree. "There."
For
a speechless minute the general stood still. On the ground, almost at his feet,
in the full sunshine, lay the casualty.
"Agnostic,"
the general had been called by many; "mystic," by more; "Natural
philosopher," by devoted chaplains who had served with him. But he was not
a man of orthodox religion.
What
lay on the fringe of purple flowers was recognizable. He could not, would not,
identify it aloud.
Behind
him, the major, the lieutenant and the sergeant were waiting shakily for him to
name it. Near them, prostrate on the earth, was the missionary—who had already
named it and commenced to worship.
It
was motionless. The beautiful human face slept in death; the alabastrine body
was relaxed in death; the unimaginable eyes were closed and the immense white
wings were folded. It was an angel.
The general could bring himself to say, in a
soft voice, only, "It looks like one."
The
three faces behind him were distracted. "It's an angel," Rawson said
in a frantic tone. "And everything we've done, and thought, and believed
is nuts! Science is nuts! Who knows, now, what the next move will be?"
The
sergeant had knelt and was crossing himself. A babble of repentance issued from
his lips—as if he were at Confessional. Seeing the general's eyes on him, he
interrupted himself to murmur, "I was brought up Catholic." Then,
turning back to the figure, with the utmost fright, he crossed himself and went
on in a compulsive listing of his sad misdemeanors.
The
lieutenant, a buck-toothed young man, was now laughing in a morbid way. A way that was the sure prelude to hysteria.
"Shut up!" the general said; then
strode to the figure among the flowers and reached down for its pulse. At that,
Reverend Simms made a sound near to a scream and leaped to his feet. His
garments were stained with the black humus in which he had lain; his clerical
collar flapped loosely at his neck.
"Don't
you even touch it! Heretic! You are not fit to be
here! You—and your martial kind—your scientists! Do you not yet see what you
have done? Your last infernal bomb has shot down Gabriel, angel of the Lord!
This is the end of the world!" His voice tore his throat. "And you
are responsible! You are the destroyers!"
The
general could not say but that every word the missionary had spoken was true.
The beautiful being might indeed be Gabriel. Certainly it was an unearthly
creature. The general felt a tendency, if not to panic, at least to take seriously
the idea that he was now dreaming or had gone mad. Human hysteria, however, was
a known field, and one with which he was equipped to deal.
He
spoke sharply, authoritatively, somehow keeping his thoughts a few syllables
ahead of his ringing voice, "Reverend Simms, I am a soldier in charge
here. If your surmise is correct, God will be my judge. But you have not
examined this pathetic victim. That is neither human nor Christian. Suppose it
is only hurt, and needs medical attention? What sort of Samaritans would we be,
then, to let it perish here in the heat? You may also be mistaken, and that would
be a greater cruelty. Suppose it is not what you so logically assume? Suppose
it merely happens to be a creature like ourselves, from some real but different
planet—thrown, say, from its space-voyaging vehicle by the violence of the morning
test?"
The thought, rushing into the general's mind
from nowhere, encouraged him. He was at that time willing to concede the
likelihood that he stood in the presence of a miracle—and a miracle of the most
horrifying sort, since the angel was seemingly dead. But to deal with men, with
their minds, and even his own thought process, he needed a less appalling
possibility to set alongside apparent fact. If he were to accept the miracle,
he would be obliged first to alter his own deep and hard-won faith, along with
its corollaries—and that would mean a change in the general's very personality.
It would take pain, and time. Meanwhile there were men to deal with—men in
mortal frenzy.
The
missionary heard him vaguely, caught the suggestion that the general might
doubt the being on the ground to be Gabriel, and burst into grotesque,
astounding laughter. He rushed from the glade.
After his antic departure, the general said
grimly, "That man has about lost his mind! A stupid way
to behave, if what he believes is the case!" Then, in
drill-sergeant tones, he barked, "Sergeant! Take a leg. . . . Lieutenant,
the other. . . . Rawson, help me here."
He
took gentle hold. The flesh, if it was flesh, felt cool, but not yet cold. When
he lifted, the shoulder turned easily; it was less heavy than he had expected.
The other men, slowly, dubiously, took stations and drew nerving breaths.
"See
to it, men," the general ordered—as if it were mere routine and likely to
be overlooked by second-rate soldiers— "that those wings don't drag on the
ground! Let's go!"
He
could observe and think a little more analytically as they carried the being
toward the jeep. The single garment worn by the angel was snow-white and
exquisitely pleated. The back and shoulder muscles were obviously of great
power, and constructed to beat the great wings. They were, he gathered,
operational wings, not vestigial. Perhaps the creature came from a small
planet where gravity was so slight that these wings sufficed for flying about.
That was at least thinkable.
A
different theory which he entertained briefly—because he was a soldier—seemed
impossible on close scrutiny. The creature they carried from the glade was not
a fake—not some biological device of the enemy fabricated to startle the Free
World. What they were carrying could not have been man-made, unless the Reds
had moved centuries ahead of everyone else in the science of biology. This was
no hybrid. The angel had lived, grown, moved its wings and been of one
substance.
It
filled the back seat of the jeep. The general said, "I'll drive. . . .
Lieutenant . . . sergeant, meet me at the field. . . . Raw, you gel HQ again on
a Z line and have them send a helicopter. Two extra passengers for the trip
out, tell them. Have General Budford fly in now, if possible. Give no information
except that these suggestions are from me."
"Yes, sir."
"Then black out all communications from
this island." "Yes, sir."
"If the Devoted Brethren Mission won't
shut its radio off, see that it stops working."
The
major nodded, waited a moment, and walked down the jungle track in haunted
obedience.
"I'll drive it," the general
repeated.
He
felt long and carefully for a pulse. Nothing. The body
was growing rigid. He started the jeep. Once he glanced back at his incredible
companion. The face was perfectly serene;
the
lurching of the vehicle, for all his care in driving, had parted the lips.
He
reached the shade at the edge of the playing field where the jeep had first
been parked. He cut the motor. The school compound had been empty of persons
when he passed this time. There had been no one on the road; not even any
children. Presently the mission bell began to toll slowly. Reverend Simms, he
thought, would be holding services. That probably explained the absence of
people, the hush in the heat of midday, the jade quietude.
He pulled out a cigarette, hesitated to smoke
it. He wondered if there were any further steps which he should take. For his
own sake, he again carefully examined the angel, and he was certain afterward
only that it was like nothing earthly, that it could be an angel and that it
had died, without any external trace of the cause. Concussion,
doubtless.
He
went over his rationalizations. If men with wings like this did exist on some
small, remote planet; if any of them had visited Earth in rocket ships in
antiquity, it would explain a great deal about what he had thitherto called
"superstitious" beliefs. Fiery chariots, old
prophets being taken to heaven by angels, and much else.
If
the Russians had "made" it and dropped it to confuse the Free World,
then it was all over; they were already too far ahead scientifically.
He lighted the cigarette. Deep in the
banyans, behind the screens of thick, aerial roots and oval leaves, a twig
snapped. His head swung fearfully. He half expected another form— winged,
clothed in light—to step forth and demand the body of its fallen colleague.
A
boy emerged—a boy of about nine, sun-tanned, big-eyed and muscular in the
stringy way of boys. He wore only a T-shirt and shorts; both bore marks of his
green progress through the jungle.
"You
have it," he said. Not accusatively. Not even very emotionally.
"Where's father?"
"Are
you------- "
"I'm
Ted Simms." The brown gaze was suddenly excited. "And you're a
general!"
The
man nodded. "General Scott." He smiled. "You've seen"—he
moved his head gently toward the rear seat—"my passenger before?"
"I
saw him fall. I was there, getting Aunt Cora a bunch of flowers."
The
general remained casual, in tone of voice, 'Tell me about it."
"Can I sit in the jeep? I never rode in
one yet." "Sure."
The
boy climbed in, looked intently at the angel, and sat beside the general. He
sighed. "Sure is handsome, an angel," said the boy. "I was just
up there at the spring, picking flowers, because Aunt Cora likes flowers quite
a lot, and she was mad because I didn't do my arithmetic well. We had seen the
old test shot, earlier, and we're sick and tired of them, anyhow! They scare
the natives and make them go back to their old, heathen customs. Well, I heard
this whizzing up in the air, and down it came, wings out, trying to fly, but
only spiraling, sort of. Like a bird with an arrow through it. You've seen that
kind of wobbly flying?"
"Yes."
"It
came down. It stood there a second and then it sat." "Sat?" The
general's lips felt dry. He licked them. "Did it —see you?"
"See me? I was right beside it."
The
boy hesitated and the general was on the dubious verge of prodding when the
larklike voice continued, "It sat there crying for a while."
"Crying!"
"Of course. The H-bomb must of hurt it something awful. It
was crying. You could hear it sobbing and trying to get its breath even before
it touched the ground. It cried, and then it looked at me and it stopped crying
and it smiled. It.had a real wonderful smile when it
smiled."
The
boy paused. He had begun to look with fascination at the dashboard instruments.
"Then what?" the general murmured.
"Can I switch on the lights?" He
responded eagerly to the nod and talked as he switched the lights, tried the
horn. "Then not much. It smiled and I didn't know
what to do. I never saw an angel before. Father says he knows people who have,
though. So I said, 'Hello,' and it said, 'Hello,' and it said, after a minute
or so, 'I was a little too late,' and tears got in its eyes again and it leaned
back and kind of tucked in its wings and, after a while, it died."
"You mean the—angel—spoke to you—in
English?"
"Don't they know all languages?"
the boy asked, smiling.
"I couldn't say," the general
replied. "I suppose they do."
He
framed another question, and heard a sharp "Look out!" There was a
thwack in the foliage. Feet ran. A man grunted. He threw himself in front of
the boy.
Reverend
Simms had crept from the banyan, carrying a shotgun, intent, undoubtedly, on
preventing the removal of the unearthly being from his island. The lieutenant
and sergeant, rounding a turn in the road, had seen him, thrown a stone to
divert him, and rushed him. There was almost no scuffle.
The
general jumped down from the jeep, took the gun, looked into the missionary's
eyes and saw no sanity there— just fury and bafflement.
"You've had a terrible shock, dominie," he said, putting the
gun in the front of the jeep. "We all have. But this is a thing
for the whole world, if it's what you believe it to be. Not just
for here and now and you. We shall have to take it away and
ascertain------- "
"Ye of little
faith!" the missionary intoned.
The
general pitied the man and suddenly envied him; it was comforting to be so sure
about anything.
Comforting. But was such comfort valid or was it specious? He looked toward the jeep.
Who could doubt now?
He
could. It was his way of being—to doubt at first. It was also his duty, as he
saw duty.
Rawson,
looking old and deathly ill, came down the cart track in the green shadows. But
he had regained something of his manner. "All set, Marc. No word will
leave here. Plane's on the way; General Budford's
flying in himself. Old Bloodshed said it better be Z priority." The major
eyed the white, folded wings. "I judge he'll be satisfied."
General
Scott grinned slightly. "Have a cigarette, Raw." He sat beside the
praying missionary with some hope of trying to bring the man's mind from dread
and ecstasy back to the human problems—the awesome, unpredictable human enigmas—which
would be involved by this "casualty."
One
thing was sure. The people who had felt for years that man didn't yet know
enough to experiment with the elemental forces of Nature were going to feel
entirely justified when this story rocked the planet.
If,
the general thought on with a sudden, icy feeling, it wasn't labeled Top Secret
and concealed forever.
That
could be. The possibility appalled him. He looked up angrily at the hot sky. No
bomb effects were visible here; only the clouds' cyclorama toiling across the
blue firmament. Plenty of Top Secrets up there still, he thought.
The President of the United States was
awakened after a conference. When they told him, he reached for his dressing
gown, started to get up and then sat on the edge of his bed. "Say that
again."
They said it again.
The
President's white hair was awry, his eyes had the
sleep-hung look of a man in need of more rest. His brain, however, came wide
awake.
"Let
me have that in the right sequence. The Bugaboo test brought down, on Tempest
Island, above Salandra Strait, an angel—or something that looked human and had
wings, anyhow. Who's outside and who brought that over?"
His aide, Smith, said,
"Weatherby, Colton and Dwane."
The Secretary of State. The chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. The chairman of the Atomic Energy
Commission.
"Sure of communications? Could be a
terrific propaganda
gag.
The Reds could monkey with our wave lengths------------------ "
The President gestured, put on the dressing
gown.
"Quadruple-checked. Budford talked on the scrambler. Also Marc Scott, who
made the first investigation of the—er —casualty." Smith's
peaceful, professorish face was composed, still, but his eyes were wrong.
"Good men."
"None better. Admiral Stanforth sent
independent verification. Green, of AEC, reported in on Navy and Air Force
channels. Captain Wilmot, ranking Navy chaplain out there, swore it was a
genuine angel. It must be—something, Mr. President! Something
all right!"
"Where is it
now?"
"On the way, naturally. Scott put it aboard a B-lll. Due in here by three o'clock. Coffee
waiting in the office."
"I'll go out, Clem. Get the rest of the
Cabinet up and here. The rest of the JCS. Get Ames at
CIA. This thing has got to stay absolutely restricted till we know more."
"Of
course."
"Scott
with it?"
"Budford." Smith smiled. "Ranked
Scott. Some mission, hunh? An angel.
Imagine!"
"All my life I've been a God-fearing
man," the President replied. "But I can't imagine. We'll wait till
it's here." He started toward the door where other men waited tensely. He
paused. "Whatever it is, it's the end to—what has been, these last fifteen
years. And that's a good thing." The President smiled.
It was, perhaps, the longest morning in the
history of the capital. Arrangements had been made for the transportation of
the cargo secretly but swiftly from the airfield to the White House. A select
but celebrated group of men had been chosen to examine the cargo. They kept
flying in to Washington and arriving in limousines all morning. But they did
not know why they had been summoned. Reporters could not reach a single Cabinet
member. No one available at State or the Pentagon, at AEC or CIA could give any
information at all. So there were merely conjectures, which led to rumors:
Something had gone wrong
with an H-bomb.
The President had been
assassinated.
Russia had sent an
ultimatum.
Hitler had reappeared.
Toward the end of that morning, a call came which the President took in person. About thirty men watched
his face, and all of them became afraid.
When he hung up he said unsteadily,
"Gentlemen, the B-111 flying it in is overdue at San Francisco and presumed
down at sea. All agencies have commenced a search.
I have asked, meantime, that those officers and scientists who saw, examined or
had any contact with the—strange being be flown here immediately. Unless they
find the plane and recover what it carried, that's all we can do."
"The whole business," Dwane said,
after a long silence,
"could be a hoax. If the entire work party engaged in Test
Series Avalanche formed a conspiracy---------- "
"Why should
they?" asked Weatherby.
"Because, Mr. Secretary," Dwane
answered, "a good many people on this globe think mankind has carried this
atomic-weapons business too far."
General Colton smiled. "I can see a few
frightened men conspiring against the world and their own government, with some
half-baked idealistic motive. But not a fleet and an army. Not, for that matter,
Stanforth or Scott. Not Scott. Not a hoax."
"They'll
report here tonight, gentlemen, in any case." The President walked to a
window and looked out at the spring green of a lawn and the budding trees
above. "We'll know then what they learned, at least. Luncheon?"
On the evening of the third day afterward,
Marc Scott greeted the President formally in his office. At the President's
suggestion they went out together, in the warm April twilight, to a low-walled
terrace.
"The
reason I asked you to come to the White House again," the
President began, "was to talk to you entirely alone. I gathered, not from
your words, but from your manner at recent meetings, general, that you had some
feelings about this matter."
"Feelings,
Mr. President?" He had feelings. But would the statesman understand or
regard them as naive, as childish?
The President chuckled and ran his fingers
through his thick white hair in a hesitant way that suggested he was uncertain
of himself. "I have a fearful
decision to make." He sighed and was silent for several seconds as he
watched the toy silhouettes of three jet planes move across the lemon-yellow
sky. "There are several courses I can take. I can order complete silence
about the whole affair. Perhaps a hundred people know. If I put it on a Top
Secret basis, rumors may creep out. But they could be scotched. The world would
then be deprived of any real knowledge of your—angel.
"Next,
I could take up the matter with the other heads of state. The
friendly ones." He paused and then nodded his head unsurely.
"Yes. Even the Russians. And
the satellite governments. With heaven knows what useful effect!
Finally, I could simply announce to the world that you and a handful of others
found the body of what appears to have been an angel, and that it was
irretrievably lost while being flown to Washington."
Since
the President stopped with those words, Marc said, "Yes, sir."
"Three equally poor possibilities. If it was an angel—a divine messenger—and
our test destroyed it, I have, I feel, no moral right whatever to keep the
world from knowing. Irrespective of any consequences."
"The
consequences!" Marc Scott murmured.
"You can imagine them!" The
President uncrossed his legs, stretched, felt for a cigarette, took a light from the general. 'Tremendous,
incalculable, dangerous consequences! All truly and decently religious
people would be given a tremendous surge of hope, along with an equal despair
over the angel's death and the subsequent loss of the—body. Fanatics would
literally go mad. The news could produce panic, civil unrest, bloodshed. And we
have nothing to show. No proof. Nothing tangible. The
enemy could use the whole story for propaganda in a thousand evil ways. Being
atheistic, they would proclaim it an American madness—what you will. Even
clergymen, among themselves, are utterly unagreed, when they are told the
situation."
"I can imagine."
The President smiled a little and went on,
"I called half a dozen leaders to Washington. Cardinal Thrace.
Bishop Neuer-mann. Father Bolder. Reverend Matthews.
Every solitary man had a different reaction. When they became assured that I
meant precisely what I said, they began a theological battle" —the
President chuckled ruefully at the memory—"that went on until they left,
and looked good for a thousand years. Whole denominations would split! Most of
the clergy, however, agreed on one point: it was not an angel."
The general was startled. "Not an angel? Then, what---------------- "
"Because it died. Because it was killed or destroyed. Angels,
general, are immortal. They are not human flesh and blood. No. I think you can
say that, by and large, the churches would never assent to the idea that the
being you saw was Gabriel or any other angel." "I hadn't thought of
that."
"I
had," the President
replied. "You are not, general, among the orthodox believers, I take
it." "No, Mr. President."
"So
I judged. Well, let me get to my reason for asking you to confer privately with
me. The churchmen debated hotly— to use the politest possible phrase—over the
subject. But the scientists—whom I also consulted"—he drew a breath and
swallowed, like a man whose memory of hard-controlled temper is still
painful—"the scientists were at scandalous loggerheads. Two of them
actually came to blows! I've heard every theory you can conceive of, and a lot
I couldn't. Every idea from the one that you, general, and all the rest of you
out in the Pacific, were victims of mass hypnosis and the whole thing's an
illusion, to a hundred versions of the 'little men from outer space' angle. In
the meeting day before yesterday, however, I noticed you were rather quiet and
reserved about expressing any opinion. I've since looked up your record. It's
magnificent." The President hesitated.
Marc said nothing.
"You're a brave, brilliant, levelheaded,
sensitive person, and a man's man. Your record makes a great deal too plain for
you to deny out of modesty. You are an exceptional man. In short, you're the
very sort of person I'd pick to look into a mere report of an incident of that
sort. So what I want—why I asked you here—is your
impression. Your feelings. Your
reactions at the time. Your reflections since.
Your man-toman, down-to-earth, open-hearted emotions about it all—and not more
theory, whether theological or allegedly scientific! Do you see?"
The appeal was forceful. Marc felt as if he
were all the members of some audiences the President had swayed—all of them in
one person, one American citizen—now asked—now all but commanded—to bare his
soul. He felt the great, inner power of the President and understood why the
people of the nation had chosen him for office.
"I'll tell you," he answered
quietly. "For what it's worth. I'm afraid that it
is mighty little." He pondered a moment. "First, when I suddenly saw
it, I was shocked. Not frightened, Mr. President—though the rest were. Just—startled. When I really looked at the—casualty, I
thought, first of all, that it was beautiful. I thought it had, in its dead
face, great intelligence and other qualities."
The
President rested his hand on the uniformed knee. "That's it, man! The
'other qualities'! What were they?"
Marc
exhaled unevenly. "This is risky. It's all—remembered
impression. I thought it looked kind. Noble too. Almost, but not exactly, sweet. I thought it had tremendous
courage. The kind that—well, I thought of it as roaring through space and
danger and unimagined risks to get here. Daring H-bombs.
And I thought, Mr. President, one more thing: I thought it had determination—as
if there was a gigantic feel about it of—mission."
There was a long silence. Then the President
said in a low voice, "That all, Marc?"
"Yes. Yes, sir."
"So I thought." He stood up
suddenly, not a man of reflection and unresolved responsibility, but an
executive with work ahead. "Mission! We don't know what it was. If only
there was something tangible!" He held out his hand and gripped the
general with great strength. "I needed that word to decide. We'll wait.
Keep it absolutely restricted. There might be another. The message to us, from
them, whoever they are, might come in some different way or by more of these
messengers! After all, I cannot represent them to the world—expose this
incredible incident—without
knowing
what the mission was. But to know there was a
mission-------------- "
He
sighed and went on firmly, "When I finally get to bed tonight, I'll sleep,
Marc, as I haven't slept since I took office!"
"It's
only my guess," the general responded. "I haven't any evidence to
explain those feelings."
"You've said enough for me! Thank you,
general." Then, to Marc Scott's honor and embarrassment, the President
drew himself straight, executed a salute, held it a moment, turned from the
terrace and marched alone into the White House.
During the months-long, single day of
Northern Siberia's summertime, on a night that had no darkness, a fireball
burst suddenly above the arctic rim. As it rose, it turned the tundra
blood-red. For a radius of miles the permafrost was hammered down and a vast,
charred basin was formed. In the adjacent polar seas ice melted. A mushroom
cloud broke through the atmospheric layers with a speed and to a height that
would have perplexed, if not horrified, the Free World's nuclear physicists.
In due course, counters the world around
would begin to click and the information would be whispered about that the
Russians were ahead in the H-bomb field. That information would be thereupon
restricted so that the American public would never learn the truth.
In Siberia the next morning awed Soviet
technicians—and the most detached nuclear physicists have been awed, even
stupefied, by their creations—measured the effects of their new bomb carefully:
area of absolute incineration, area of absolute destruction by blast, putative
scope of fire storm, radius of penetrative radiation, kinds and concentrations
of radioactive fall-out, half-lives, dispersion of same, kilos of pressure per
square centimeter. Then, on maps of the United States of America, these
technicians superimposed tinted circles of colored plastics, so that a glance
would show exactly what such a bomb would destroy of Buffalo and environs, St.
Paul, Seattle, Dallas, as well as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los
Angeles, and so on—the better targets. These maps, indicating the imaginary
annihilation of millions, were identical with certain American maps, save for
the fact that the latter bore such city names as Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad,
Vladivostok, Ordzhonikidze, Dnepropetrovsk, and the like.
It
was while the technicians were correlating their bomb data—and the sky over the
test base was still lava—that coded word came in to the commanding officer of
the base concerning a "casualty." The casualty had been found in
dying condition by a peasant who had been ordered to evacuate his sod hut in
that region weeks before. After the casualty, he had been summarily shot for
disobedience.
The
general went to the scene forthwith—and returned a silent, shaken man. Using
communication channels intended only for war emergency, he got in touch with
Moscow. The premier was not in his offices in the new, forty-six-story
skyscraper; but his aides were persuaded to disturb him at one of his suburban
villas. They were reluctant; he had retired to the country with Lamenula, the
communist Italian actress.
The
premier listened to the faint, agitated news from Siberia and said, "The
garrison must be drunk."
"I assure you, comrade-------- "
"Put
Vorshiv on."
Vorshiv
said, uneasily, the same thing. Yes, he had seen it. . . . Yes, it had wings. .
. . No, it could not be an enemy trick. . . . No, there were no interplanetary
vehicles about; nothing on the radar in the nature of an unidentified flying
object. . . . Certainly, they had been meticulous in the sky watch; this had
been a new type of bomb, incorporating a new principle, and it would never have
done to let an enemy reconnaissance plane observe the effects. "I will
come," said the premier.
He
ordered a new Khalov-239 prepared for the flight. He was very angry. Lamenula
had been coy—and the premier had enjoyed the novelty of that, until the call
from Siberia had interrupted. Now he would have to make a long, uncomfortable
journey in a jet—which always frightened him a little —and he would be obliged
to postpone the furthering of his friendship with the talented, beautiful,
honey-haired young Italian.
Night
came to the Siberian flatlands and the sky clouded so that there was a
semblance of darkness. A frigid wind swept from the Pole, freezing the vast
area of mud created by the H-bomb. In the morning the premier came in at the
base airfield, twelve jets streaming in the icy atmosphere, forward rockets
blasting to brake the race of the great ship over the
hard-packed terrain. It stopped only a few score rods short of the place where
the "inadequate workers" lay buried—the more than ten thousand slaves
who had died to make the field.
Curiously enough, it was an American jeep
which took the premier out to the scrubby patch of firs. The angel lay untouched,
but covered with a tarpaulin and prodigiously guarded round about by men and
war machines.
"Take it off."
He
stood a long time, simply looking, his silent generals and aides beside him.
Not
a tall man, this Soviet premier, but broad, overweight, bearlike in fur
clothing—a man with a Mongol face and eyes as dark, as inexpressive and
unfeeling as prunes. A man whose face was always shiny, as if he exuded
minutely a thin oil. A man highly educated by the
standards of his land; a man ruthless by any standard in history.
What
went through his head as he regarded the dazzling figure, he would not
afterward have catalogued. Not in its entirety. He was afraid, of course. He
was always afraid. But he had achieved that level of awareness which
acknowledges, and uses, fear. In the angel he saw immediately a possible finish
to the dreams of Engels, Marx, the rest. He saw a
potential end of communism, and even of the human race. This milk-white
cadaver, this impossible reality, this beauty Praxiteles could never have
achieved even symbolically, could mean—anything.
Aloud, he said—his first
remark—"Michelangelo would have appreciated this."
Some of the men around him, scared, breathing
steam in the gray, purgatorial morning, smiled or chuckled at their chiefs erudition and self-possession. Others agreed
solemnly: Michelangelo—whoever he was or had been—would have appreciated this
incredible carcass.
He
then went up and kicked the foot of the angel with his own felted boot. It
alarmed him to do so, but he felt, as premier, the duty. First,
the noble comment; next, the boot.
He
was aware of the fact that the men around him kept glancing from the frozen
angel up toward the barely discernible gray clouds. They were wondering, of
course, if it could be God-sent. Sounds came to him—bells of churches, litanies
recited, chants—Gregorian music in Caucasian bass. To his nostrils came the
smell of incense. He thought, as atheists must, what if they were right?
Against
that thought he ranged another speedily enough; it was his custom. He wrenched
the ears and eyes of his mind from the church pageantry of recollected boyhood,
in the Czar's time, to other parts of his expanding domain. He made himself
hear temple bells, watch sacred elephants parade, behold
the imbecile sacrifices and rituals of the heathen. They, too, were believers,
and they had no angels. Angels, he therefore reasoned, were myths.
It
occurred to him—it had already been suggested to him by General Mornsk, of
Intelligence—that some such being as this, come on a brief visit from an
unknown small planet, had given rise to the whole notion of angels. He
chuckled.
Vorshiv
had the temerity to ask, "You have formed an opinion, comrade?"
The
premier stared at the stringy, leathern man with his watery eyes and his
record: eighteen million unworthy citizens "subdued." "Certainly." He looked once more at the casualty.
"Autopsy it. Then destroy the remains."
"No," a voice
murmured.
The premier whirled about.
"Who said that?"
It
was a young man, the youngest general, one born after 1917, one who had seen no
world but the Soviet. Now, pale with horror and shame, the young man said,
"I merely thought, sir, to preserve this for study."
"I
detected sentiment. Credulity. Superstition.
Your protest was a whimper."
The
young officer showed a further brief^ flicker of dissent. "Perhaps—this
being cannot be destroyed by our means."
The
premier nodded at the body, and his thin, long lips became longer, thinner. A smile, perhaps. "Is not our second test planned for
the very near future?"
"Tomorrow," Mornsk said. "But
we are prepared to post-
pone it if you think the situation---------- "
"Postpone
it?" The premier smiled. "On the contrary.
Follow plans. Autopsy this animal. Attach what remains to the bomb. That
should destroy it effectively." He glanced icily at the young general,
made a daub at a salute and tramped over the ice-crisped tundra toward the
jeeps.
On
the way back to the base, Mornsk, of Intelligence, decided to mention his
theory. Mornsk turned in his front seat. "One thing,
comrade. Our American information is not, as you know, what it was.
However, we had word this spring of what the British call a 'flap.' Many sudden, very secret conferences. Rumors.
We never were able to determine the cause—and the brief state of near-panic
among the leadership has abated. Could it be—the 'flap' followed one of their
tests —that they, too, had a 'casualty'?"
"It could be,"
the premier replied. "What of it?"
"Nothing. I merely would have thought, comrade, that they would have announced it
to the world."
The
thin lips drew thinner again. "They are afraid. They would, today, keep
secret a thousand things that, yesterday, they would have told one another
freely. Freedom. Where is it now? We are driving it
into limbo—their kind. To limbo." He shut his
prune eyes, opened them, turned to the officer on his
left. "Gromov, I hope the food's good here. I'm famished."
An old Russian proverb ran through his mind: "Where hangs
the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear."
The
trick, he reflected, was to keep that fire of fear alive, but to know at the
same time it might consume you also. Then the trick was to make the fear
invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own
men's souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men
to see how their hale was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it,
hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the
hands of the hating fearful.
There,
in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the
proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they
were free and yet could be made to hate:
Frighten;
then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize. Like governing
children.
If more of these angels showed up, he
reflected, it would simply be necessary to pretend they were demons, Lucifers,
outer-space men bent on assassinating humanity. So simple.
The
slate-hued buildings of the base rose over the tundra. From the frigid outdoors
he entered rooms heated to a tropical temperature by the nearby reactors.
There, too, the Soviets had somewhat surpassed the free peoples.
His
secretary, Maximov, had thoughtfully forwarded La-menula, to temper the
hardships of the premier's Siberian hegira. He was amused, even somewhat
stirred, to learn the young lady had objected to the trip, had fought, was even
now in a state of alternate hysteria and coma—or simulated coma. A little
communist discipline was evidently needed, and being applied; and he would take
pleasure in administering the finishing touches.
Late
that night he woke up with a feeling of uneasiness. A feeling, he decided, of
fear. The room was quiet, the guards were in place, nothing menaced him in the
immediate moment, and Lamenula was asleep. Her bruises were beginning to show,
but she had learned how to avoid them in the future, which was the use of
bruises.
What
frightened him was the angel. Church music, which he had remembered, but
refused to listen to in his mind, now came back to
him. It did not cause him to believe that the visitor had given a new validity
to an Old Testament. It had already caused him to speculate that what he, and a
billion others, had thitherto regarded as pure myth might actually be founded
on scientific fact.
What
therefore frightened the premier as he lay on the great bed in the huge,
gaudily decorated bedchamber, was an intuition of
ignorance. Neither he nor his physicists, he nor his political philosophers—nor
any men in the world that still, ludicrously, blindly, referred to itself as
"free"—really knew anything fundamental about the universe. Nobody
really knew, and could demonstrate scientifically, the "why" of time
and space and energy—or matter. The angel—the very beautiful angel that had
lain on the cold tundra—might possibly mean and be something that not he nor
any living man, skeptic or believer, could even comprehend.
That
idea wakened him thoroughly. Here was a brand-new dimension of the unknown to
be faced. He sat up, switched on the light and put a cigarette in his thin
mouth.
. How, he asked himself, could this fear of
the unknown be translated into a hatred of something known, and so employed to
enhance power? His power. That was, invariably,
the
formulation; once made, it generally supplied its own answer.
You
could not, however, set the people in the Soviets and the people in the rest of
the world to hating angels. Not when, especially, their reality—or real
counterpart—could never be exhibited and had become a military secret.
Mornsk's
theory bemused him. Had the Americans also shot one down with an H-bomb? If so,
they'd followed a procedure like his own, apparently. Saying nothing. Examining the victim,
doubtless.
He
realized he should go to sleep. He was to be roused early for the test of the
next super-H-bomb, but he kept ruminating, as he smoked, on the people of the
United States.
Whom,
he reflected, we shall destroy in millions in--------------- The
number of
months and days remaining before the blitz of the U.S.A. was so immense a
secret that he did not let himself reckon it exactly. Whom we shall slaughter in
sudden millions, soon.
But suppose something
intervened? Angels?
He smiled again. Even if such creatures had
visited the earth once before, it was long ago. They might be here again now.
They would presumably go away again, for millenniums. Ample
time to plant the Red flag everywhere in the world.
Still, he could not know,
and not to know was alarming.
There
was a phone beside his bed. He could astound telephone operators halfway
around the world, and yet, doubtless, in ten minutes, fifteen—perhaps an hour—he
could converse with the President of the United States.
"Seen
any angels, Mr. President? . . . What do you make of it? . . . Perhaps we
aren't as knowing as we imagine. . . . Possibly we should meet and talk things
over—postpone any—plans we might have for the near future? At least, until
this matter of invading angels is settled."
It wouldn't be that simple or that quick, but
it might be done. And it might be that that was the only possible way to save
the Soviet, because it might be the one way left to save man and his planet.
He thought about the abandonment of the
communist philosophy, the scrapping of decades of horror and sacrifice, the
relaxing of the steely discipline; he thought of the dreams of world domination
gone glimmering—of "freedom" being equated with communism. There
welled in him the avalanche of hatred which was his essence and the essence of
his world. He ground out his cigarette and tried to sleep. . . .
In the morning, after the test shot—which was
also very successful and, the premier thought, frightening—he requested the
report on the autopsy of the casualty. He had to ask repeatedly, since it
became clear that none of the nearby persons—generals, commissars, aides,
technicians—wanted to answer. He commanded Mornsk.
The
general sweated in the cold air, under a sky again clear and as palely blue as
a turquoise. "We have no report, comrade. The autopsy was undertaken last
night by Smidz. An ideal man, we felt—the great biologist, who happened to be
here, working on radiation effects on pigs. He labored alone all night, and
then—your orders, comrade—the—remains were fixed to the bomb." Momsk's
glance at the towering mushroom disposed of that matter. "It was then
discovered that Smidz made no notes of whatever he learned."
"Get
Smidz."
"This morning early,
comrade, he killed himself."
General Scott did not return to the Pacific
until nearly Christmastime. He had hoped not to go back at all, particularly
since he had spent the autumn with his "family in Baltimore, commuting
weekdays to the Pentagon. In December, however, he received secret information
of still another series of springtime nuclear-weapons tests and orders to fly
again to the Sangre Islands, where he would prepare another of the group for
total sacrifice. The death of islands was becoming commonplace to the
weaponeers. In the unfinished span of his own military career, a suitable
target had grown from a square of canvas stretched over a wooden frame to a building, and then to a city block, next a
city's heart, and now, an island the size of Manhattan. This, moreover, was not
holed, wrecked or merely set afire, but wiped off the earth's face, its roots
bumed away deep into the sea, its substance thrown, poisonous, across the
skies.
He
went reluctantly, but as a soldier must, aware that by now he had the broadest
experience—among general officers —for the task at hand.
Work went ahead with no more than the usual
quota of "bugs"—or what his orderly would have called
"snafus." It was a matter of "multiple snafu," however,
which finally led the general to order a light plane to fly him to Tempest
Island. There had arisen an argument with the natives about property rights;
there was some trouble with the placement of instruments; a problem about
electric power had come up; and a continuing report of bad chow was being
turned in from the island mess hall. Time for a high-echelon
look-see.
As he flew in, General Scott noticed the
changes which he had helped to devise. The mission playing field had been
bulldozed big enough to accommodate fair-sized cargo planes on two x-angled
strips. Here and there the green rug of jungle had been macheted open to
contain new measuring devices of the scientists. The harbor had been deepened;
dredged-up coral made a mole against the purple Pacific as well as the
foundation for a sizable pier. Otherwise, Tempest was the same.
His
mind, naturally, returned to his previous trip and to what had been found on
the island. The general had observed a growing tendency, even in Admiral
Stanforth and Rawson, now a colonel, to recall the angel more as a figure of a
dream than as reality. Just before the landing gear came down he looked for,
and saw, the very glade in which the angel had fallen. Its clear spring was an
emerald eye and the Bletias were in violet bloom all around.
Then
he was on the ground, busy with other officers, busy with the plans and problems
of a great nation, scared, arming, ready these days
for war at the notice of a moment or at no notice whatever. Even here,
thousands upon thousands of miles from the nervous target areas of
civilization, the fear and the desperate urgency of man had rolled up, parting
the jungle and erecting grim engines associated with ruin.
He was on his way to the headquarters tent
when he noticed, and recognized, the young boy.
Teddy
Simms, he thought, was about ten now, the age of his own son. But Teddy looked
older than ten, and very sad.
The
general stepped away from his accompanying officers. "You go on," he
said. "I'll soon catch up. This is an old friend of mine." He waved
then. "Hi, Ted! Why you all dressed up? Remember me?"
The
youngster stopped and did recognize the general, with a look of anxiousness. He
nodded and glanced down at his clothes. "I'm gonna leave! Tonight. It'll be"—his face brightened
slightly—"my very first airplane ride!"
"That's
swell!" The general had been puzzled by signs of
apprehension in the boy. "How's your father? And your
aunt? Cora, wasn't it?"
"She's O.K. But father-------- " His
lip shook.
Marc Scott no longer smiled. "Your
father----------- "
The boy answered stonily, "Went
nuts."
"After------- "
the general asked, knew the answer and was
unsurprised by the boy's increased anxiousness.
"I'm not allowed to say. I'd go to
prison forever."
A jeepful of soldiers passed. The general
moved to the boy's side and said, "With me, you are, Ted. Because I know all about it too. I'm—I'm mighty sorry your
father—is ill. Maybe he'll recover, though."
"The
board doesn't think so. They're giving up the mission. That's why I'm going
away. To school, Stateside. Father"—he fell in
step with the general, leaping slightly with each stride —"father never
got any better—after that old day you were here."
"What
say, we go back where—it happened? I'd like to see it once more, Ted."
"No."
Teddy amended it, "No, sir. I'm not even allowed to talk about it. I don't
ever go there!"
"It's
too bad. I thought it was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me in
my life."
The
boy stared at the man incredulously. "You did? Father thought it was the
worst thing ever happened."
"I
felt as if you, Ted—and I—all of us—were seeing something completely
wonderful!"
The
boy's face showed an agreement which changed, slowly, to a pitiable
emotion—regret, or fear, perhaps shame. It was the general's intuition which
bridged the moment: Teddy knew more than he had ever said about the angel; he
had lied originally or omitted something.
"What
is it, son?" The general's tone was fatherly. Eyes darted toward the
jungle, back to the general and rested measuringly, then hopelessly. It was as
if the youngster had considered aloud running away and had decided his
adversary was too powerful to evade.
He stood
silent a moment longer; then said almost incoherently, "I never meant to
keep it! But it is gold! And we were always so mighty poor! I thought, for a
while, if father sold it
------ But he couldn't even think of things like
selling gold
books. He
had lost his reason."
If
the generate heart surged, if his mind was stunned, he did not show it. "Gold books?" His eyes forgave in advance.
"Just one book, but heavy." The dismal boy looked at the ground. "I
didn't steal it, really! That angel—dropped it."
The
general's effort was tremendous. Not in battle had composure cost him as dear.
"You—read it?"
"Huh!"
the boy said. "It was in all kinds of other languages. 'Wisdom,'
that angel said it was. 'Gathered from
our whole galaxy—for Earth.' Did you ever know--------------- "
His
voice
intensified with the question, as if by asking it he might divert attention
from his guilt. "Did you know there are other people on other planets of
other suns, all around? Maybe Vega, or the North Star, or
Rigel, or more likely old Sirius? That angel mentioned a few names. I
forget which."
"No.
I didn't realize it. And, you say, this book had a message for the people on
Earth, written in all languages? Not English, though?"
"I
didn't see any English. I saw—like Japanese and Arabian—and a lot of kinds of
alphabets you never heard of— some, just dots."
"And you—threw it
away?" He asked it easily too.
"Naw. You
couldn't do that! It's gold—at least, it looks like
gold. All metal pages. It's got hinges, kind of, for every page. I guess it's
fireproof and even space-proof, at the least. I didn't throw it away. I hid it
under an old rock. Come on. I'll show you."
They
returned to the glade. The book lay beneath a flat stone. There had been
another the general was never to know about—a book buried beneath a sod hut in
Siberia by a peasant who also had intended to sell it, for he,
too, had been poor. But the other book, identical, along with the hovel above
it, had been reduced.to fractions of its atoms by a certain test weapon which
had destroyed the body of its bearer.
This one the general picked up with shaking
hands, opened and gazed upon with an ashen face.
The
hot sun of noon illumined the violet orchids around his tailored legs. The boy
stood looking up at him, awaiting judgment, accustomed to harshness; and about
them was the black and white filigree of tropical forest. With inexpressible
amazement, Marc searched page after page of inscriptions in languages unknown,
unsuspected until then. It became apparent that there was one message only,
very short, set again and again and again, but he did not know what it was
until," toward the last pages, he found the tongues of Earth.
A sound was made by the man as he read them—a
sound that began with murmurous despair and ended, as comprehension entered
his brain, with a note of exultation. For the message of icy space and flaring
stars was this: "Love one another."
From the pages of The Saturday Evening
Post-twenty dazzling flights of the imagination
THE PLACE OF THE GODS Stephen Vincent Benêt THE SECOND TRIP TO MARS Ward Moore THE LOST CONTINENT Geoffrey Household
THE DEATH DUST Frank Harvey DOOMSDAY DEFERRED Will F.Jenkins , • plus the
complete novelette THE ANSWER Philip Wylie
And many other
spellbinding stories—all designed to take you on a supercharged, breath-catching
journey into new worlds of the unexpected and the unknown...