The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 4

  “Maisie? Maisie Hetterman?”

  “Maisie Bailey now. We got married same time I bought the paper and moved here. What are you doing here, Pete?”

  “Business. Just here overnight. See a man named Wilcox.”

  “Oh, Wilcox. Our local screwball—but don’t get me wrong; he’s a smart guy all right. Well, you can see him tomorrow. You’re coming home with me now, for dinner and to stay overnight. Maisie’ll be glad to see you. Come on, my buggy’s over here.”

  “Sure. Finished whatever you were here for?”

  “Yep, just to pick up the news on who came in on the train. And you came in, so here we go.”

  They got in the buggy, and George picked up the reins and said, “Giddup. Bessie,” to the mare. Then, “What are you doing now, Pete?”

  “Research. For a gas-supply company. Been working on a more efficient mantle, one that’ll give more light and be less destructible. This fellow Wilcox wrote us he had something along that line; the company sent me up to look it over. If it’s what he claims, I’ll take him back to New York with me, and let the company lawyers dicker with him.”

  “How’s business, otherwise?”

  “Great, George. Gas-, that’s the coming thing. Every new home’s being piped for it, and plenty of the old ones. How about you?”

  “We got it. Luckily we had one of the old Linotypes that ran the metal pot off a gas burner, so it was already piped in. And our home is right over the office and print shop, so all we had to do was pipe it up a flight. Great stuff, gas. How’s New York?”

  “Fine, George. Down to its last million people, and stabilizing there, No crowding and plenty of room for everybody. The air—why, it’s better than Atlantic City, without gasoline fumes.”

  “Enough horses to go around yet?”

  “Almost. But bicycling’s the craze; the factories can’t turn out enough to meet the demand. There’s a cycling club in almost every block and all the able-bodied cycle to and from work. Doing ’em good, too; a few more years and the doctors will go on short rations.”

  “You got a bike?”

  “Sure, a pre-vader one. Average five miles a day on it, and I eat like a horse.” George Bailey chuckled. “I’ll have Maisie include some hay in the dinner. Well, here we are. Whoa, Bessie.”

  An upstairs window went up, and Maisie looked out and down. She called out, “Hi, Pete!”

  “Extra plate, Maisie,” George called. “We’ll be up soon as I put the horse away and show Pete around downstairs.”

  He led Pete from the barn and into the back door of the newspaper shop. “Our Linotype!” he announced proudly, pointing.

  “How’s it work? Where’s your steam engine?”

  George grinned. “Doesn’t work yet; we still hand set the type. I could get only one steamer and had to use that on the press. But I’ve got one on order for the Lino, and coming up in a month or so. When we get it, Pop Jenkins, my printer, is going to put himself out of a job teaching me to run it. With the Linotype going, I can handle the whole thing myself.”

  “Kind of rough on Pop?”

  George shook his head. “Pop eagerly awaits the day. He’s sixty-nine and wants to retire. He’s just staying on until I can do without him. Here’s the press—a honey of a little Miehle; we do some job work on it, too. And this is the office, in front. Messy, but efficient.”

  Mulvaney looked around him and grinned. “George, I believe you’ve found your niche. You were cut out for a small-town editor.”

  “Cut out for it? I’m crazy about it. I have more fun than everybody. Believe it or not, I work like a dog, and like it. Come on upstairs.”

  On the stairs, Pete asked, “And the novel you were going to write?”

  “Half done, and it isn’t bad. But it isn’t the novel I was going to write; I was a cynic then. Now—”

  “George, I think the waveries were your best friends.”

  “Waveries?”

  “Lord, how long does it take slang to get from New York out to the sticks? The vaders, of course. Some professor who specializes in studying them described one as a wavery place in the ether, and ‘wavery’ stuck—Hello there, Maisie, my girl. You look like a million.”

  They ate leisurely. Almost apologetically, George brought out beer, in cold bottles. “Sorry, Pete, haven’t anything stronger to offer you. But I haven’t been drinking lately. Guess—”

  “You on the wagon, George?”

  “Not on the wagon, exactly. Didn’t swear off or anything, but haven’t had a drink of strong liquor in almost a year. I don’t know why, but—”

  “I do,” said Pete Mulvaney. “I know exactly why you don’t—because I don’t drink much either, for the same reason. We don’t drink because we don’t have to—say, isn’t that a radio over there?”

  George chuckled. “A souvenir. Wouldn’t sell it for a fortune. Once in a while I like to look at it and think of the awful guff I used to sweat out for it. And then I go over and click the switch and nothing happens. Just silence. Silence is the most wonderful thing in the world, sometimes, Pete. Of course I couldn’t do that if there was any juice, because I’d get vaders then. I suppose they’re still doing business at the same old stand?”

  “Yep, the Research Bureau checks daily. Try to get up current with a little generator run by a steam turbine. But no dice; the vaders suck it up as fast as it’s generated.”

  “Suppose they’ll ever go away?”

  Mulvaney shrugged. “Helmetz thinks not. He thinks they propagate in proportion to the available electricity. Even if the development of radio broadcasting somewhere else in the Universe would attract them there, some would stay here—and multiply like flies the minute we tried to use electricity again. And meanwhile, they’ll live on the static electricity in the air. What do you do evenings up here?”

  “Do? Read, write, visit with one another, go to the amateur groups—Maisie’s chairman of the Blakestown Players, and I play bit parts in it. With the movies out everybody goes in for theatricals and we’ve found some real talent. And there’s the chess-and-checker club, and cycle trips and picnics—there isn’t time enough. Not to mention music. Everybody plays an instrument, or is trying to.”

  “You?”

  “Sure, cornet. First cornet in the Silver Concert Band, with solo parts. And—Good Heavens! Tonight’s rehearsal, and we’re giving a concert Sunday afternoon. I hate to desert you, but—”

  “Can’t I come around and sit in? I’ve got my flute in the brief case here, and—”

  “Flute? We’re short on flutes. Bring that around and Si Perkins, our director, will practically shanghai you into staying over for the concert Sunday—and it’s only three days, so why not? And get it out now; we’ll play a few old-timers to warm up. Hey, Maisie, skip those dishes and come on in to the piano!”

  While Pete Mulvaney went to the guest room to get his flute from the brief case, George Bailey picked up his cornet from the top of the piano and blew a soft, plaintive little minor run on it. Clear as a bell; his lip was in good shape tonight.

  And with the shining silver thing in his hand he wandered over to the window and stood looking out into the night. It was dusk out and the rain had stopped.

  A high-stepping horse clop-clopped by and the bell of a bicycle jangled. Somebody across the street was strumming a guitar and singing. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  The scent of spring was soft and sweet in the moist air.

  Peace and dusk.

  Distant rolling thunder.

  God damn it, he thought, if only there was a bit of lightning.

  He missed the lightning.

  OBEDIENCE

  On a tiny planet of a far, faint star, invisible from Earth, and at the farther edge of the galaxy, five times as far as man has yet penetrated into space, there is a statue of an Earthman. It is made of precious metal and it is a tremendous thing, fully ten inches high, exquisite in workmanship.

  Bugs crawl on it…

&
nbsp; * * * *

  They were on a routine patrol in Sector 1534, out past the Dog Star, many parsecs from Sol. The ship was the usual two-man scout used for all patrols outside the system. Captain May and Lieutenant Ross were playing chess when the alarm rang.

  Captain May said, “Reset it, Don, while I think this out.” He didn’t look up from the board; he knew it couldn’t be anything but a passing meteor. There weren’t any ships in this sector. Man had penetrated space for a thousand parsecs and had not as yet encountered an alien life form intelligent enough to communicate, let alone to build spaceships.

  Ross didn’t get up either, but he turned around in his chair to face the instrument board and the telescreen. He glanced up casually and gasped; there was a ship on the screen. He got his breath back enough to say “Cap!” and then the chessboard was on the floor and May was looking over his shoulder.

  He could hear the sound of May’s breathing, and then May’s voice said, “Fire, Don!”

  “But that’s a Rochester Class cruiser! One of ours. I don’t know what it’s doing here, but we can’t—”

  “Look again.”

  Don Ross couldn’t look again because he’d been looking all along, but he suddenly saw what May had meant. It was almost a Rochester, but not quite. There was something alien about it. Something? It was alien; it was an alien imitation of a Rochester. And his hands were racing for the firing button almost before the full impact of that hit him.

  Finger at the button, he looked at the dials on the Picar ranger and the Monoid. They stood at zero.

  He swore. “He’s jamming us, Cap. We can’t figure out how far he is, or his size and mass!”

  Captain May nodded slowly, his face pale.

  Inside Don Ross’s head, a thought said, “Compose yourselves, men. We are not enemies.”

  Ross turned and stared at May. May said, “Yes, I got it. Telepathy.”

  Ross swore again. If they were telepathic—

  “Fire, Don. Visual.”

  Ross pressed the button. The screen was filled with a flare of energy, but when the energy subsided, there was no wreckage of a spaceship…

  Admiral Sutherland turned his back to the star chart on the wall and regarded them sourly from under his thick eyebrows. He said, “I am not interested in rehashing your formal report, May. You’ve both been under the psychograph; we’ve extracted from your minds every minute of the encounter. Our logicians have analyzed it. You are here for discipline. Captain May, you know the penalty for disobedience.”

  May said stiffly, “Yes, sir.”

  “It is?”

  “Death, sir.”

  “And what order did you disobey?”

  “General Order Thirteen-Ninety, Section Twelve, Quad-A priority. Any terrestrial ship, military or otherwise, is ordered to destroy immediately, on sight, any alien ship encountered. If it fails to do so, it must blast off toward outer space, in a direction not exactly opposite that of Earth, and continue until fuel is exhausted.”

  “And the reason for that, Captain? I ask merely to see if you know. It is not, of course, important or even relevant whether or not you understand the reason for any ruling.”

  “Yes, sir. So there is no possibility of the alien ship following the sighting ship back to Sol and so learning the location of Earth.”

  “Yet you disobeyed that ruling, Captain. You were not certain that you had destroyed the alien. What have you to say for yourself?”

  “We did not think it necessary, sir. The alien ship did not seem hostile. Besides, sir, they must already know our base; they addressed us as ‘men.’”

  “Nonsense! The telepathic message was broadcast from an alien mind, but was received by yours. Your minds automatically translated the message into your own terminology. He did not necessarily know your point of origin or that you were humans.”

  Lieutenant Ross had no business speaking, but he asked, “Then, sir, it is not believed that they were friendly?”

  The admiral snorted. “Where did you take your training, Lieutenant? You seem to have missed the most basic premise of our defense plans, the reason we’ve been patrolling space for four hundred years, on the lookout for alien life. Any alien is an enemy. Even though he were friendly today, how could we know that he would be friendly next year or a century from now? And a potential enemy is an enemy. The more quickly he is destroyed the more secure Earth will be.”

  “Look at the military history of the world! It proves that, if it proves nothing else. Look at Rome! To be safe she couldn’t afford powerful neighbors. Alexander the Great! Napoleon!”

  “Sir,” said Captain May. “Am I under the penalty of death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I may as well speak. Where is Rome now? Alexander’s empire or Napoleon’s? Nazi Germany? Tyrannosaurus rex?”

  “Who?”

  “Man’s predecessor, the toughest of the dinosaurs. His name means ‘king of the tyrant lizards.’ He thought every other creature was his enemy, too. And where is he now?”

  “Is that all you have to say, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I shall overlook it. Fallacious, sentimental reasoning. You are not under sentence of death, Captain. I merely said so to see what you would say, how far you would go. You are not being shown mercy because of any humanitarian nonsense. A truly ameliorating circumstance has been found.”

  “May I ask what, sir?”

  “The alien was destroyed. Our technicians and logicians have worked that out. Your Picar and Monoid were working properly. The only reason that they did not register was that the alien ship was too small. They will detect a meteor weighing as little as five pounds. The alien ship was smaller than that.”

  “Smaller than—?”

  “Certainly. You were thinking of alien life in terms of your own size. There is no reason why it should be. It could be even submicroscopic, too small to be visible. The alien ship must have contacted you deliberately, at a distance of only a few feet. And your fire, at that distance, destroyed it utterly. That is why you saw no charred hulk as evidence that it was destroyed.”

  He smiled. “My congratulations, Lieutenant Ross, on your gunnery. In the future, of course, visual firing will be unnecessary. The detectors and estimators on ships of all classes are being modified immediately to detect and indicate objects of even minute sizes.”

  Ross said, “Thank you, sir. But don’t you think that the fact that the ship we saw, regardless of size, was an imitation of one of our Rochester Class ships is proof that the aliens already know much more of us than we do of them, including, probably, the location of our home planet? And that—even if they are hostile—the tiny size of their craft is what prevents them from blasting us from the system?”

  “Possibly. Either both of those things are true, or neither. Obviously, aside from their telepathic ability, they are quite inferior to us technically—or they would not imitate our design in spaceships. And they must have read the minds of some of our engineers in order to duplicate that design. However, granting that is true, they may still not know the location of Sol. Space coordinates would be extremely difficult to translate, and the name Sol would mean nothing to them. Even its approximate description would fit thousands of other stars. At any rate, it is up to us to find and exterminate them before they find us. Every ship in space is now alerted to watch for them, and is being equipped with special instruments to detect small objects. A state of war exists. Or perhaps it is redundant to say that; a state of war always exists with aliens.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That is all, gentlemen. You may go.”

  Outside in the corridor two armed guards waited. One of them stepped to each side of Captain May.

  May said quickly, “Don’t say anything, Don. I expected this. Don’t forget that I disobeyed an important order, and don’t forget that the admiral said only that I wasn’t under sentence of death. Keep yourself out of it.”

  Hands clenched, teeth cla
mped tightly together, Don Ross watched the guards take away his friend. He knew May was right; there was nothing he could do except get himself into worse trouble than May was in, and make things worse for May.

  But he walked almost blindly out of the Admiralty Building. He went out and got promptly drunk, but that didn’t help.

  He had the customary two weeks’ leave before reporting back for space duty, and he knew he’d better straighten himself out mentally in that time. He reported to a psychiatrist and let himself be talked out of most of his bitterness and feeling of rebellion.

  He went back to his schoolbooks and soaked himself in the necessity for strict and unquestioning obedience to military authority and the necessity of unceasing vigilance for alien races and the necessity of their extermination whenever found.

  He won out; he convinced himself how unthinkable it had been for him to believe that Captain May could have been completely pardoned for having disobeyed an order, for whatever reason. He even felt horrified for having himself acquiesced in that disobedience. Technically, of course, he was blameless; May had been in charge of the ship and the decision to return to Earth instead of blasting out into space—and death—had come from May. As a subordinate, Ross had not shared the blame. But now, as a person, he felt conscience-stricken that he had not tried to argue May out of his disobedience.

  What would Space Corps be without obedience?

  How could he make up for what he now felt to be his dereliction, his delinquency? He watched the telenewscasts avidly during that period and learned that, in various other sectors of space, four more alien ships had been destroyed. With the improved detection instruments all of them had been destroyed on sight; there had been no communication after first contact.

  On the tenth day of his leave, he terminated it of his own free will. He returned to the Admiralty Building and asked for an audience with Admiral Sutherland. He was laughed at, of course, but he had expected that. He managed to get a brief verbal message carried through to the admiral. Simply: “I know a plan that may possibly enable us to find the planet of the aliens, at no risk to ourselves.”