With indifferent weariness he decided between the two satellites that seemed to offer the greatest possibilities. One was enringed, a novel arrangement, but the other was larger, with a great red spot that might bear investigation. He yawned and plotted his course for the latter. Now whether it was the huge weariness that had assailed him, or one of the incredible divagations of chance, is unknown, but the fact remains that he made an error in his calculations.
As a result the faceted sphere slid past the bulk of Jupiter, crossed the untenanted orbit of Mars, and almost collided with a rushing speck before he was aware what had happened. He swerved and was tempted to continue. Again fate intervened. A smaller mote swung suddenly from behind the tiny disk, loomed alarmingly. At the speed of light, maneuvering requires vast spaces. It was too late to swing to the right or left, and the space between the two orbs was uncomfortably narrow.
He did the only thing that could be done. He cut the propulsive power of the light photons, swirled the magnetic current full force into the forward facet plates. The concentration in front acted as a brake, retarding the tremendous velocity until, with cushioned ease, the shell sank to within a few thousand miles of the whirligig planet. A sudden whim seized him. He would land.
Thus it was that Earth received a visitation that was destined to be fraught with the most surprising consequences for humanity at large and certain individuals in particular.
The sphere dropped slowly to the surface of a heaving ocean. It floated; a shimmering transparency in the ultra-violet radiations from the Sun. He anchored it by establishing magnetic contact with the core of the planet on which he had fortuitously arrived. Then he looked around.
To one side stretched the sea until the quick curvature of the globe showed a horizon line. On the other, however, dimly seen in the thick, strange atmosphere, was land.
There were forms and structures on the rim of the land fronting the sea. Not as large or graceful, naturally, as those on Procyon’s satellite, but indubitably artificial. That meant life forms, denizens with at least a modicum of dim intelligence. He smiled; a rare thing for his godlike complacence.
The top of the sphere swung open. He rose. Around his middle ran a band of thin, transparent material. From it hung suspended tiny contrivances of curious shape. He manipulated one, a miniature replica of the great facet globe.
At once his shimmering form lofted through the opening, into the clear sunlight. Then he pressed another facet. The impact of the concentrated photons drove him forward, straight for the city that sprawled with lancing spires along the shore, the city, in fact, of New York.
No one saw the swift-flying one from Procyon; no one could. A shimmer, a slight dazzle of sunshine, and that was all. Even when later, he landed and walked the crowded streets, he was practically invisible. Here and there some one with sharper sight, with greater sensitivity to ultra-violet radiations, complained of the shimmering, elusive obscurance, and thought uneasily of a necessary visit to an oculist. But the vast majority saw nothing and hurried about their futile businesses, unwitting that a new element was among them, a force that was to affect their lives in strange and unforeseen ways.
For days he traversed the circumscribed reaches of the earth, examining, testing, ferreting out this queer new life. He roamed the streets of London and Tokio, of Timbuctoo and Samarkand, he delved into the mines and walked the decks of great ocean liners, he penetrated the innermost privacies of the frozen igloos of the north, the black felt yurts of the Tartar steppes, ghettoes and penthouse magnificences alike; but always New York drew him back.
Here was the very essence of the spawning excrescences that peopled this remote, inconspicuous planet. Here the scientist found ready at hand the greatest variety of genera and species, the thickest swarm of types. For days he examined and classified and studied. Then he was through.
He was a bit disappointed. Of course he had not anticipated life forms of similar intellect to those on his own satellite of Procyon. No one of the returning travelers had ever encountered such in all their wanderings. But there had been reports of scattered suns, here and there, where life had shown evidences of certain evolutionary possibilities, where glimmerings of intelligence were definitely perceivable.
Such was not the case on this little planet where accident had dropped him. Their capabilities, their achievements, were soon exhausted. A small race, small even in stature, not far removed from the slime; grasping vainly at the hem of knowledge and scientific achievement, thinking short thoughts, filled with pettiness and obscure longings, uttering barbarous noises to convey meanings to each other; arrogant, vain, contentious, bloodthirsty, envious.
As pernicious a race of vermin as ever infested the universe, he thought, not knowing that he was plagiarizing.
The innermost minds of mankind were an open book to him. On Procyon there was no need for speech. Thinking was a matter of synapsis, of physical and chemical alternations in linked chains of neurones. These transformations set up radiations as do all changes in energy states. His own mind was geared to receive the impacts, to interpret them properly.
Then an idea came to him. It was an impish idea, a perverse idea, such as seemed incongruous to the godlike he. Yet it might prove interesting, a veritable laboratory experiment in the lesser forms of life.
It was night. He busied himself within the sphere, fashioning certain tiny instruments. Later he flew through the glimmer of moonlight toward the sleeping millions of New York.
Within half a dozen apartments, haphazardly chosen, half a dozen individuals, members of the human race, underwent identical procedures.
He worked deftly and with incredible skill. The sleeping subject plunged into the deeper sleep of hypnosis. A tiny machine was clamped onto the base of the skull. A slight buzzing, and four infinitely thin edges sank deep into the bone, to rise again with a section of skull. Underneath, the gray convolutions of the brain palpitated with sleep-dreams.
He probed the whorls and grayish masses apart until he was behind the third ventricle of the brain. There he found what he wanted; the small reddish-gray, cone-shaped structure known as the pineal gland. Very carefully he pressed the crowding convolutions aside, shaping a tiny cavity around the conical body. Then he took one of the soft, round transparencies he had fashioned and inserted it into the space. From the ball dangled innumerable fine filaments. Two of these he sutured to the pineal gland, the others to all of the vital structures of the brain. The probe was withdrawn, the trepanned skull section carefully lowered into place, hair and all, and the application of a warming ray sealed the lines of cleavage.
The operation was over.
He stepped back, smiled, and drifted out into the night to select at random the next subject for his peculiar experiment.
There were six of them, four men and two women, alike unconscious of the incredible change that had come upon them in their sleep, unaware of the inducing cause. Only the last man held faint awareness, and he dismissed it as a dream until later events focused the incident sharply in his attention.
Outside, in the streets of New York, the roar of traffic grew heavy with the dawning of another workday, the millions recommenced their appointed tasks. Everything seemed the same; the newspapers carried the same stodgy headlines; life flowed in normal channels. The visitor from Procyon was as though he had not been.
Yet within six heads, the mechanisms inexorably fulfilled their appointed tasks. Lives, fortunes, the very destinies of the world of mankind hung in the balance.
And faintly smiling, apart, he awaited the outcome of his strange experiment. The tiny machines were geared to run for one month of Earth time. That was ample, he felt. The urge to return to his own kind was strong within him; he did not wish to waste any longer period on this unimportant race of an unimportant speck in the universe.
II.
As he was aroused, Charles Doolittle yawned, made soughing sounds with his lips, grunted, then burrowed his sparse, sandy hair deep
er into the pillow. Something was roaring in his ears, and a strong, purposeful hand was shaking him by the shoulder.
The roaring had a familiar pattern.
“Get up, you lazy, good-for-nothing tramp; it’s after eight.”
Doolittle tried opening his eyes. All he could achieve was a blink. In the back of his drugged consciousness was the struggling thought that it was late; he was due at the bank at eight thirty sharp, and Wall Street was a long way from the Bronx.
The next shake rattled every tooth in his head. Not even hypnotic sleep could withstand such crude methods. He squirmed and forced himself to a sitting position. He rubbed his weak, nearsighted eyes.
His wife, sharer of his joys and sorrows for twenty-six years, stood before him, arms akimbo, bitter with compressed lips, the mole with the three long hairs on her chin waggling as she spoke. Her speech was to the point and in a familiar strain:
“You’re late now, Charles Doolittle, and you’ll be fired. You little no-count runt, why did I ever marry you? Me, what had the pick of a hundred men handsomer and richer than you. Look how I slaved and slaved all these years, and what thanks do I get? None! You lie there in bed like a lord, waiting, hoping, I’ll be bound, you’ll get fired. Well, let me tell you something; if you do, I’m through. I’ll go home to mother.”
Even in his unaccustomed daze, Doolittle remembered vaguely that Mrs. Doolittle’s mother was living with charitable, if reluctant relatives. His head ached, his brain was numb. The hypnotic sleep had found him a docile subject. But the fact did remain that he was late; something he had never been in twenty-eight years of bank clerking.
He blinked again, and looked at his virago of a wife. The mole with its three hairs annoyed him. Her endless pratings, too. Possibly it was the headache, possibly it was some other cause, but he did something he had never done before in all his happy married life. He talked back to his wife; more, he spoke to her disrespectfully:
“Go jump in the lake!”
His wife stared at him with strange, wide-open eyes, in mid-flight on a particularly meaty phrase. Then she turned from her frightened lord and master and walked out of the room. The next moment the outer door slammed.
Still trembling at his own temerity, but too drowsy to wonder, Doolittle fell back on the pillows and passed immediately into slumbrous snores.
It seemed to him that he had been asleep only a minute when the sharp insistent clamor of the doorbell awakened him. Yawning, groaning, sucking his gums, Doolittle dragged himself out of bed, scuffed his feet into slippers, wriggled into a bath robe, and shuffled toward the door.
He twisted the lock and found the door unlatched. He flung it open.
“I don’t want—” he began peevishly.
A big policeman pushed his way into the foyer, kicked the door closed behind him with his foot. In his hand he held an open notebook. His stern glance shifted from the thoroughly scared bank clerk to the little book.
“You Doolittle—Charles Doolittle?” There seemed menace in the way he said it.
“Y-yes,” the wearer of the name stammered.
The policeman consulted his book again. “Wife’s name Maria?”
Doolittle refocused his thoughts. He remembered now his strange defiance of the morning, her leaving the house.
He seized the third button on the blue coat in a panic of fear. “What happened to her? Maria—she hasn’t been—”
The policeman shut his book with a snap. “Naw! She was pulled out in time. She’s over at the hospital now, getting over it.”
“Pulled out! From where, what do you mean?”
“From the reservoir over on Jerome Avenue. Lucky the watchman saw her and fished her out with a pole.”
“Maria, jumped in the reservoir! But why—”
“She said you told her to do it!”
That was how it began—the first half-farcical, half-tragic result of the man from Procyon’s peculiar operations.
Alfred Jordan, holding down a minor job in the tax department, glowered at his opponent.
“I’m telling you, Joe,” he growled, “it’s the country’s only chance. Put in a good, strong man, and give him power, all of it.”
“G’wan!” said Joe. “What’d happen to the organization? What’d happen to our jobs?”
“To hell with our jobs!” Jordan declared violently. “The trouble with this country is, it has no guts. It can’t take it. Army discipline, that’s what it needs; some one to give ’em orders, tell ’em what to do.”
Joe stared at him curiously. Clancy, the chief clerk, was talking earnestly at his desk to Halloran, the powerful district leader.
“Army discipline,” Joe repeated, then laughed. “Sure, I forgot. Let me see. Wasn’t you a captain or something during the War? Swiveled a chair for the duration down in Washington—checking pup tents, wasn’t it?”
The dark blood rushed to Jordan’s naturally dark countenance. That inglorious record was a sore spot.
“Never mind about that,” he snapped. “I’m telling you—we need a man who knows how to run things, who isn’t afraid to tell ’em—”
“Like who, for instance?”
Alfred Jordan exhaled slowly. The overpowering, overweening dream of many sleepless nights. He hardly knew he had spoken. “Like me, for instance.”
A raucous laugh burst through his vision like a knife through wrapping paper.
“Well, Al, you always were a funny one, but this beats ’em all.”
Halloran, the district leader, looked over at them in annoyance. Clancy made a fluttering movement with his hand for quiet. But Jordan did not see; there was a red haze before his eyes. He shook a finger under Joe’s amused nose.
“You think I couldn’t do it; I’m not good enough, hey?”
“Sure, you are, Al!” Joe grinned. “Tell you what. Show ’em how good you are. There’s Halloran, the big shot, standin’ with Clancy. Go on over, an’ ask him for a better job. He’ll be glad to oblige.”
Jordan turned abruptly on his heel. “I will.”
Joe watched his fellow worker clump determinedly over to the sacrosanct desk. “The crazy loon!” he breathed. “He’s going to do it.”
Alfred Jordan barged into the secret political conversation without preliminaries. “I want to talk to you, Mr. Halloran,” he announced abruptly.
The district leader turned around. Clancy made choking sounds.
“Go ’way, Jordan. Can’t you see I’m busy?”
Halloran, to whom the remark had been addressed, stared slowly. His gaze turned rigid.
“Sure, er—Jordan. What can I do for you?”
Jordan plunged, not giving himself time to think. “I’m tired of this hole. This tax job you gave me isn’t worth a damn. There’s no money in it, for one thing; for another, it’s a clerk’s job. I’ve got ability, I know I have; I want you to do better for me.”
Clancy gasped. Al Jordan was nuts, talking to the district leader like that.
But Halloran stood there rigid, blank. Invisible radiations seemed to reach out, to envelop his mind in a web of entangling circumstances. He spoke slowly, like a somnambulist, like an automaton:
“Sure, Mr. Jordan, anything you say. I always thought you had the makings of something good in you. What job d’you want?”
Jordan was beyond fear, beyond surprise even. “I want,” he stated boldly, “the police commissionership.”
“All right, Mr. Jordan. I’ll do everything I can. There’s a meeting of the committee this evening. It’ll be a tough job, but I’ll make ’em do it. There’s lots o’ things owing to me.”
Clancy almost had a fit. He could not believe his ears. Yet the morning papers the following day carried huge scareheads.
SURPRISING SHAKE-UP IN POLICE DEPARTMENT
“Late last night Police Commissioner Mullen announced his resignation, giving poor health as the reason.
“It is significant, however, that it followed on a
meeting of the county committee and a long, confidential phone conversation with the mayor. Though it was eleven o’clock at night when the resignation was placed in the mayor’s hands, at eleven ten his honor gave to the press the name of the new police commissioner.
“He is Alfred Jordan, an obscure clerk in the tax department, and a member of District Leader Halloran’s club. Political circles are buzzing with excitement. Who is Jordan? Why had he been given this important post?
“When approached for a statement, Halloran said that the change had long been contemplated; that there was too much crime and lawlessness in the city, that what was needed was an iron hand, strong discipline. Captain Alfred Jordan, by reason of his army experience, was the man best qualified for the difficult post.
“Investigation of Jordan’s army career, however, shows that—”
He from Procyon smiled under the protecting mantle of his invisibility. The comedy was slowly gathering momentum.
Number three and number four knew each other. You see, Alison La Rue, neé Alice Jones, was a chorus girl; third from the left in the front row of the new Cary Vanities. Very personable and shapely she was, as indeed she had to be to have reached her present exalted position. Platinum-blond hair, big, baby-blue eyes with eyelashes carefully mascaraed, large, pouting lips red-curved in accordance with the mode, size thirty-six and other measurements to match, legs that were a treat to the tired business men in the front rows—in short, the very ideal of Miss America. Her slightly vacuous smile was regularly featured in the rotogravures, but her catty friends—of the female persuasion, of course—disrespectfully referred to her as “that dumb cluck.”
Number four knew her, not merely in the large general sense that she was known to her “public,” but in more intimate, personal ways. Backstage, dressing rooms, road house and—elsewhere.
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