Anna smiled, very slightly, and there was a violent banging at the front door.
iii
TONY went slowly through the living room. The door was beginning to shake under the blows.
“Cut that out and I’ll open it!” he yelled. There was silence as he swung the door open. A sergeant of the guards; three others, and Bell, who was well in the rear. He must have known there’d been shooting.
“What’s been going on?” the Commissioner began. He sniffed the air and his eyes traveled to the covered bodies. “Graham? If it is, we might have a murder arrest. His dispatch gave you people plenty of motive.”
“No. Brenner,” Tony said shortly. “And a young man named Hank Radcliff.”
Bell, starting for the figures, recoiled. “Sergeant,” he said, and gestured. The non-com gingerly drew back the blankets, exposing the drug maker’s face. The Commissioner stared for a long moment and said hoarsely: “Cover it, Sergeant.” He turned to Tony. “What happened?”
“We have a disinterested witness,” said the doctor. “Douglas Graham. He saw the whole thing.”
TONY led the way into the hospital. The sergeant followed, then the Commissioner. Graham said from his bed: “Visiting a dead friend?”
Bell snapped: “It’s an inter-colony crime. Murder. Obviously I can’t take the word of anybody who’s a member of this community. Did you witness the killing?”
“I was a witness, all right,” said Graham. “Best damn witness you ever saw. Billions of readers hang on my every word.” He made an effort and raised himself on one elbow. “Remember the chummy sessions we used to have in Washington, Bell?”
On the Commissioner’s forehead, sweat formed.
“Here’s the story of the killing,” said Graham. “Brenner pulled his gun on a man named Kandro during a little dispute. He threatened to kill Kandro, went into some detail about how fully automatic that gun was and—let me think—his exact words were ‘spray the room.’ With a babe in arms present. Think of it, Bell! Not even you would have done a thing like that; not even in the old days. The Radcliff kid jumped Brenner and took all the slugs in his belly. I guess they were dumdums, because the gun looked to me like a .38 and none of them went through. Only the Radcliff boy squashed Brenner’s neck before he knew he was dead. Reminded me of a time once in Asia—”
Bell cut him off. “Did Brenner die right away? Did he—say anything before he died?”
“Deathbed confession? Delirious rambling? No.”
The Commissioner relaxed perceptibly.
“But,” said the newsman, “He talked quite a bit before he pulled the gun. He didn’t recognize me with my battered face and I didn’t introduce myself. He thought it was just a bunch of Sun Lakers in here and that nobody would believe a word they said about him. Brenner talked quite a bit.”
“Sergeant!” Bell broke in. “I won’t be needing you for a while. Wait for me in the other room. And see to it nobody touches those bodies!”
THE door closed behind the non-com, and Graham laughed. “Maybe you do know, eh, Commish? Maybe you know Brenner liked to refer to you as ‘my man Bell’ ?”
The Commissioner’s eyes ran unhappily around the room. “You people,” he said. “Get out. All of you. Leave us alone—so I can take a statement.”
“No,” said Graham, “they stay here. I’m not a strong man these days, but Brenner talked quite a bit. I wouldn’t want anything to stop me from getting the story to an eagerly waiting world.”
Bell looked around hopelessly. Tony saw Nick’s face twist into a knowing, malevolent grin; like the others, he made an effort to imitate it.
“What do you want, Graham?” asked the Commissioner. “What are you trying to get at?”
“Not a thing,” the writer said blandly. “By the way, in my statement on the killing, should I include what Brenner had to say about you? He mentioned some financial matters, too. Would they be relevant?”
Tony tried to remember what financial matters Brenner had discussed, aside from the price he offered for the Colony. None—but Graham was a shrewd bluffer.
The Commissioner made a last effort to pull himself together. “You can’t intimidate me, Graham,” he rasped. “And don’t think I can’t be tough if you force my hand. I’m in the clear. I don’t care what Brenner said; I haven’t done a thing.”
“Yet,” said the writer succinctly. “Your part was to come later, wasn’t it?”
Bell’s face seemed to collapse.
“Still think you can get tough?” Graham jeered. “Try it, and I guarantee that you’ll be hauled back to Earth on the next rocket, to be tried for malfeasance, exceeding your authority, accepting bribes and violating the narcotics code. I can also guarantee that you will be convicted and imprisoned for the rest of your life. Don’t try to bluff me, you tin-horn sport. I’ve been bluffed by experts.”
THE Commissioner began shrilly, “I won’t stand for—” and cracked. “For God’s sake, Graham, be reasonable! What have I ever done to you? What do you want? Tell me what you want!”
The waiter fell back on the bed. “Nothing right now, thanks. If I think of anything, I’ll let you know’.”
The Commissioner started to speak, and couldn’t. Tony saw the veins of tension stand out. He saw, too, how Anna’s lip was curling in disgust.
Graham seemed amused. “There is one thing, Commish. An intercolony matter under your jurisdiction, I believe. Will you remove those carcasses on your way out?
You’d be surprised how sensitive I am about such things.”
He dosed his eyes and waited till the door was shut behind the departing guest. When he opened them again, all the self-assurance was gone out of them.
“Doc,” he moaned, “give me a shot. When I got up on my elbow something tore. God, it hurts!” While Tony took care of him, Joe Gracey said: “It was a grand performance, Mr. Graham. Thank you for what you did.”
“I can undo it,” the reporter said flatly, “or I can use it any way I want to. If you people have been lying to me . . .” He sighed with relief. “Thanks, Doc. That’s a help. Now if you want anything out of my man Bell—show me one of your Brownies!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
GRAHAM’S challenge fell into a silent room. Everyone waited for Tony to speak; Tony waited for Anna.
“I don’t, see why not,” she said at last. “I guess they’d do it.” She looked despairingly at Tony. “Is this the only way?” she pleaded.
“It’s the only way you’re going to beat that marcaine-theft rap,” Graham answered for him.
“All right. I’ll go out there in the morning. I think I can talk them into it.”
“If you don’t mind, Miss Willendorf, I’d rather it was right now.
In twelve hours, your hot-shot engineer here could probably build, a Brownie.”
“I can try,” she said. “But I can’t promise. Not even for tomorrow. I only think I can talk one of them into coming here. I don’t know how they’ll feel about it.” Graham grinned. “That’s about how I figured it,” he said. “Thanks, folks. It was a good show while it lasted.”
“We’re going,” Tony said grimly. “And we’ll bring you back a Brownie.”
“Still not good enough,” the writer said. “If you go, I go with you. You mind if I’m just a little suspicious?”
“It’s ten kilometers to the Rimrocks,” Tony told him. “Most of it by half-track, the rest by stretcher for you.”
“The hell with your humanitarian sentiments! It’s your medical opinion, if any, that I want!”
“You’ll live. No danger of that.”
“All right,” the writer said. “When do we start?”
Tony looked questioningly at Anna, who nodded. “Right now,” the doctor said, “or any time you’re ready.” He opened a cabinet and fished out a patent-syringe ampoule. “This should make it easier.” He started to open the package!
“No, thanks,” Graham said. “I want to see what I see—if anything.” His
eyes went swiftly from one face to another, studying them for reactions.
“If you can take it, I can,” the doctor told him. But he dropped the package in his pocket before they left.
IN THE rattling half track, with Anna driving and Tony in the truck body beside Graham, the writer said through clenched teeth: “God help you if you tell me the Brownies aren’t biting tonight. It’s a damn-fool notion anyway. You’ve been telling me Brownies are born of Earth people. Why aren’t there any born on Earth?”
“It’s because of what the geneticists call a lethal gene. Polly and Jim, for instance. Each one of them had a certain lethal gene in their heredity. Either of them could have married somebody without the lethal gene and had ordinary babies, on Earth or on Mars, because the gene is a recessive. On Earth, when Polly’s lethal gene and Jim’s lethal gene matched, it was fatal to their offspring. They never came to term; the gene produced a foetus which couldn’t survive the womb on Earth. I don’t know what factors are involved in that failure—cosmic rays, the gravity or what. But on Mars the foetus comes to term and is—a Brownie.
“A Brownie is a Martian. They don’t just accept Mars air like an Earthman with Mars worthy lungs. They can’t stand Earth air. And „ they need a daily-ration of marcaine to grow and live. That’s who stole Brenner’s marcaine. That’s why they slipped marcaine into Polly Kandro’s food. They wanted her to pass it to Sunny in her milk. When we put Sunny on the bottle, they stole him so they could give him marcaine. They surrendered him on our promise to see that he got it.”
“And that’s a perfect cover-story for a dope-addict mama,” scoffed the writer. “How many Brownies are there supposed to be?”
“A couple of hundred. I suppose about half of them are first-generation. There must have been a very few in the beginning, children of homesteaders abandoned on a desert ranch when their parents died, who crawled out and lived off the country, chewing marcaine out of the weed. And they must have ‘stolen’ other Brownie babies from other homesteaders when they grew.”
Graham swore against the pain. “The Kandro kid looks as normal as any other baby. How are the Brownies supposed to know he isn’t? Does he give them a password?”
Tony explained wearily: “They are telepathic. It explains a lot of things—-why they’re only seen by people they want to see them, why they could steal Brenner’s marcaine and not get caught. They can hear people coming—their thoughts, that is. That’s why they beat up Big Ginny; she was aborting a Brownie baby. Why they beat the hell out of you. Why they sensibly keep away from most Earth people.”
“Except Red Sand Jim Granata, eh?”
“Granata was a liar. He probably never saw a Brownie in his life. He heard all the Brownie-yarns and used them to put on good commercial shows.”
Anna maneuvered the half track around a spur of rock picked out by the headlights and ground the vehicle to a stop. “It’s too rugged from here on,” she said. “We’ll have to carry him the rest of the way.”
“You warm enough? Another blanket?” asked Tony.
“You’re really going through with this, aren’t you?” said the writer. “I’m crazy to play along, but if—if this is a story and I get beaten on it—Oh, hell, yes, I’m warm enough. Stretcher ought to be easier going than this tin can.”
ANNA led, with Graham swaying between them on a shoulder-suspended litter that left the bearers’ hands free. The writer’s weight was not much of a burden in this gravity. Both she and Tony used torches to pick their way among the scree that had dribbled for millenia, one stone at a time, down the weathering Rimrocks. They smelled the acrid fumes of Pittco across the hills, fouling the night air, and Graham began to cough.
“Anna?” asked the doctor.
She knew what he meant, and said shortly: “Not yet.”
Another hundred meters, and Tony felt her begin to pull off to the right. Her “homing” led them to the foot of the mesalike hills a few meters from a cave mouth. They headed in.
“Quite soon,” said Anna, and then: “We can put him down.”
“Be very quiet,” Tony told the writer. He himself felt the faint, eerie “touch” of a Brownie in his mind. “They’re very sensitive to . . .”
“Gargh!” shrieked Graham as a Brownie stepped into the beam from Anna’s light. It clapped its hands over its cars and fled.
“Now see what you did!” raged Anna in an angry whisper. “Their ears—you almost deafened him.”
“Get him back!” Tire writer’s voice was tremulous.
“I don’t know if I can,” Anna said coldly. “He doesn’t have to take orders from you or me. All I can do is try.”
“You’d better. It scared the hell out of me, I admit, but so did the Brownies in Granata’s Interplanetary Show, and they were fakes.”
“Man, didn’t you feel it?” asked Tony incredulously.
“What?” asked Graham.
“Please be quiet, both of you!” They waited a long time in the cold corridor before the thing reappeared, stepping warily into the circle of light.
Suddenly Anna laughed. “He wants to know why you want to pull his ears off. He sees you thinking of pulling his ears and the ears coining off and he’s as puzzled as he can be.”
“Shrewd guess,” said Graham. “Do I get to pull them?”
“No. If you have any questions, tell me, and I’ll try to ask him.”
“I think it’s a fake. Come out from behind those whiskers, whoever you are. Stillman? Gracey? No, you’re too short. I’ll bet you’re that little punk Tad Campbell from the radio shack. I’d like to get my hands on those flapping ears just for one second.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” said Tony. “Graham, you think of a person or a scene or something, the Brownie will get it telepathically, give it to Anna and she’ll say what it is.”
“Fair enough,” said the writer. “I don’t know what it’s supposed to prove, but it’s some kind of test. I’m thinking.”
A moment later Anna said evenly: “If you weren’t beaten up already, I’d slap your face off.”
“I’m sorry,” said Graham hastily. “I was only kidding. I didn’t really think it would—but it did, didn’t it?” With mounting excitement he said: “Ask him who he is, who his people were, whether he’s married, how old he is—”
Anna held up her hand. “That’s enough to start. I can’t think of any way to ask his name. His parents—not Brownies, homesteaders—a shack and a goat—a kitchen garden—tall, tall people, the man wears thick glasses—Tony! It’s the Tollers!”
“That’s impossible,” he said. “Their son’s on Earth. He never answers their letters,” the doctor remembered. “They keep writing, and—‘How old was he when he left?”
“I don’t know,” she answered a moment later. “He doesn’t understand the question.”
“I felt it,” said the writer, suddenly, in a frightened voice. “Like a thing touching you inside your head. Is that him?”
“That’s him. Just don’t fight it.” After a long silence Graham said quietly: “Hell, he’s all right. They’re all-right people, aren’t they?”
“Do you want to ask him any more questions?” asked Anna.
“A million of them. But not right now. Can I come back again?” asked the writer slowly and heavily. “When I’m in better shape?” He waited for Anna’s nod, then said: “Will you say thanks to him and get me to the ’track?”
“Pain worse?” asked Tony. “No, I don’t think so. Hell, I don’t know. As a matter of fact, I’m just worn out.”
The Brownie glided from the circle of light. “ ’By, fella,” said Graham, and then grinned weakly. “He said good-by back at me!” Swaying between them on the litter on the way back to the ’track, the writer said at last; “Two System beats. Eyewitness account of Drug King Brenner’s death, and the first factual eyewitness account of extraterrestrial intelligent life. One newsman per century gets one story like this. And I’ve got two!” They loaded him into the
halftrack. He broke silence only once on the bumpy trip back to Sun Lake, saying with a chuckle: “I think he liked me.” And then he fell quietly asleep.
ii
GRACEY and Nick and half a dozen of the biochem lab boys were waiting for them at the hospital. Joe must have been watching out the window, because he ran out to meet them.
It was late, and the lights were already out in most of the double row of rust-brown huts. But Joe Gracey, the quiet one, the gentle ex-professor, possessor of eternal calm and detachment, came flying down the dim street, shouting: “Doc! Tony! We’ve got it!”
“Sh-h . . .” Tony nodded toward the dozing man on the shoulder litter, but Graham was already opening his eyes.
“What’s up?” he asked mushily. “What’s all excitement?”
“Nothing at all,” the doctor tried to tell him. “We’re back in the Colony. And you’re going to bed. Hold on just a minute, will you, Joe?” He knew how Gracey felt; it was hard enough to restrain his own jubilance and keep his voice in neutral register. But Graham had had enough for one night, and Tony had to get his patient back to the hospital bed before he could take time to listen even to such news as Gracey bore.
Joe helped them get the writer comfortably settled, and waited impatiently while the doctor made a quick check for any possible damage done by the trip. Finally, Anna pulled up the covers, and the three of them started out.
“Oh, Doctor . . .” Tony turned to find Graham up again on one elbow, wide-eyed and not a bit sleepy. “I was just wondering if I could have my typewriter.” Before Tony could answer, the elbow collapsed and Graham smiled ruefully. “I guess not. I couldn’t work it. You don’t have anything as luxurious as an Earthside dictatyper in the place, do you?”
“Sure,” Tony told him. “We’ve got one in the Lab office. You get some rest now, and we’ll set it up for you here in the morning.”
“I’m okay,” Graham insisted. “There’s something I’d like to get on paper right away. I won’t be able to sleep anyhow if I don’t get it done.”
Collected Short Fiction Page 130
