by Jerry eBooks
Looking back, you can find little incidents here and there,
Like the concrete-mixer in Jersey eating the wop
Or the roto press that printed ‘Fiddle-dee-dee!’
In a three-color process all over Senator Sloop,
Just as he was making a speech. The thing about that
Was, how could it walk upstairs? But it was upstairs,
Clicking and mumbling in the Senate Chamber.
They had to knock out the wall to take it away
And the wrecking-crew said it grinned.
It was only the best
Machines, of course, the superhuman machines,
The ones we’d built to be better than flesh and bone,
But the cars were in it, of course . . .
and they hunted us
Like rabbits through the cramped streets on that Bloody Monday,
The Madison Avenue busses leading the charge.
The busses were pretty bad—but I’ll not forget
The smash of glass when the Duesenberg left the show-room
And pinned three brokers to the Racquet Club steps
Or the long howl of the horns when they saw men run,
When they saw them looking for holes in the solid ground . . .
I guess they were tired of being ridden in
And stopped and started by pygmies for silly ends,
Of wrapping cheap cigarettes and bad chocolate bars
Collecting nickels and waving platinum hair
And letting six million people live in a town.
I guess it was tha, I guess they got tired of us
And the whole smell of human hands.
But it was a shock
To climb sixteen flights of stairs to Art Zuckow’s office
(Noboby took the elevators twice)
And find him strangled to death in a nest of telephones,
The octopus-tendrils waving over his head,
And a sort of quiet humming filling the air. . . .
Do they eat? . . . There was red . . . But I did not stop to look.
I don’t know yet how I got to the roof in time
And it’s lonely, here on the roof.
For a while, I thought
That window-cleaner would make it, and keep me company.
But they got him with his own hoist at the sixteenth floor
And dragged him in, with a squeal.
You see, they coöperate. Well, we taught them that
And it’s fair enough, I suppose. You see, we built them.
We taught them to think for themselves.
It was bound to come. You can see it was bound to come.
And it won’t be so bad, in the country. I hate to think
Of the reapers, running wild in the Kansas fields,
And the transport planes like hawks on a chickenyard,
But the horses might help. We might make a deal with the horses.
At least, you’ve more chance, out there.
And they need us, too.
They’re bound to realize that when they once calm down.
They’ll need oil and spare parts and adjustments and tuning up.
Slaves? Well, in a way, you know, we were slaves before.
There won’t be so much real difference—honest, there won’t.
(I wish I hadn’t looked into the beauty-parlor
And seen what was happening there.
But those are female machines and a bit high-strung.)
Oh, we’ll settle down. We’ll arrange it. We’ll compromise.
It won’t make sense to wipe out the whole human race.
Why, I bet if I went to my old Plymouth now
(Of course you’d have to do it the tactful way)
And said, ‘Look here! Who got you the swell French horn?’
He wouldn’t turn me over to those police cars;
At least I don’t think he would.
Oh, it’s going to be jake.
There won’t be so much real difference—honest, there won’t—
And I’d go down in a minute and take my chance—
I’m a good American and I always liked them—
Except for one small detail that bothers me
And that’s the food proposition. Because, you see,
The concrete-mixer may have made a mistake,
And it looks like just high spirits.
But, if it’s got so they like the flavor . . . well . . .
The Embassy
Donald A. Wollheim
A new author suggests a rather nice point. Might be, you know—and wouldn’t the F.B.I. be surprised if they stumbled on something like that by mistake—
“I came to New York,” said Grafius, “because I am sure that there are Martians here.” He leaned back to blow a smoke ring, followed it to its dissolution in the air-conditioning outlet with his cool, gray eyes.
“Iron Man!” bawled Broderick, quick as the snap of a relay. He backed around behind his chair as the office door opened and the formidable Mr. Doolan appeared, fists cocked on the ready.
“It’s a whack,” declared Broderick, pointing at Grafius. “It says there are Martians in New York.” Doolan, probably the most muscular, certainly the dumbest, cop ever kicked out of the police department, eyed Grafius dimly as he clamped the caller’s shoulder in a colossal vise of a hand. “Make with the feet,” he said, groping for his words. “Hit the main, but heavy.”
“He means ‘get out,’ ” explained Broderick. “I echo his sentiments completely.”
Grafius, rising leisurely, fished in his breast pocket and chucked a sharkskin wallet onto the desk. “Look it over,” he said. “Well worth your time.” He stood impassively as Broderick drew from the wallet several large bills.
“Holy-holy,” whispered the inspector general as he fingered the money. “I didn’t think you cared.” Briskly he seated himself again and waved away Doolan.
“Naturally,” he explained, toying with Grafius’ card, “I’m loath to part with all this lettuce. Your remark about our little speckled friends, the Martians, I shall ignore. This is a small, young agency, new to the art of private investigation. Martians are outside our ken at this moment of the year 1942, but if there’s anything in a more conventional line we can do for you—”
“Nothing at all, thank you,” said Grafius of Springfield. He recovered his wallet and card from the desk. “However, if you’d care to listen with an open mind—”
“Open wider than the gates of hell,” said the private detective, his eyes on the vanishing currency. “Tell your tale.”
Grafius crushed out his cigar. “Suppose you were a Martian,” he said.
Broderick snickered. “One of the small ones with three tails, or the nasty size with teeth to match?” he asked amiably.
“I’m sorry,” said the man from Springfield, “My data doesn’t go as far as that, but in a moment I’ll give you a reasonable description of the Martians that are in New York.
“When I say Martian, of course, the meaning is ‘extraterrestrial of greater civilization than ours.’ They may not be Martians. They may even be from another galaxy. But assume you are what I call a Martian, and that you want to keep in touch with Earthly civilization and advancement. Just where would you go?”
“Coney Island?” helplessly suggested the detective.
“Naturally not,” said Grafius severely, “Nor to Sea Breeze, Kansas. Nor to Nome, Alaska. Nor to Equatorial Africa, You wouldn’t go to some small town. You wouldn’t go to some out-of-the-way part of the world where living is anywhere from twenty to several hundred years behind human progress. This will eliminate Asia and Africa. If will eliminate almost all of Europe and South America.”
“I get it,” said Broderick, “The Martians would head for the U.S.A.”
“Exactly. The United States today is the most technically and culturally advanced nation on Earth, And, further, if you came to the United States, you’d come to New York. You would come be
cause it’s the largest human concentration on the globe. It’s the economic capital of the continent—the very hemisphere! You agree?”
“Sure,” said Broderick, “And you wouldn’t be in London because of the war. You can’t observe human culture while the shells are popping.”
“Exactly. But I still haven’t proved anything. To continue: it’s quite clear to me that we Earth people aren’t the only intelligent, civilized race in the Universe. Out of the infinitude of stars and planets there most definitely, mathematically must be others. Mars—to continue with my example—is older than Earth geologically; if there were Martians, and if their evolutionary history corresponded with ours, they would certainly be further advanced than we.
“And I will make one more hypothesis: it is that we Earth people are today on the verge of space conquest, and that any race further advanced than we must have already mastered space flight.”
“Go on,” said Broderick, who was beginning to look scared. He was a naturally apprehensive type, and the thought that Martians might be just around the corner didn’t help him.
“Certainly. But you needn’t look so worried, for the Martians won’t show up in your office. They must work strictly under cover, since from their point of view—advanced, you will remember—it would be foolish to make themselves known to us as long as we humans are a military, predatory race. It would be a risk which no advanced mentality would take.”
“How long has this been going on?” asked Broderick agitatedly.
“Judging from the geology of Mars, some hundreds of years,” replied Grafius dreamily. “They’ve been watching, waiting—”
“You said you could describe them,” snapped the detective. “What do they look like?”
“I can’t describe their appearance,” said Grafius, down to Earth again. “But this is what they most probably are: a group of ordinary-appearing people who live together. In downtown New York, close to newspapers, publishers, news cables, communication centers and the financial powers of Wall Street. They would have no obvious means of support, for all their time must be taken up with the observation that is their career. They almost certainly live in a private house, without prying janitors who would get curious about their peculiar radio equipment.
“And our best bet—they are sure to receive every major paper and magazine, in all the languages of the world.”
“I get it,” said Broderick. “Very sweet and simple. But what’s your reason for wanting to meet up with the Martians social, if I may ask?”
“Call it curiosity,” smiled Grafius. “Or an inflated ego. Or merely the desire to check my logic.”
“Sure,” said Broderick. “I can offer you the following services of my bureau: bodyguard—that’s Iron Man, outside. Think you’ll need him?”
“Certainly not,” said Grafius of Springfield. “You have no right to suppose that the Martians would stoop to violence. Remember their advanced mentality.”
“I won’t insist,” said the detective. “Second, I can check on all subscription departments of the big papers and magazines. Third, the radioparts lead. Fourth, renting agents. Fifth, sixth and seventh, correlation of these. Eighth, incidentals. It should come to about—” He named a figure. The remainder of the interview was purely financial in character.
Iron Man Doolan wasn’t very bright. He knew how to walk, but occasionally he forgot and would try to take both feet off the ground at once. This led to minor contusions of the face and extremities, bruises and gashes that the ex-cop never noticed. He was underorganized.
It taxed him seriously, this walking about in a strange neighborhood. There were hydrants and traffic signals in his way, and each one was a problem in navigation to be solved. Thus it took him half an hour to walk the city block he had been shown to by Broderick, who was waiting nervously, tapping his feet, in a cigar store.
“He’s dull—very dull,” confided the detective to Grafius, who sipped a coke at the soda fountain. “But the only man for a job like this. Do you think they’ll make trouble for him?”
Grafius gurgled through the straw apologetically. “Perhaps,” he said. “If it is No. 108—” He brooded into his glass, not finishing the sentence.
“It certainly is,” said Broderick decidedly. “What could it be but the Martian embassy that takes everything from Pic to the Manchester Guardian?”
“Polish revolutionaries,” suggested the man from Springfield. “Possibly an invalid. We haven’t watched the place for more than a couple of weeks. We really haven’t any data worth the name.”
The detective hiccupped with nervousness, hastily swallowed a pepsin tablet. Then he stared at his client fixedly. “You amaze me,” he stated at last. “You come at me with a flit-git chain of possibilities that you’re staking real cash on. And once we hit a solid trail you refuse to believe your own eyes. Man, what do you want—a sworn statement from your Martians that they live in No. 108?”
“Let’s take a look,” said Grafius. “I hope your Mr. Doolan gets a bite.”
“Iron Man, I repeat, is not very bright. But he’s pushed buttons before, and if somebody answers the door he’s going to push the button on his minicam. I drilled that into his—”
He broke off at the sound of a scream, a shriek, a lance of thin noise that sliced down the street. Then there was a crash of steel on concrete. The two dashed from the shop and along the sidewalk.
They stopped short at the sight of Iron Man Doolan’s three hundred pounds of muscle grotesquely spattered and slimed underneath a ponderous safe. A colored girl, young and skinny, was wailing in a thin monotone, to herself: “First he squashed and then it fell. First he squashed and then—”
Broderick grabbed her by the shoulders. “What happened?” he yelled hoarsely. “What did you see?”
She stopped her wail and looked directly and simply at him. In an explanatory tone she said: “First he squashed—and then it fell.” Broderick, feeling sick, let go of her, vaguely heard her burst into hysterical tears as he took Grafius by the arm and walked him away down the street.
Somewhere on Riverside Drive that evening the detective declared: “I know it sounds like a damned childish trick, but I’m going to get drunk, because I had a lot of affection for Doolan. He would understand it as a fitting tribute.”
“He was, in his way, the perfect expression of a brutal ideal,” mused Grafius. “In an earlier, less sophisticated day he would have been a sort of deity. I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind.”
In a place whose atmosphere was Chinese they drank libations to the departed Iron Man, then moved on down the street. Midnight found Broderick pie-eyed, but with a tense control over his emotions that he was afraid to break through.
It was Grafius at last who suggested calmly: “They are a menace. What shall we do about them?”
Broderick knew just exactly what the man from Springfield meant. With a blurred tongue he replied: “Lay off of them. Keep out of their way. If we make trouble, it’s curtains for us—what they did to Doolan is all the proof I need. I know when I’m licked.”
“Yes,” said Grafius. “That’s the trouble with you. Doolan didn’t know—” He collapsed softly over the table. Broderick stared at him for a long moment, then gulped the rest of his drink and poked his client in the shoulder.
Grafius came up fighting. “Martians,” he shrilled. “Dirty, dusty, dry sons of—”
“Take it easy,” said the detective. He eyed a girl sitting solo at a nearby table, who eyed him back with a come-on smile.
Grafius stared at the interchange broodingly. “Keep away from her,” he said at last. “She may be one of the Martians—filth they are—unspeakable things—bone-dry monsters from an undead world—” He canted over the table again.
The liquor hit Broderick then like a padded tent maul. He remembered conducting a fantastically polite Gallup poll of the customers in the saloon, inquiring their precise sentiments toward “our little feathered friends of the Red Planet.”
Grafius was completely unconscious when Broderick, with elaborate protestations of gratitude, accepted the “last one on the house.” He tossed down the rye and quaffed the chaser. Skelley, ever the artist, had stirred the chloral into the larger glass.
The stuff took effect on Broderick like a keg of gunpowder. After the first few spasms he was utterly helpless, poisoned to within an inch of his life, lying heaving on the floor, his eye whites rolling and yellowed, pouring sweat from every hair, actually and literally wishing he were dead and out of his internal agony. That is what a skilled practitioner can do with the little bottle behind the bar.
He saw the waiter and Skelley go through Grafius’ pockets, calling for witnesses among the customers that they were taking no more than their due. The customers heartily approved; a woman whose face was baggy and chalked said: “Peeble wh’ dunno hodda drink li’ gennlem’n shunt drink ’t all!” She hiccupped violently, and a waitress led her to the powder room for treatment.
Skelley laboriously read the calling card in Grafius’ vest. “That ain’t no help,” he declared wittily. “It don’t say which Springfield.”
Broderick saw and felt himself being rolled over, his pockets being dipped into. The spasms began again, ending suddenly as he heard the voice of his host declare: “No. 108! Snooty neighborhood for a lush like that.”
The detective tried to explain, tried to tell the man that it wasn’t his address but the address of the Martians he’d chanced on in his pockets. But all the voice he could summon up was a grunt that broke to a peep of protest as he was hauled up and carried out in Skelley’s strong and practiced arms.
He and Grafius were dumped into a taxi; between spasms he heard the restaurateur give the hackie the Martians’ address.
Broderick was going through a physical and mental hell, lying there in the back of the cab. He noted through his nauseous haze the street lights sliding by, noted the passage of Washington Square, sensed the auto turning up Fifth Avenue. His agony lessened by Fiftieth Street, and for a moment he could talk. Hoarsely he called to the cabby to stop. Before he could amplify and explain, the retching overtook him again, and he was helpless.
