The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories Read online

  “Something wrong, George?”

  “I hope so,” said George Bailey. “I certainly hope so.”

  He started to reach for another drink and changed his mind. He had a sudden hunch that something big was happening, and he wanted to sober up to appreciate it.

  He didn’t have the faintest idea how big it was.

  “George, what do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. But Maisie, let’s take a run down to the studio, huh? There ought to be some excitement.”

  * * * *

  April 5, 1957; that was the night the waveries came.

  It had started like an ordinary evening. It wasn’t one, now.

  George and Maisie waited for a cab, but none came so they took the subway instead. Oh yes, the subways were still running in those days. It took them within a block of the MID Network Building.

  The building was a madhouse. George, grinning, strolled through the lobby with Maisie on his arm, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and for no reason at all gave the elevator boy a dollar. He’d never before in his life tipped an elevator operator.

  The boy thanked him. “Better stay away from the big shots, Mr. Bailey,” he said. “They’re ready to chew the ears off anybody who even looks at ’em.”

  “Wonderful,” said George.

  From the elevator he headed straight for the office of J. R. McGee himself.

  There were strident voices behind the glass door. George reached for the knob, and Maisie tried to stop him.

  “But George,” she whispered, “you’ll be fired!”

  “There comes a time,” said George. “Stand back away from the door, honey.”

  Gently but firmly he moved her to a safe position.

  “But George, what are you—?”

  “Watch,” he said.

  The frantic voices stopped as he opened the door a foot. All eyes turned toward him as he stuck his head around the corner of the doorway into the room.

  “Dit-dit-dit.” he said. “Dit-dit-dit.”

  He ducked back and to the side just in time to escape the flying glass as a paperweight and an inkwell came through the pane of the door.

  He grabbed Maisie and ran for the stairs.

  “Now we get a drink,” he told her.

  * * * *

  The bar across the street from the network building was crowded, but it was a strangely silent crowd. In deference to the fact that most of its customers were radio people, it didn’t have a TV set—but there was a big cabinet radio, and most of the people were bunched around it.

  “Dit” said the radio. “Dit-dah-d’dah-dit-dahditdah dit—”

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” George whispered to Maisie.

  Somebody fiddled with the dial. Somebody asked, “What band is that?” and somebody said, “Police.” Somebody said, “Try the foreign band,” and somebody did. “This ought to be Buenos Aires,” somebody said. “Dit-d’dah-dit—” said the radio.

  Somebody ran fingers through his hair and said, “Shut that damn thing off.” Somebody else turned it back on.

  George grinned and led the way to a back booth where he’d spotted Pete Mulvaney sitting alone with a bottle in front of him. He and Maisie sat across from Pete.

  “Hello,” he said gravely.

  “Hell,” said Pete, who was head of the technical research staff of MID.

  “A beautiful night, Mulvaney,” George said. “Did you see the moon riding the fleecy clouds like a golden galleon tossed upon silver-crested whitecaps in a stormy—”

  “Shut up,” said Pete. “I’m thinking.”

  “Whisky sours,” George told the waiter. He turned back to the man across the table. “Think out loud, so we can hear. But first, how did you escape the booby hatch across the street?”

  “I’m bounced, fired, discharged.”

  “Shake hands. And then explain. Did you say dit-dit-dit to them?”

  Pete looked at him with sudden admiration. “Did you?”

  “I’ve a witness. What did you do?”

  “Told ’em what I thought it was and they think I’m crazy.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said George. “Then we want to hear—” He snapped his fingers. “What about TV?”

  “Same thing. Same sound on audio and the pictures flicker and dim with every dot or dash. Just a blur by now.”

  “Wonderful. And now tell me what’s wrong. I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s nothing trivial, but I want to know.”

  “I think it’s space. Space is warped.”

  “Good old space,” George Bailey said.

  “George,” said Maisie, “please shut up. I want to hear this.”

  “Space,” said Pete, “is also finite.” He poured himself another drink. “You go far enough in any direction and get back where you started. Like an ant crawling around an apple.”

  “Make it an orange,” George said.

  “All right, an orange. Now suppose the first radio waves ever sent out have just made the round trip. In fifty-six years.”

  “Fifty-six years? But I thought radio waves traveled at the same speed as light. If that’s true, then in fifty-six years they could go only fifty-six light-years, and that can’t be around the universe because there are galaxies known to be millions or maybe billions of light-years away. I don’t remember the figures, Pete, but our own galaxy alone is a hell of a lot bigger than fifty-six light-years.”

  Pete Mulvaney sighed. “That’s why I say space must be warped. There’s a shortcut somewhere.”

  “That short a shortcut? Couldn’t be.”

  “But George, listen to that stuff that’s coming in. Can you read code?”

  “Not any more. Not that fast, anyway.”

  “Well, I can,” Pete said. “That’s early American ham. Lingo and all. That’s the kind of stuff the air was full of before regular broadcasting. It’s the lingo, the abbreviations, the barnyard to attic chitchat of amateurs with keys, with Marconi coherers or Fessenden barreters—and you can listen for a violin solo pretty soon now. I’ll tell you what it’ll be.”

  “What?”

  “Handel’s Largo. The first phonograph record ever broadcast. Sent out by Fessenden from Brant Rock in 1906. You’ll hear his CQ-CQ any minute now. Bet you a drink.”

  “Okay, but what was the dit-dit-dit that started this?”

  Mulvaney grinned. “Marconi, George. What was the most powerful signal ever broadcast and by whom and when?”

  “Marconi? Dit-dit-dit? Fifty-six years ago?”

  “Head of the class. The first transatlantic signal on December 12, 1901. For three hours Marconi’s big station at Poldhu, with two-hundred foot masts, sent out an intermittent S, dit-dit-dit, while Marconi and two assistants at St. Johns in Newfoundland got a kite-borne aerial four hundred feet in the air and finally got the signal. Across the Atlantic, George, with sparks jumping from the big Leyden jars at Poldhu and 20,000-volt juice jumping off the tremendous aerials—”

  “Wait a minute, Pete, you’re off the beam. If that was in 1901 and the first broadcast was about 1906 it’ll be five years before the Fessenden stuff gets here on the same route. Even if there’s a fifty-six light-year short cut across space and even if those signals didn’t get so weak en route that we couldn’t hear them—it’s crazy.”

  “I told you it was,” Pete said gloomily. “Why, those signals after traveling that far would be so infinitesimal that for practical purposes they wouldn’t exist. Furthermore they’re all over the band on everything from microwave on up and equally strong on each. And, as you point out, we’ve already come almost five years in two hours, which isn’t possible. I told you it was crazy.”

  “But—”

  “Shh. Listen,” said Pete.

  A blurred, but unmistakably human voice was coming from the radio, mingling with the cracklings of code. And then music, faint and scratchy, but unmistakably a violin. Playing Handel’s Largo.

 
Only suddenly it climbed in pitch as though modulating from key to key until it became so horribly shrill that it hurt the ear. And kept on going past the high limit of audibility until they could hear it no more.

  Somebody said, “Shut that God damn thing off.” Somebody did, and this time nobody turned it back on.

  Pete said, “I didn’t really believe it myself. And there’s another thing against it, George. Those signals affect TV too, and radio waves are the wrong length to do that.”

  He shook his head slowly. “There must be some other explanation, George. The more I think about it now the more I think I’m wrong.”

  He was right: he was wrong.

  * * * *

  “Preposterous,” said Mr. Ogilvie. He took off his glasses, frowned fiercely, and put them back on again. He looked through them at the several sheets of copy paper in his hand and tossed them contemptuously to the top of his desk. They slid to rest against the triangular name plate that read:

  B. R. Ogilvie

  Editor-in-Chief

  “Preposterous,” he said again.

  Casey Blair, his best reporter, blew a smoke ring and poked his index finger through it. “Why?” he asked.

  “Because—why, it’s utterly preposterous.”

  Casey Blair said, “It is now three o’clock in the morning. The interference has gone on for five hours and not a single program is getting through on either TV or radio. Every major broadcasting and telecasting station in the world has gone off the air.”

  “For two reasons. One, they were just wasting current. Two, the communications bureaus of their respective governments requested them to get off to aid their campaigns with the direction finders. For five hours now, since the start of the interference, they’ve been working with everything they’ve got. And what have they found out?”

  “It’s preposterous!” said the editor.

  “Perfectly, but it’s true. Greenwich at 11 P. M. New York time; I’m translating all these times into New York time—got a bearing in about the direction of Miami. It shifted northward until at two o’clock the direction was approximately that of Richmond, Virginia. San Francisco at eleven got a bearing in about the direction of Denver; three hours later it shifted southward toward Tucson. Southern Hemisphere: bearings from Capetown, South Africa, shifted from direction of Buenos Aires to that of Montevideo, a thousand miles north.”

  “New York at eleven had weak indications toward Madrid; but by two o’clock they could get no bearings at all.” He blew another smoke ring. “Maybe because the loop antennae they use turn only on a horizontal plane?”

  “Absurd.”

  Casey said, “I like ‘preposterous’ better, Mr. Ogilvie. Preposterous it is, but it’s not absurd. I’m scared stiff. Those lines—and all other bearings I’ve heard about—run in the same direction if you take them as straight lines running as tangents off the Earth instead of curving them around the surface. I did it with a little globe and a star map. They converge on the constellation Leo.” He leaned forward and tapped a forefinger on the top page of the story he’d just turned in. “Stations that are directly under Leo in the sky get no bearings at all. Stations on what would be the perimeter of Earth relative to that point get the strongest bearings. Listen, have an astronomer check those figures if you want before you run the story, but get it done damn quick—unless you want to read about it in the other newspapers first.”

  “But the heaviside layer, Casey—isn’t that supposed to stop all radio waves and bounce them back?”

  “Sure, it does. But maybe it leaks. Or maybe signals can get through it from the outside even though they can’t get out from the inside. It isn’t a solid wall.”

  “But—”

  “I know, it’s preposterous. But there it is. And there’s only an hour before press time. You’d better send this story through fast and have it being set up while you’re having somebody check my facts and directions. Besides, there’s something else you’ll want to check.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t have the data for checking the positions of the planets. Leo’s on the ecliptic; a planet could be in line between here and there. Mars, maybe.”

  Mr. Ogilvie’s eyes brightened, then clouded again. He said, “We’ll be the laughingstock of the world, Blair, if you’re wrong.”

  “And if I’m right?”

  The editor picked up the phone and snapped an order.

  * * * *

  April 6th headline of the New York Morning Messenger, final (6 A. M.) edition:

  RADIO INTERFERENCE COMES FROM SPACE, ORIGINATES IN LEO

  May Be Attempt at Communication by Beings Outside Solar System

  All television and radio broadcasting was suspended.

  Radio and television stocks opened several points off the previous day and then dropped sharply until noon when a moderate buying rally brought them a few points back.

  Public reaction was mixed; people who had no radios rushed out to buy them and there was a boom, especially in portable and table-top receivers. On the other hand, no TV sets were sold at ail. With telecasting suspended there were no pictures on their screens, even blurred ones. Their audio circuits, when turned on, brought in the same jumble as radio receivers. Which, as Pete Mulvaney had pointed out to George Bailey, was impossible; radio waves cannot activate the audio circuits of TV sets. But these did, if they were radio waves.

  In radio sets they seemed to be radio waves, but horribly hashed. No one could listen to them very long. Oh, there were flashes—times when, for several consecutive seconds, one could recognize the voice of Will Rogers or Geraldine Farrar or catch flashes of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight or the Pearl Harbor excitement. (Remember Pearl Harbor?) But things even remotely worth hearing were rare. Mostly it was a meaningless mixture of soap opera, advertising and off-key snatches of what had once been music. It was utterly indiscriminate, and utterly unbearable for any length of time.

  But curiosity is a powerful motive. There was a brief boom in radio sets for a few days.

  There were other booms, less explicable, less capable of analysis. Reminiscent of the Wells-Welles Martian scare of 1938 was a sudden upswing in the sale of shotguns and sidearms. Bibles sold as fast as books on astronomy—and books on astronomy sold like hotcakes. One section of the country showed a sudden interest in lightning rods; builders were flooded with orders for immediate installation.

  For some reason which has never been clearly ascertained there was a run on fishhooks in Mobile, Alabama; every hardware and sporting goods store sold out of them within hours.

  The public libraries and bookstores had a run on books on astrology and books on Mars. Yes, on Mars—despite the fact that Mars was at that moment on the other side of the sun and that every newspaper article on the subject stressed the fact that no planet was between Earth and the constellation Leo.

  Something strange was happening—and no news of developments available except through the newspapers. People waited in mobs outside newspaper buildings for each new edition to appear. Circulation managers went quietly mad.

  People also gathered in curious little knots around the silent broadcasting studios and stations, talking in hushed voices as though at a wake. MID network doors were locked, although there was a doorman on duty to admit technicians who were trying to find an answer to the problem. Some of the technicians who had been on duty the previous day had now spent over twenty-four hours without sleep.

  * * * *

  George Bailey woke at noon, with only a slight headache. He shaved and showered, went out and drank a light breakfast and was himself again. He bought early editions of the afternoon papers, read them, grinned. His hunch had been right; whatever was wrong, it was nothing trivial.

  But what was wrong?

  The later editions of the afternoon papers had it.

  EARTH INVADED, SAYS SCIENTIST

  Thirty-six line type was the biggest they had; they used it. Not a home-edition copy of a newspaper was delivered that
evening. Newsboys starting on their routes were practically mobbed. They sold papers instead of delivering them; the smart ones got a dollar apiece for them. The foolish and honest ones who didn’t want to sell because they thought the papers should go to the regular customers on their routes lost them anyway. People grabbed them.

  The final editions changed the heading only slightly—only slightly, that is, from a typographical viewpoint. Nevertheless, it was a tremendous change in meaning. It read:

  EARTH INVADED, SAY SCIENTISTS

  Funny what moving an S from the ending of a verb to the ending of a noun can do.

  Carnegie Hall shattered precedent that evening with a lecture given at midnight. An unscheduled and unadvertised lecture. Professor Helmetz had stepped off the train at eleven-thirty and a mob of reporters had been waiting for him. Helmetz, of Harvard, had been the scientist, singular, who had made that first headline.

  Harvey Ambers, director of the board of Carnegie Hall, had pushed his way through the mob. He arrived minus glasses, hat and breath, but got hold of Helmetz’s arm and hung on until he could talk again. “We want you to talk at Carnegie, Professor,” he shouted into Helmetz’s ear. “Five thousand dollars for a lecture on the ‘vaders.’”

  “Certainly. Tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Now! I’ve a cab waiting. Come on.”

  “But—”

  “We’ll get you an audience. Hurry!” He turned to the mob. “Let us through. All of you can’t hear the professor here. Come to Carnegie Hall and he’ll talk to you. And spread the word on your way there.”

  The word spread so well that Carnegie Hall was jammed by the time the professor began to speak. Shortly after, they’d rigged a loud-speaker system so the people outside could hear. By one o’clock in the morning the streets were jammed for blocks around.

  There wasn’t a sponsor on Earth with a million dollars to his name who wouldn’t have given a million dollars gladly for the privilege of sponsoring that lecture on TV or radio, but it was not telecast or broadcast. Both lines were busy.

  * * * *

  “Questions?” asked Professor Helmetz.

  A reporter in the front row made it first, “Professor,” he asked, “have all direction finding stations on Earth confirmed what you told us about the change this afternoon?”