Bug-Eyed Monsters

by Bill Pronzini

  Max Schick is unable to maintain coherency from this point on. But his direct account is not necessary. We are, unfortunately, all too well aware of what happened next.

  Max Schick sat there in his chair and watched Andrew Benson change.

  He watched him grow. He watched him put forth the eyes, the stalks, the writhing tentacles. He watched him twist and tower, filling the room and then overflowing until the flimsy stucco walls collapsed and there was nothing but the green, gigantic horror, the sixty-foot-high monstrosity that may have been born in a screenwriter’s brain or may have been spawned beyond the stars, but certainly existed and drew nourishment from realms far from a three-dimensional world or three-dimensional concepts of sanity.

  Max Schick will never forget that night and neither, of course, will anybody else.

  That was the night the monster destroyed Los Angeles . . .

  It has often been said that the short-short is the most difficult of all literary forms to master; this seems particularly true in science fiction, which for the most part deals with complex ideas rather than simple incidences. But “The Other Kids” is an example of what can be done in the s-f short-short by a talented writer—a combination of idea and incidence that results in a powerful cautionary statement about men and about those we call monsters.

  Robert F. Young (b. 1917) has been a popular and prolific writer of science fiction for three decades. His stories regularly appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, among other publications in the field, and several have been honored in best-of-the-year anthologies edited over the past quarter-century by such diverse critical tastes as Everett Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, Judith Merrill, Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, and Terry Carr. These and some of his other fine stories appear in two collections, The Worlds of Robert F. Young (1965) and A Glass of Stars (1968).

  The Other

  Kids

  Robert F. Young

  By the time the two army officers came up in the jeep half the population of the little town was standing along the edge of the meadow. It wasn’t a particularly large crowd, but it was a nasty one. There were shotguns in it, and rifles and knives and lead pipes and baseball bats.

  Captain Blair waited till the two truckloads of soldiers arrived, then he pushed his way through the crowd to the meadow. Lieutenant Simms followed.

  The sheriff was standing in front of the crowd, a brand-new .270 balanced in the crook of his arm. He nodded to the captain. “Thought I’d better let the army in on this,” he said in a thin rasping voice. “It’s a little out of my line.”

  The captain squinted at the saucer. It sat in the middle of the meadow, gleaming in the October sunlight. It looked like a king-size Aladdin’s lamp; an Aladdin’s lamp without chimney or base, and totally lacking in ornamentation. The captain had read most of the accounts about saucers and he had always been impressed by their dimensions, though he had never admitted it to anyone.

  This one was disappointing. It was a distinct letdown. It was so small it couldn’t possibly contain more than a crew of one, unless you postulated pint-size Martians. The captain was disgusted. He was sacrificing his Sunday morning sack time for nothing.

  Still, he reconsidered, it was the first authentic saucer, and if it contained any kind of life at all, pint-size or otherwise, he would be the first human to contact it. There would be generals on the scene before long of course, and probably even chiefs of staff. But until they got there the responsibility was his. A tiny gold leaf fluttered before his eyes.

  He turned to the lieutenant, who was quite young and who, in the captain’s private opinion, had no business in this man’s army. “Deploy the men,” the captain said. Then he turned to the sheriff. “Get those people the hell out of here where they won’t get hurt!”

  The meadow came to life. The crowd shuffled back just far enough to give the impression of compliance, muttered just loud enough to imply resentment, and parted just wide enough to let the soldiers through. The soldiers came running, rifles at port, and deployed around the saucer at the lieutenant’s direction, each man dropping to prone position.

  The lieutenant rejoined the captain and the two officers stood looking at the little saucer. The lieutenant was having trouble with a memory. It concerned something that had happened to him when he was a small boy, but the trouble was he couldn’t recall exactly what it was that had happened. All he could remember was the part that led up to the part he wanted to remember.

  He could recall the circumstances clearly enough: the house in the new neighborhood, the morning after the first snow—the snow had been white and wonderful when he had looked at it from his strange bedroom window, and all he could think of while he was getting dressed was running outside and finding out was it good for packing and building a snowman and maybe a fort, and playing games . . .

  He heard the shouts and laughter of the other neighborhood kids while he was eating breakfast and he was so excited he couldn’t finish his cereal. He gulped down his milk, choking a little, and ran into the hall for his coat and leggings. His mother made him wear the wool scarf that always prickled his neck, and she buttoned the flaps of his toboggan hat in under his chin.

  He ran out into the bright morning—

  And there the memory stopped. Try as he would, the lieutenant couldn’t recall the rest of it. Finally he gave up and devoted his attention to the saucer. The memory had no business in his mind at such a time anyway, and he couldn’t understand what had evoked it.

  “Do you think we’ll have trouble, sir?” he asked the captain.

  “We didn’t come out here on a picnic, Lieutenant. Of course there’ll be trouble. This may even be an act of war.”

  “Or of peace.”

  The captain’s seamed face grew red. “Do you consider sneaking down during the night, eluding our radar, and landing way out here in the sticks an act of peace, Lieutenant?”

  “But it’s such an insignificant little ship—if it is a ship. It’s almost like a toy. Why, I’ll bet if you rubbed it a genie would appear.”

  “Lieutenant, I consider your attitude unmilitary. You’re talking like a child.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  The morning had grown quiet. The sound of the crowd had diminished to an occasional shuffling of restless feet and an occasional mutter of voices. The soldiers lay silently in the dun meadow grass. High in the cloudless sky a V of geese soared sedately south.

  Suddenly the village church bell began to peal. The sound washed over the fields in sonorous, shocking waves. Even the captain jumped a little. But he recovered himself so quickly that no one noticed. He lit a cigarette slowly and deliberately.

  “I hope all you men remembered to bring your hymn books,” he said in a loud voice.

  Nervous laughter rippled round the circle of waiting soldiers. “Hallelujah!” someone shouted. The old man was a good Joe after all.

  The last peal of the bell lingered for a long time, then gradually trailed away. The crowd whispered to itself, but remained intact. The sheriff pulled out a red bandanna handkerchief and began polishing the barrel of his .270. He stood just behind the two officers.

  The saucer gleamed enigmatically in the sunlight. The captain’s eyes were starting to ache and he looked away for a moment to rest them. When he looked back the top half of the saucer was rising like the top section of a clam shell.

  It rose slowly, up and back, flashing in the sunlight. Presently it stopped and something climbed out of its interior and slipped to the ground. Something with big bright eyes and too many limbs.

  The captain drew his .45. Rifle bolts snickered around the circle of soldiers.

  “It looks like it’s been injured,” the lieutenant said. “See, one of its arms—”

  “Draw your weapon, Lieutenant!”

  The lieutenant drew his .45.

  The genie stood in the shadow of the ship, its luminous eyes glowing palely. A morning wind crept down from the hills and riffled the meadow grass. The sun
shone brightly.

  Presently the genie moved out of the shadow. It started forward, in the direction of the two officers. It was a livid green in color and it definitely had too many limbs, most of them legs. It was impossible to tell whether the creature was running or walking.

  The captain’s voice was tight. “Give the order to fire, Lieutenant!”

  “But sir, I’m sure it’s harmless.”

  “You blind? It’s attacking us!”

  The sheriff’s rasping voice had thickened. “Sure it’s attacking us,” he said, his breath hot on the lieutenant’s neck.

  The lieutenant said nothing. The rest of the memory was emerging from his subconscious where it had been hiding for fifteen years.

  He was running out of the house again, and into the bright morning. He started across the street to where the other kids were playing in the snow. He didn’t see the snowball. It had been packed tight and it had been thrown hard. It struck him squarely in the face, exploding in blind numbing pain.

  He stopped in the middle of the street. At first he couldn’t see, but after a while his eyes cleared. But only for a moment. Then they were blind again, blind with tears, and he was running back to the house, back to the warm comfort of his mother’s arms—

  The captain’s voice was taut. “I’ll give you one more chance, Lieutenant. Give the order to fire!”

  The lieutenant stood silently, his face contorted with the remembered pain.

  “Fire!” the captain screamed.

  The morning detonated.

  The captain and the soldiers and the sheriff shot the genie. The genie’s eyes went out like shattered electric light bulbs and it collapsed into a tangle of arms and legs.

  The lieutenant shot the captain. The captain’s face looked silly as he slipped slowly to the ground. His officer’s cap had come off and so had the top of his head.

  After that the lieutenant was running. He looked wildly around for the house but it wasn’t there any longer. And that was odd, he thought. It had been there a moment ago.

  One of the other kids was shouting something in a thin rasping voice but he did not stop. He kept on running. He had to find the house, the security of the house, the warmth of his mother’s arms—

  The second snowball struck him squarely in the back of the head. It wasn’t half as bad as the first one had been. The first one had hurt all the way through him. The first one had never stopped hurting. This one didn’t hurt at all. There was just a sudden flash of brightness, and then nothing—’

  Nothing at all.

  “The Miracle of the Lily” offers a strong extrapolative view of man’s eternal battle with the insect, plus an ironic surprise twist on the theme. And, of course, it also offers some dandy BEMs. Although the story may show its age a bit compared to modern science fiction (it was originally published in the April 1928 issue of Amazing Stories), it is nonetheless a first-rate and unusual example of early s-f.

  Clare Winger Harris was a pioneer woman “scientifiction” writer of the Gernsback era. Her first story, “A Runaway World,” was published in the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales. Ten subsequent stories appeared between 1927 and 1930 in WT, Amazing, Wonder Stories Quarterly, and other magazines; one, “Fate of the Poseidonia,” won a prize in a 1927 Amazing Stories contest. All eleven stories were gathered into a hardcover collection entitled Away from the Here and Now in 1947, at about the time she surfaced in Los Angeles science-fiction circles (only to disappear again in the early fifties, this time without resurfacing). Along with a collaboration with Miles J. Breuer, “A Baby on Neptune” (a.k.a. “Child of Neptune”), “The Miracle of the Lily” is considered to be her finest work.

  The Miracle

  of the Lily

  Clare Winger Harris

  CHAPTER I

  The Passing of a Kingdom

  Since the comparatively recent resume of the ancient order of agriculture I, Nathano, have been asked to set down the extraordinary events of the past two thousand years, at the beginning of which time the supremacy of man, chief of the mammals, threatened to come to an untimely end.

  Ever since the dawn of life upon this globe, life, which it seemed had crept from the slime of the sea, only two great types had been the rulers: the reptiles and the mammals. The former held undisputed sway for eons, but gave way eventually before the smaller but intellectually superior mammals. Man himself, the supreme example of the ability of life to govern and control inanimate matter, was master of the world with apparently none to dispute his right. Yet, so blinded was he with pride over the continued exercise of his power on Earth over other lower types of mammals and the nearly extinct reptiles, that he failed to notice the slow but steady rise of another branch of life, different from his own; smaller, it is true, but no smaller than he had been in comparison with the mighty reptilian monsters that roamed the swamps in Mesozoic times.

  These new enemies of man, though seldom attacking him personally, threatened his downfall by destroying his chief means of sustenance, so that by the close of the twentieth century, strange and daring projects were laid before the various governments of the world with an idea of fighting man’s insect enemies to the finish. These pests were growing in size, multiplying so rapidly and destroying so much vegetation, that eventually no plants would be left to sustain human life. Humanity suddenly woke to the realization that it might suffer the fate of the nearly extinct reptiles. Would mankind be able to prevent the encroachment of the insects? And at last man knew that unless drastic measures were taken at once, a third great class of life was on the brink of terrestrial sovereignty.

  Of course no great changes in development come suddenly. Slow evolutionary progress had brought us up to the point where, with the application of outside pressure, we were ready to handle a situation that, a century before, would have overwhelmed us.

  I reproduce here in part a lecture delivered by a great

  American scientist, a talk which, sent by radio throughout the world, changed the destiny of mankind: but whether for good or for evil I will leave you to judge at the conclusion of this story.

  “Only in comparatively recent times has man succeeded in conquering natural enemies: flood, storm, inclemency of climate, distance. And now we face an encroaching menace to the whole of humanity. Have we learned more and more of truth and of the laws that control matter only to succumb to the first real danger that threatens us with extermination? Surely, no matter what the cost, you will rally to the solution of our problem, and I believe, friends, that I have discovered the answer to the enigma.

  “I know that many of you, like my friend Professor Fair, will believe my ideas too extreme, but I am convinced that unless you are willing to put behind you those notions which are old and not utilitarian, you cannot hope to cope with the present situation.

  “Already, in the past few decades, you have realized the utter futility of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that had no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continued to hoard, thus lessening the degree of your life’s efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life’s accomplishments. You have given these things up slowly, but I am now going to ask you to relinquish the rest of them quickly; everything that interferes in any way with the immediate disposal of our enemies, the insects.”

  At this point, it seems that my worthy ancestor, Professor Fair, objected to the scientist’s words, asserting that efficiency at the expense of some of the sentimental virtues was undesirable and not conducive to happiness, the real goal of man. The scientist, in his turn, argued that happiness was available only through a perfect adaptability to one’s environment, and that efficiency sans love, mercy and the softer sentiments was the short cut to human bliss.

  It took a number of years for the scientist to put over his scheme of salvation, but in the end he succeeded, not so much from the persuasiveness of his words as because prompt action of some sort was necess
ary. There was not enough food to feed the people of the earth. Fruit and vegetables were becoming a thing of the past. Too much protein food in the form of meat and fish was injuring the race, and at last the people realized that for fruits and vegetables, or their nutritive equivalent, they must turn from the field to the laboratory: from the farmer to the chemist. Synthetic food was the solution to the problem. There was no longer any use in planting and caring for foodstuffs destined to become the nourishment of man’s most deadly enemy.

  The last planting took place in 2900, but there was no harvest. The voracious insects took every green shoot as soon as it appeared, and even trees, which had previously withstood the attacks of the huge insects, were by this time stripped of every vestige of greenery.

  The vegetable world suddenly ceased to exist. Over the barren plains, which had been gradually filling with vast cities, man-made fires brought devastation to every living bit of greenery, so that in all the world there was no food for the insect pests.

  CHAPTER II

  Man or Insect?

  Extract from the diary of Delfair, a descendant of Professor Fair, who had opposed the daring scientist.

  From the borders of the great state-city of Iowa, I was witness to the passing of one of the great kingdoms of earth—the vegetable, and I can not find words to express the grief that overwhelms me as I write of its demise, for I loved all growing things. Many of us realized that Earth was no longer beautiful; but if beauty meant death, better life in the sterility of the metropolis.

  The viciousness of the thwarted insects was a menace that we had foreseen and yet failed to take into adequate account. On the city-state borderland, life is constantly imperiled by the attacks of well-organized bodies of our dreaded foe.