by Jerry
“Tomorrow,” said Adams, “I shall file a petition with the courts asking dissolution of the city charter. As owner of the greatest portion of the land included in the corporate limits, both from the standpoint of area and valuation, I understand I have a perfect legal right to do that.”
The mayor gulped, finally brought out some words.
“Upon what grounds?” he asked. “Upon the grounds,” said Adams, “that there is no further need of it. I do not believe I shall have too hard a time to prove my case.”
“But . . . but . . . that means.”
“Yeah,” said Gramp, “you know what it means. It means you arc out right on your ear.”
“A park,” said Gramp, waving his arm over the wilderness that once had been the residential section of the city. “A park so that people can remember how their old folks lived.”
The three of them stood on Tower Hill, with the rusty old water tower looming above them, its sturdy steel legs planted in a sea of waist-high grass.
“Not a park, exactly,” explained Henry Adams. “A memorial, rather. A memorial to an era of communal life that will be forgotten in another hundred years. A preservation of a number of peculiar types of construction that arose to suit certain conditions and each man’s particular tastes. No slavery to any architectural concepts, but an effort made to achieve better living. In another hundred years men will walk through those houses down there with the same feeling of respect and awe they have when they go into a museum today. It will be to them something out of what amounts to a primeval age, a stepping stone on the way to the better, fuller life. Artists will spend their lives transferring those old houses to their canvasses. Writers of historical novels will come here for the breath of authenticity.”
“But you said you meant to restore all the houses, make the lawns and gardens exactly like they were before,” said Webster. “That will take a fortune. And after that, another fortune to keep them in shape.”
“I have too much money,” said Adams. “Entirely too much money. Remember, my grandfather and father got into atomics on the ground floor.”
“Best crap player I ever knew, your grandddaddy was,” said Gramp. “Used to take me for a cleaning every pay day.”
“In the old days,” said Adams, “when a man had too much money, there were other things he could do with it. Organized charities, for example. Or medical research or something like that. But there are no organized charities today. Not enough business to keep them going. And since the world committee has hit its stride, there is ample money for all the research, medical or otherwise, anyone might wish to do.
“I didn’t plan this thing when I came back to see my grandfather’s old house. Just wanted to see it, that was all. He’d told me so much about it. How he planted the tree in the front lawn. And the rose garden he had out back.
“And then I saw it. And it was a mocking ghost. It was something that had been left behind. Something that had meant a lot to someone and had been left behind.
Standing there in front of that house with Gramp that day, it came to me that I could do nothing better than preserve for posterity a cross section of the life their ancestors lived.”
A thin blue thread of smoke rose above the trees far below.
Webster pointed to it. “What about them?”
“The Squatters stay,” said Adams, “if they want to. There will be plenty of work for them to do. And there’ll always be a house or two that they can have to live in.
“There’s just one thing that bothers me. I can’t be here all the time myself. I’ll need someone to manage the project. It’ll be a lifelong job.”
He looked at Webster.
“Go ahead, Johnny,” said Gramp. Webster shook his head. “Betty’s got her heart set on that place out in the country.”
“You wouldn’t have to stay here,” said Adams. “You could fly in every day.”
From the foot of the hill came a hail.
“It’s Ole,” yelled Gramp.
He waved his cane. “Hi, Ole. Come on up.”
They watched Ole striding up the hill, waiting for him, silently.
“Wanted to talk to you, Johnny,” said Ole. “Got an idea. Waked me out of a sound sleep last night.”
“Go ahead,” said Webster.
Ole glanced at Adams. “He’s all right,” said Webster. “He’s Henry Adams. Maybe you remember his grandfather, old F.J.”
“I remember him,” said Ole.
“Nuts about atomic power, he was. How did he make out?”
“He made out rather well,” said Adams.
“Glad to hear that,” Ole said. “Guess I was wrong. Said he never would amount to nothing. Daydreamed all the time.”
“How about that idea?” Webster asked.
“You heard about dude ranches, ain’t you?” Ole asked.
Webster nodded.
“Place,” said Ole, “where people used to go and pretend they were cowboys. Pleased them because they really didn’t know all the hard work there was in ranching and figured it was romanticlike to ride horses and—”
“Look,” asked Webster, “you aren’t figuring on turning your farm into a dude ranch, are you?”
“Nope,” said Ole. “Not a dude ranch. Dude farm, maybe. Folks don’t know too much about farms any more, since there ain’t hardly no farms. And they’ll read about the frost being on the pumpkin and how pretty a—”
Webster stared at Ole. “They’d go for it, Ole,” he declared. “They’d kill one another in the rush to spend their vacation on a real, honest-to-God, old-time farm.”
Out of a clump of bushes down the hillside burst a shining thing that chattered and gurgled and screeched, blades flashing, a cranelike arm waving.
“What the—” asked Adams.
“It’s that dadburned lawn mower!” yelped Gramp.
THE END.
THE OTHER
Wilson Tucker
Out of the wasteland came flaming thunder and a message from an alien world. This is the story of the single man who dared to answer that challenge.
ALMOST any newspaper in the country dated during the last two weeks of August will give you the popular details of what they call “The Meteorite Murder Case.” Haubert Heine, a refugee scientist from Austria—and a damn good one—shot and killed his assistant, Charles Packer, over a newly-fallen giant meteorite in the Arizona sands.
I referred above to “almost any paper”: there were four that did not run amok in screaming type—the small chain I work for. Our four papers, dailies, scattered across the continent, represented the “unpopular” side of the affair because we insisted upon giving the principal figure a square deal. Such a thing was frowned upon by my brothers-in-arms; such tactics sold fewer papers than the hue-and-cry angle.
Our papers gave Heine a break for two good reasons: one, JayCee Whipple, owner of the chain and ray boss, had sponsored Heine’s importation into this country when the late, tin-lamented Adolph made life uncomfortable for Heine and his friends.
And two: because I alone, of all that sensation-seeking horde, happened to believe Haubert Heine when he said it was self-defence.
Heine confided to me that he felt the meteorite was the cause of the tragedy. He claimed the huge stone—twice the height of a man and weighing nearly seven tons—“lived.” That is the exact English word he used.
The meteorite was not magnetic, nor did it: hold a latent force of static electricity. Heine did not use the word “lived” in any allegorical sense.
I thought I understood him where no one else did. I believed I could follow his cramped thinking, his old-world romanticism, and his often-amusing tangled English in noisy, unromantic, 1947 America.
I sat in the warden’s office of the state prison, waiting to see Heine, and went back over the case history of the crime.
A bedraggled one-mule prospector was the lone witness to the meteorite’s fall. Out of curiosity and hoping for a reward, he ambled across the sands the next morn
ing “to hev a look at that there shootin’ star.”
He found it almost completely buried in red sand, only a few square feet of its bare, topside surface exposed to the Arizona sun. A couple of arm-jarring swings at its unyielding bard face with a pickaxe convinced the old man that it was useless to him and unlikely to give, up the riches he sought. Accordingly, on a trip into town for supplies two months later, he sent a collect telegram to the Institute, giving location and date of the fall, and hinting rather broadly that his remuneration for the information should be promptly forthcoming.
He subsequently received a formal letter of thanks from the Institute’s directors along with a two-dollar check for his services, and stepped out of the picture until reporters found him later for “exclusive interviews.” A hundred and twenty newspapers and two picture magazines ran his picture standing beside the mule, with captions in large type pointing out which was which.
HAUBERT HEINE and Charles Packer moved out into the Arizona sands to pitch their tent beside the meteorite in mid-August. They had with them the modern, electrically powered equipment of the Institute. After digging a work-trench completely around the stone almost down to its base, they prepared for the sinking of test holes in the rock’s interior.
Packer started up the gasoline motor that operated the drill, and tapped over the surface with a wooden-handled hand-axe, spotting likely places to drill.
At length he found a spot that seemed to present a good surface for drilling. It was hot in mid-August in Arizona. He was wearing nothing but shorts, a wide-brimmed straw hat and protecting goggles His tanned body rippled in the sun.
Heine had on but little more—a long flapping shirt to cover his thinness, and straw slippers to protect his feet. He watched, fascinated, as Packer placed the tip of the drill on one of the chalk marks and squeezed the double trigger.
The drill bit in.
Heine, alternately watching the slender rod boring into the rock and the jiggling, vibrating effect of the powerful tool upon Packer’s body, was startled to see a change spread over the young man.
Packer was standing with his feet braced wide apart in the sand, putting pressure on the drill. Abruptly a white cloud flowed up to his arms to the jiggling tune of the machine, crept across his shoulders and flooded his face. He raised one hand to snatch off his goggles, revealing the pupils of his eyes dilated horribly. The dead-white hue of his skin was alarming. The muscles of his arms and legs bulged and surged as if seeking to break the bonds of flesh that held them. Suddenly, Packer slackened pressure on the drill, and the machine ground harmlessly in the hole it had already made.
Heine stepped forward to peer at Packer, and Packer shut off the drill. The gasoline motor sputtered loudly in the new silence. Packer swung up his head to stare at Heine.
Heine confided to me that he felt the impact of a physical shock when Packer looked at him. He said that if Packer had struck him across the face with the back of his hand, the shock and pain would hardly have been greater.
“What is the matter, Charles?” Heine asked in alarm.
Packer did not answer but continued to glare at him as if he were an unearthly visitant, a stranger from nowhere.
“Charles Heine’s bewilderment grew. He stepped over to the meteorite and braced himself against its surface. Packer watched him suspiciously but made no move.
“Are you ill? Why do you not continue drilling? Can I aid you? Why do you not answer—I demand to know!”
Packer took one step forward and the drill, still hanging in his free hand, came out of the hole. Heine noticed that the point of it was dull brown. He swung his eyes back to the young man s face.
Packer was slowly advancing around the meteorite, dragging the drill in the sand. His face was frightening. In his eyes, dilated as they were, Heine read a fearful resolve.
He turned and ran. Inside the tent was a loaded rifle, included in the equipment as a safeguard against diamondbacks and gila monsters. Heine snatched it up and peered out through the canvas flap.
Parker was still standing by the huge rock, holding the drill, staring away across the sands. Pie seemed to have forgotten his companion, until Heine stepped into sight again, the rifle ready in his hands.
Packer switched around to stare at him and then at the gun. At first there was no noticeable change of expression on the younger man’s face, but slowly Heine saw recognition growing in Packer’s eyes. Very slowly, as if recalling the memory of a gun from a previous incarnation, Packer recognized the weapon in Heine’s hands.
Pie became enraged and fearful.
He retreated, braced a naked, tanned foot against the hot rock and watched Heine s slow, nervous advance with the rifle, Charles Packer lifted the drill with one hand until it was high off the ground; swung his other hand down to grasp its fat, sleek middle, and brought it up, rifle-fashion across his arm, to aim the brown-stained point at Heine. The restless fingers of his other hand sought and found the double trigger on the drill handle.
Heine stopped ten feet from Packer and waited.
They stood there, the two of them in the broiling sun, facing one another like armed warriors.
Minutes sped by while each Availed for the other to make the first move; while Heine—fear and incomprehension boiling inside him—waited for Packer to lunge with that deadly drill. The point would be flashing crimson in the sun, not brown, if. Packer reached him, and Packer’s body would again vibrate with the jiggling kick-back of the tool while the whirling bit ate into Heine’s living body. It would run entirely through his body in a fraction of a minute.
Nervously, he shifted the rifle. Packer mistook the action. He squeezed the double triggers and lunged. Heine screamed.
STILL screaming, he found himself running towards the protecting bulk of the meteorite, his feet slipping on the loose sand at the bottom of the trench. Packer followed him slowly, as if this were something unexpected.
The chase continued for long minutes—then stopped abruptly.
Heine discovered that Packer had ceased following him. He was somewhere on the other side of the rock, silent and waiting. Heine watched for his shadow on the sands but saw nothing. He backed away a few feet, to the limit of the trench, and wondered if he should leave altogether, run away across the desert for safety.
He would have to go without food and water unless he could get to the tent or to the truck parked in the sand on the other side of the tent. He didn’t know how to drive, but he had watched Packer’s motions and believed he could imitate them.
Where was Packer?
Again he searched for tell-tale shadows at either end of the rock, but there was nothing. He continued cautiously around the meteorite.
Packer was not there. The sound of the drill had ceased, and only the monotonous drone of the gasoline motor broke the desert stillness. Packer might have gone into the tent. There was no other weapon there, but he might have gone looking for one.
He saw the movement in the corner of his eye again.
Suddenly he discovered Packer, and screamed again. The man was atop the meteorite, braced there in the flaming sun and wind, arms swinging wildly, the drill in one hand, bending his knees to leap down upon him!
Still screaming, Heine threw up the rifle and fired. He pumped five shots at Packer before his finger slipped from the trigger, and the gun dropped to the ground.
Packer had fallen down across the top surface, bleeding profusely. The drill was beneath him. The blood dripped from his body, trickled down across the shiny belly of the drill and fell upon the meteorite.
Heine looked into Packer’s eyes, terror-stricken. Packer’s eyes were dying as his body died, but they were sane again.
THAT’S the story Haubert Heine told; that’s the story I believed, and that’s the story my four papers printed. I was damn near laughed out of the Press Club, but we stuck to it, Heine, my papers, and I.
Heine’s trial was one of those occasional courtroom circuses that pop up in America, carefully
fed and nurtured by a murder-mongering press, given daily hypos by hysterical New York columnists turned loose on the airwaves for the sake of bay rum, and neatly done to a turn by “experts” going over the testimony with fine-tooth combs from the comfort of their living rooms, and printed in weekly magazines.
Guilty or not, the luckless devil that falls afoul of this combination becomes the chief carnival attraction, and often has as much chance of gaining his freedom as a captured gorilla.
Heine had no chance. The newspapers tried and convicted him on their front pages daily, and the docile jury lifted their twelve individual right hands and said “fa” dutifully.
A frozen-faced girl who served as the warden’s secretary came in and handed me the blue slip of paper that said I could visit Heine in the death row. For half an hour.
I was searched as a matter of routine and my fountain pen and matches taken from me.
Heine looked up and smiled when the corridor door opened.
“Welcome, my friend, truly welcome!” And then his smile drooped. “My only friend.”
“Not quite, chief. You have at least two. There’s my boss.”
He shrugged. I went into the cell mid sat beside him on the bunk. A guard placed a chair just outside the door and sat down to watch us.
“I am afraid,” Heine continued moodily, “that I have only made much trouble for Mr. Whipple. And for you, too, young man. But for Mr. Whipple—” He spread his hands. “Public opinion, it is bad. They think he is responsible for my actions. They think—”
I cut in there. “Never mind what those dopes think! They think what other papers tell them to think. Those that are able to think for themselves don’t read papers. I’m not worrying about it and you shouldn’t.” At once I saw that was a bad slip and tried to cover up. He saw through it and grinned.
“Do not mind, young friend. I have become acclimated to the idea. The warden visited me a short while ago. He brought me these.” The old scientist displayed two choice cigars. “I do not smoke. But he asked if there was a last request. Tell me, is that something expected—this last request?”
