A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  I settled back in the bunk.

  “Yeah, chief. Our time-honored method of—of ushering gentlemen out in style and contentment in these United Stales. You are given a last request—anything within reason and reach of the prison authorities. And a last meal. You can order anything at all that suits your fancy, in season or out, and I’ll bet a silver dollar the chef downstairs has it on tap. Why, I covered a guy once—” and stopped. Heine wouldn’t be interested in Big Jules from Brooklyn who ordered fried chicken and strawberries.

  “Yes, he also explained as to the meal.” Heine grinned at me. “I asked for wheatcakes and maple syrup. He seemed surprised. But the request—yes, I did make a so-called request. It seemed to startle him even more than the food I wanted.”

  “It did?” I turned so that I could look Heine in the face. The warden isn’t easily startled. “Just what did you ask?”

  “I want to visit the meteorite,” Heine told me seriously.

  I stared at him. “Why in the name of—Why do you want to do that?” Heine looked at me very soberly for a long moment. Then he said, sighing, “I see you still do not completely understand.”

  I shrugged. “I think I understand some of it.”

  “But not fully.” He went on, “So I will again explain. Here is my theory: This meteorite fell on our Earth for a purpose. It was no happening of chance, understand? Where it came from I do not know—except that it might have been a living, thinking mother world. A world of intelligent matter. But this intelligence is imprisoned, trapped, in rock—it cannot move about. It needs a human body—”

  “To use as a means of locomotion?”

  “Exactly. I believe this meteorite is not the first that will come. Perhaps this evil will spread—like a plague—from one human to the next, as soon as it finds a suitable ‘home.’

  “The thing in the meteorite thought it had one in Charles. But when I shot him, he fell across the top of the stone. The drill was beneath him. When this ‘other’—this evil force—saw that Charles was dying, it went back into the meteorite—through the metal of the drill.”

  I frowned, puzzled; he explained. “The metal is the contact, you see? Metal in a human’s hands gives it the bridge it needs—”

  “But those other men,” I objected, “There were scores of them. The workmen dug the rock out of the sand, crated it and shipped it here to the city. Other workmen mounted it. And the officials over at the Institute—what about them?”

  He smiled slowly. “Water seeks water. Intelligence seeks intelligence. Again I can only guess. This thing was ultra-intelligent—it could not or would not pass into a body of lesser intelligence. The workmen—they used tools which had wooden handles, destroying the contact. Besides, the higher intelligence was missing.

  “The officials at the Institute would have the intelligence—but how many of them would have metal between their flesh and the meteorite to make contact?”

  HE PASSED a tired hand over his eyes. “My friend—there is no other way but that this evil thing die! It is a ghastly threat to the human race—it must not escape!

  “How terrible it is, I saw in Charles’ face. Poor Charles, I know the human part of him must have wanted to warn me—while the alien part tried with all its strength to kill me! I believe when he saw the gun, and knew what it could do—this entity that had crept into him read the danger from his mind.

  “But here, now, is the worst part. Supposing this evilness manages to hide itself in a human body, undetected? It is clever; it would know that to be as apparent as it was in Charges would mean its death—and there might not be a chance to return to its other body, the meteorite. It would guard against that. But the man—or men—it entered would become fiends beyond comprehension. This I know. This I believe.”

  I didn’t quite recognize my voice as I asked, “And what do you mean to do?”

  He regarded me with his brilliant, sad eyes.

  “I want to go to the meteorite and let this intelligence possess my body. I want to have it die with me.”

  It probably has never been done before, and probably will never be done again—but JayCee Whipple got Heine the chance to go to the Institute.

  At first Whipple laughed at me when I told him about the request, but an hour later he gave in. “Why not? Society is going to kill this man for a crime he never committed. Why can’t he go see that rock if wants to?”

  You see, I didn’t tell Whipple the real reason. I know he wouldn’t have believed me.

  He phoned long-distance to the governor. I think JayCee applied a few secret screws—every good newspaper man keeps some in reserve.

  Anyway, it was done, and there Ave sat in an armored car—the five of us—being whisked across town to the Institute.

  Heine sat between two guards, shackled hand and foot. Another, with a sawed-off shotgun, sat by the door.

  The scientist had insisted that the guards wear gloves, and JayCee had furnished them. With much grumbling they had put them on—the handcuffs over them.

  Heine, however, wore no gloves—the cuffs met the bare skin of his thin wrists.

  He did not speak to me, and I saw his command to remain silent, in his eyes.

  The armored car pulled up at the side door of the Institute, and we all got out. Walking slowly, so as not to attract attention, we went inside. The place had been closed for the day.

  There was a small group of officials standing around. Some of them smiled at Heine, others appeared indifferent.

  The foyer was large—it had to be to hold that gigantic thing of pitted metal and menace. It lay there, mute, and to my flaming imagination, the damned thing appeared to be watching us.

  Now Heine stood before it. His body was erect but seemed frail compared to the meteorite’s bulk. I stood where I could watch his face. The moisture in my palms was the cold sweat of fear.

  His eyes, brooding and wide, fastened on mine and his gaze held as he stepped forward, hands outstretched. The shackles clanked in the silence as his guards kept pace with him.

  He smiled at me slightly and his shoulders squared. He took a deep breath—and extended a manacled hand toward the meteorite.

  The metal touched with a small clink.

  I saw the change come over him. We all saw it. Gradually an ashen pallor, gray as death, and as frightening, crept into his thin hands and through his wrists, vanishing up the coat-sleeves. I saw it reappear almost instantly above his collar and wash in a ghastly flood across his face.

  The muscles of his throat were tight and choking with the scream that was caught there.

  I saw the Thing crouching in his eyes. It was deadly beyond belief, horrible beyond all nightmare.

  The scream in his throat came free and knifed through the air. With one mad lunge he recoiled from the meteorite—and the chains that held him snapped as if they were slender thread!

  He leaped at me! His hands were curved, raking claws, and I stumbled backward from their grasp.

  But his fingers touched my throat and a shock, as if from a high-voltage wire, sparked through me. I heard an insane screaming, but was only dimly aware that it was myself.

  That was when they shot him. I heard the roar of the gun, felt his body sag away from me, I must have lost consciousness for a while, because the next thing I remember I was lying flat on the cold Boor.

  The first thing I saw was the warden standing beside the meteorite. His gun was in his bare hand—and the metal of the barrel touched the stone!

  “Get away!” I screamed. “It’ll enter you. It’ll—”

  But nothing happened. The man shifted his gun, stared uneasily at the doctor bending over me. His eyes remained sober—and sane.

  Heine had succeeded.

  I sat up and saw the body covered with a blanket “He’s dead?” I asked dully.

  One of the guards was rubbing his sprained wrist. The horror of what had happened was still in his face.

  “A madman,” he said, “I always knew he was really a killin�
��, butcherin’—”

  I got to my feet, looked at him steadily. I knew that nothing I could say would change what these men thought of Haubert Heine. In their minds he had proven himself guilty.

  But I said slowly, “He was a great man, A brave man, He was my friend.”

  NOW it is later, and I keep remembering what Haubert Heine said. What if this alien madness does manage to mask its evilness when it enters a human? What if it learns by failure, until we will not know who among us are still human . . .?

  But why worry, you ask? The thing died with the blaze of a gun that blasted life from a frail body, you say?

  This is why: A second giant meteorite fell in the Arizona sands this morning.

  Heine is gone—and where we can find another Heine I do not know . . .

  THE CASE OF JACK FREYSLING

  Thomas Calvert McClary

  Freysling was a swell guy; agreed. But those who knew him very long found he had a most disturbing and unorthodox—persistence!

  We were casualties, sitting around the convalescing station at Darwin, waiting for odd pieces of ourselves to patch up. We had a lot of time on our hands for talk, and one of our favorite lighter themes, for some reason, was the latest list of known dead. There was nothing morbid in this. It simply held common interest. Maybe it’s that a fellow likes to know who is waiting for him at the other end if he has to hit the sky trail.

  Jeff Lambert was reading off the morning list and suddenly stopped. He looked up, and around at the five of us, one by one, and said, “They got Jack Freysling in the Solomons.”

  We fell into that suspended silence of recollection. All of us had known Freysling, a wild, wacky galoot who had turned down a good exempt job at home to join up as groundhog with the flying jeeps. I recalled him with flaming red hair, a voice like an organ, and the light of sixteen devils in his eyes. He had somehow acquired a love interest after hitting the island, and had not only been darned near butchered by the Japs, but very nearly court-martialed for sneaking through the lines one night.

  There are some men whom you decide will have no number until they get to be at least ninety-four. Jack was that kind, and so it was something more than sadness that moved our silence. It was outright surprise. You simply could not think of that crazy coot being dead.

  I was thinking that for about the tenth time when I heard Bill Hay chuckle. I looked around at him, and he was enjoying high humor, but he wasn’t out of his head. I said pretty sharply, “That must be funny! I thought you were friends back home?”

  “He isn’t dead!” he scoffed. “You can’t kill that bird!”

  Jeff said soberly, “They don’t make mistakes on these lists, Bill. They’re careful not to list a man until they know for sure.”

  “Oh, they probably found his body, all right,” Bill agreed. “But they’ve found it four or five times before that I know of.”

  Jeff peered at him intently. “You all right, boy, or has that wound got you?”

  “I am all right,” Bill nodded adamantly. “But it wasn’t the first time Jack died, I can tell you! It was the time after he committed suicide.”

  Now Bill was one of those good-natured, but exceedingly accurate and literal guys who never put a quarter inch on anything. When he said visibility was six and a half miles, it was six and a half, and not three quarters. So we gave him more attention than we might have another of the crowd.

  “It was this way,” Bill said. “I had palled around with Jack for about five years in nearly every part of the country you can think of. I was on a transcontinental flight, and kept getting special duty to off-the-route airports for some reason. It gave me layover time at a lot of strange ports, big and little. And almost any time at any of them, I was liable to run into Jack.

  “He was a newspaper feature writer and he was always buzzing-off on some wild yarn, half the time of his own concoction. Sometimes these jaunts and his wayward habits would land him in difficulties. I guess I bumped into him under about every condition there is. One time he would be in jail, the next time, just getting out of a hospital, the next time with a six room suite at some swanky hotel. He was just that kind of mug. You expected it of him.

  “He had a serious streak, but he kept it well hidden. It was three years before I knew he had anything in him but a devilish twisted humor to involve everyone he knew in some jam. Then one night I broke the ice and discovered this serious side of him. I didn’t know until then that he had ever been married. But he had been, and hard a daughter, and it turned out she was all the world to him.

  “Well, this daughter had been ill almost since birth with some malady that no doctor could name. Jack had used every connection he had, and I guess his family had money to boot, to get this kid cured. They had taken her to at least twenty specialists in three or four countries, but the kid was still sick. I won’t forget the way he looked as he told about it. When he finished, he gave me a long, intent look, but somehow as if he were way out in space and looking at me from there. He said, ‘Bill, that kid can be cured, and I am going to find out how. But if she isn’t, if anything ever happened to her, I’d bust out of this world fast!”

  “He was serious enough, but a man is liable to think those things himself at such times, and I never gave it a second thought until he committed suicide. That was in New York in 1939, and brother, there was no mistake! He left a note saying, what he was going to do in his hotel room. He paid his bills, and for about two weeks, made a point of seeing his friends. He gave no sign of what he had in mind, and that was why they were extra careful to make sure that it was Jack. When the time came, he went up atop an office building and jumped.

  “The fall smashed him up pretty badly, but it didn’t hurt his face or one hand. He had destroyed all identity on him, and that was the reason for the first check. They had to find out who he was from his fingerprints. There wasn’t any doubt of them, but to make sure, they had five people identify him at the morgue. I was one.

  “Now there wasn’t the slightest ‘possibility that it was not Jack. I saw him, and looked at him a long time, and he didn’t look any different than he had a month before. It was Jack Freysling and nobody else. In the course of time, they found his ex-wife who identified him again. She said she was not surprised. She let it go at that, but I found out the kid had died only a short time before.

  “That was in November of ’39. In February of ’40, I went to Rio for a special job. I was cooling off with some frosty drink at the Continental when Jack walked in. He walked smack up and stood beside me and ordered a drink. I said something dopey like, ‘You can’t do this. You’re dead!”

  “ ‘Oh, again?’ ” he grinned.

  “I got pretty stiff. You begin to think you’re nuts yourself when something like that happens, and pinch your own hand and things. I must have gone over the whole thing a dozen times that night with him, but I couldn’t get anything but amused remarks out of him. The next morning I decided I had been just plain cockeyed drunk, or touched with some jungle fever. But he was registered in the hotel.

  “I saw a lot of him for two weeks, and the thing worried me so much I stole his fingerprints and sent them back to New York. A friend got in touch with the police, and in the course of a few days wired back, ‘Fingerprints belong to a Jack Freysling who committed suicide here in November. Are you carrying around a corpse?”

  “I wasn’t sure myself, but I readjusted my life and had about gotten used to living with an unsolvable mystery when he got killed in the mountains back of Rio. He was shot by accident on a hunting trip, a clean shot right smack through the heart. They brought his body down, and it was his and no mistake. Just for good measure, the consul sent up his fingerprints, and got his identification back. They couldn’t locate anyone related to him nearer than a cousin who cabled them to bury him down there. He was buried in Rio, with half a dozen people who had known him in years gone by, taking last view of the body and attending the funeral. I was one.

  “To tell the t
ruth, it was a relief in a way. There is something darned creepy about talking and drinking with a man you know is dead!

  “Well, that was near the end of April. In October I was driving up Santa Monica boulevard in Los Angeles when a voice like a loudspeaker hollered at me to pull over. I did, automatically. I don’t know that I was exactly afraid, but it was something close to it; an unexplainable fear that it would be Jack Frey sling. It was. A car pulled up behind mine, and he got out, and came up grinning and whacked me on the shoulder. He had the devil in his blue eyes as he looked at me, and he stood there and asked, ‘What’s wrong with you, Bill? Bring back some of that jungle fever from Rio?”

  “Well, we went and had drinks and went through the same thing all over again. If he was real, he had been in Rio. He had seen me there, and he recalled precise things we had done together in every detail. He admitted going off on that last hunting trip. But when I spoke about his death and identification and funeral, he simply grinned. When I tried to pin him on it, he’d come out with some crazy remark like, ‘Boy, I’m always dying!”

  “I saw a lot of him as usual for a week or two, but this time, it was getting me. I went to three different alienists to be sure I wasn’t crazy! I even took him along to one. I’d go to bed dog-tired, and waken in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and wondering if I was crazy. We lived at the same hotel, and I’d go running, and pretty near yelling, down to his room to see if he was still there, and in the flesh.

  “You can’t fly a passenger plane in that condition, and without telling the boss why, I got switched onto freight flying. In the meantime, I stole his fingerprints again. I got them, and a dozen snapshots of him, and I checked in New York and Washington and Rio. It was Jack Frey sling beyond a doubt. It was the same Jack Freysling who had jumped from a roof in New York, and been shot in the mountains back of Rio.

  “I was on a flight east when he went up to Alaska on a story about the fishing industry and how it was being crowded and pirated by the Japs. While he was writing the story, he went overboard in a rough sea and was drowned. They recovered his body, and there was no mistake. They shipped it down to Seattle, and his boss in New York flew out to identify it. He had heard about those other deaths, and I guess he thought of them, but I Jack was the kind of guy who was always getting involved in weird predicaments, and then building the stories up. The boss probably thought the other deaths had been hoaxes. This one was real. He had known Jack since he was in high school, and as well as face and fingerprints, he identified a ring and birthmark. I wasn’t at that funeral, but I later saw people who were, and they knew for certain the body was put into the ground.