Oh, yes. Just one last item. Don’t pay any attention to the Earthlings Go Home! signs you’ll see written all over the walls. These Martians have no sense of gratitude. After liberating the planet. Earth has been granting them aid for twenty years until now their whole economy is on the skids.
ALBATROSS
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
This is another of the basic science-fiction themes that have become a challenge, since a new departure is hard to come by. The idea is, the first extraterrestrial comes to Earth. What happens? Yes, yes, I know, he says to the first passerby, “Take me to your leader.” But that’s already been done. You’ve got to have a new gimmick, and the editors are mighty touchy about this theme —they’ve seen it too often before. It first appeared in Imagination in 1955.
—Mack Reynolds
* * * *
We were in a hurry to be airborne but I couldn’t allow that to keep me from the care that meant the difference between getting back to where we started or blowing the ultra-hot F4IOB we were flying. While Jack Casey climbed into the ship, I hustled around it checking to make sure the fuel caps were all on and to pull the safety pin from the nose wheel so it would steer. Then I climbed in too and pulled the pin out of the ejector; if you forgot that, you didn’t get out of an F4IOB in a bail-out. You usually didn’t get out anyway, not without a broken neck—the 410 is really fast.
The ground crew had wheeled up an electric starting unit and now they plugged it in, their hands fumbling in their haste. I checked the dozen warning lights on the instrument panel.
And now, automatically, I went over the procedure that was second nature to me. I began checking in one corner of the cockpit and went around it, missing nothing. The rudder pedals for correct length, the stabilizer and the aileron tabs, the cooling rheostats and the cabin pressurization—we flew at altitudes that called for oxygen at all times.
An enlisted man came running up, breathless. He came to the side of the cockpit and put one hand up, resting against the ship.
I said, “What is it, Corporal?”
“The colonel,” he puffed. “The colonel says to tell you they’re in Saskatchewan already. They left…they left all them jets behind, Lieutenant.”
Air whistled out from between Jack Casey’s teeth. He had been checking his guns behind me.
The corporal took a deep breath and got out the rest of his message. “The colonel says it looks like they’re heading for Chicago, Lieutenant. He says your 410 is the only thing maybe fast enough between them and Chicago.”
The master sergeant in charge of the ground crew had been listening. Now his lips went thin white. Without inflection he said, “Sir, I got a sister in Chicago.”
I looked at him. “I have a wife and two children in Chicago, Sergeant.”
His eyes went down. “Yes sir.”
“Let’s fire up this airplane,” I said.
He acknowledged and I flicked on the engine master switch and engaged the starter. When the engine was turning over at approximately five percent rpm, I opened the throttle part way and the engine picked up to twenty percent of its own accord.
I waved to the sergeant. “Take it away.”
They disconnected the starter unit and began to wheel it off.
I said over my shoulder, “All set, gunner?”
“All set,” Casey said. He’d heard the corporal. Casey’s mother lived in Gary. His voice was flat, not like Jack Casey’s voice.
I closed the dive brakes to the fuselage and dropped my flaps to the takeoff setting. The crew pulled the chocks and I made my way to the takeoff point. The thing was to get into the air as soon as possible now. When the F4IOB was turning over at anything below ten thousand feet, the fuel consumption was unbelievable.
The call to the tower for clearance was only routine; the whole installation was watching my takeoff. I ran the engine up to one hundred percent power, checked the auxiliary fuel pump and the oil pressure gauge, and started down the runway at a clip.
As soon as we broke ground, I snapped the gear up; the indicator lights went out, so I knew it was safely locked. I hit the flap lever and spilled the added lift and the 410 shot forward. I reached for the higher altitudes immediately and headed north, flying easily at about eight hundred. Until I had a better fix on them, there was no use using my speed.
The fix improved as we went. The initial surprise over, the boys on ground were doing a better job of tracking. We were getting nearer to an interception point.
I flew easily, my right hand, or rather the fingers of my right hand, resting on the stick, my left hand forward on the throttle. And unceasingly, as I flew, my head moved from one side to another; to the right of the ship, to the left, up, then down, behind me. Mechanically, slowly, covering the sky, the earth, high above, far below, though I doubted that they would be flying much higher than my sixty-odd thousand feet.
Jack Casey and I were the only things that counted between them and Chicago. Between them and Muriel and Kenny and Bob, and Jack’s mother—and the sergeant’s sister.
* * * *
Jack spotted them first, a tiny dot coming in from the north. “Five o’clock high,” he said.
I reached for altitude. They had about five thousand feet on me. My fingers touched here and there around the cockpit, charging the guns, twisting the rheostat for the electric sight image in the windshield. I set the wingspan pointers to one hundred feet for the present. I turned the trigger button from “safe” over to “fire” and opened the throttle slightly.
I brought the colonel in on the radio, gave him the story. He wanted to know what the hell they were flying that was so fast.
“Some kind of flying wing,” I told him. “Maybe rocket-propelled.”
“Don’t be silly,” he growled. “With that kind of range?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. Where did he think they were getting that kind of speed?
The colonel said, “Okay, Shirey, bring her down.”
I said “Yes sir,” and flicked off the set. I didn’t want him or anybody else jabbering in my ear now.
The craft had become melted and twisted wreckage in only a few moments. We picked over and examined the few items that we’d managed to rescue or that were left in the ruins, avoiding looking at the charred body. Jack Casey took up a spool of wire from among the things we’d tossed out into the long narrow field we’d landed in, and fingered it.
He said. “Allen, this looks like the kind of wire used for recordings.”
I grunted, looking at the other stuff. “I wonder why they were heading for Chicago,” I muttered. “And why did they have to come in over the Pole like that?”
Jack shrugged his chunky shoulders. “What difference would it have made if they’d come in from some other direction? Results would have been the same; and not only in this country either.”
I went back to the F4IOB and got Colonel Heddrick on the radio. We’d skidded the ship in, ruining the landing gear and crumpling one wing, but it had been important to get down quick.
His voice was jumpy with excitement. “Shirey,” he barked, “we’ll need proof of this attempted sneak attack to place before the UN. Have you got any evidence of its origin, its nationality?”
“Yes sir,” I said quietly. “Their ship burned, almost completely destroyed, but we rescued enough of it to indicate origin.”
“Excellent,” he rapped. “You boys’ll get the Air Medal for this. I’ll send some windmills to pick up the material and to get you out of there.” He added, almost as an afterthought, “Of course, they came from— ”
“No, sir,” I interrupted. “They’re extraterrestrial, Colonel. It was a spaceship, not a fast bomber like we thought.”
“What!” he bellowed.
“We’ve just shot down the first visitors from space,” I told him.
Long hours later we stood before Major General McCord’s desk, fagged from the flight and even more from the endless questions we’d been having fired at us ever si
nce the return to base. We were too tired to see it that way, but there was an element of humor in the situation.
Over and over the implication had been that we were either drunk or insane. And always our ultimate answer to that suspicion was to motion to the charred body of the three-foot alien from space, now packed in dry ice.
General McCord was trying to speak quietly and easily, but he was holding himself in restraint with effort. Restraint wasn’t one of the general’s strong points.
“You claim that this craft looked strange from the first,” he rasped. “Why’d you have to be so confounded trigger-happy?”
He knew the answer, even better than Casey and I. The orders we were following out came directly from the Pentagon.
I couldn’t keep an edge of irritation from my voice.
“Sir,” I told him, “all we knew was that the alarm rang and that we were to get into the air as quick as possible. She was coming in high and fast. Radar first picked her up over the Aleutians; Dutch Harbor reported she was doing fifteen hundred. She left the jets based up in Alaska so far behind that they looked like trainers. Our F4IOB’s were the only thing between her and the Chicago-Detroit area; finally it narrowed down to our F4IOB being the only thing. Lieutenant Casey and I picked her up in Manitoba, maybe a hundred miles north of Winnipeg. We didn’t have time to type her, we didn’t have time to challenge her, we didn’t even have time to think. Sir, we were the only thing standing between what seemed to be a sneak attack on the country’s industrial centers. Our orders were to bring her down and we did.”
The general glowered at me. “Did she show any signs of hostility?”
“We didn’t give her time to, sir. She was faster than we were. We had just one chance for a crack at her, and then she was going to be gone. We let her have everything we had—everything.”
His face worked, but he dropped the point. He poked with his finger at the coil of wire on his desk and turned to Jack Casey. “Lieutenant, you said something to the effect that you believed this was a recording somewhat similar to our wire recordings.”
“Yes sir,” Casey said. “I was—”
“What gave you that impression?” the general interrupted.
“I was just about to tell you, sir,” Casey said, his voice registering complaint. We were both reaching the point of exhaustion where not even a major general was impressive. “When I first forced my way into the spaceship—it was burning plenty, already—it was there with half a dozen other coils and with a machine that looked something like a phonograph. You know, sir, a loudspeaker and so forth.”
The general said, “Why didn’t you rescue the other coils and the machine?”
I protested at that, indicating the bandages that covered the bums we’d both received. “Sir, it was all we could do to recover the odds and ends that we did. The craft was in flames before we were able to land and get to it.”
He grunted, “I suppose so,” his tone suggesting that we should have shot it down without setting fire to it. He turned to Colonel Heddrick. “Colonel, make arrangements to check completely on this wire and see whether or not it is possible to play it back. That is, of course, if it is a recording.”
The general ran a hand over his throat, as though checking to see whether or not he needed a shave. The matter was affecting him as it had all the rest of us. We felt, well…confused.
He said to Casey and me, “I’m making arrangements to send you two back to Washington. They’re anxious to get to the bottom of this.” He grimaced. “And it’s one problem they’re welcome to.” He poked the wire coil again, thoughtfully. “You might as well wait until we can check this. It might be best to take it to Washington with you. If it’s a recording, maybe some of those bright boys in Intelligence can decipher it.”
* * * *
Jack Casey and I got less than two hours’ sleep that night. Early dawn saw us back in the general’s quarters, bleary-eyed and only half awake. Colonel Heddrick was there and half a dozen other colonels and brigadiers.
The general didn’t waste time on preliminaries. He snapped to Jack Casey, “You were right about the wire recording.” He motioned with a thumb to an improvised machine on his desk. “We’re rushing you to Washington, where you’re to report to a special meeting of—well, of the representatives of the six leading powers. But first I want you to hear this.”
Casey said, “What good would that do, sir? We don’t understand their language any more than—”
General McCord silenced him with a flick of his hand. “The recording is in English. Evidently this life form from space has been picking up our radio emanations and has been able to decipher at least one of our Earth languages. We’ve decided that the rolls you reported having seen were all meant to be used in initial communication with us.” He added in a growl, “Unfortunately, you recovered only one.”
The general pressed a switch.
The words came out slowly and clearly and with a distinctly mechanical effect, as though they had been created by a speaking machine rather than a human throat.
Greetings…to…man! …We…of…the…Galactic…Union…welcome…this…opportunity…to… make…contact…with…you…of…Earth.
For… many… decals… we… have… watched… from… afar…the… progress…of…your…race…Now…we…feel…it…is… time... for…us…to… make…known…our… presence… and…to… offer…you…the…benefit…of…our…older…civilization.… The…many…problems…that…confront…you…today…were…once…our…own… problems. …Fortunately…we… were… able…to… solve…them…and… institute… a… millennium…of… peace…prosperity…and…good…will.
Listen…then…with…care…to…the…advice…that… follows… for…in… these…instructions…lies…the…salvation…of…your…race…otherwise…fated…to… perish…by…its…own…hand.
That was all. The machine whined, and Colonel Heddrick stepped forward and flicked it off. His face was gaunt. It had been Heddrick who had ordered the actual attack.
There was a long silence in the room.
Finally the general said, “You’ll start for Washington at once.”
I suppose that I could describe our next three months in Washington, New York, London, Paris, and Moscow. The endless conferences, the endless sessions with military and political leaders. Somehow, I haven’t the heart for it.
When it was all over, Jack Casey and I returned to our base in Montana. They’d commissioned us captains by this time. I don’t know why. In all that period, in every country we touched, I hadn’t met one person who approved of what we’d done. Of course, the blame wasn’t put on our shoulders, as individuals.
We both tried to wipe the memory of it from our minds. I said, we tried. Jack Casey was no longer the exuberant kid he’d been before, and I spent long hours in the sack, just staring up at the ceiling.
One day we sat in the officers’ mess across a chess table, with two or three of the others watching. Jack Casey had made his inevitable gambit, and, also inevitably, I’d accepted. Now he had his king’s pawn in his hand.
After a time, when he didn’t make his move, I looked up into his face. He was staring at something beyond us.
He said softly, “We shot the Albatross.”
“Uh?” I said. The others in the room looked at him. You’d think that his voice wouldn’t have carried that well, but everybody was looking at him. There didn’t seem to be any particular reason.
He turned his eyes to me. “You remember—that poem about the Ancient Mariner. The Albatross was always the bird of good omen; the sailors used to believe it brought good fortune, good weather, peace and well-being.”
It didn’t sound like the old Casey talking.
He put the pawn back on the board haphazardly and went over to the bookshelf and poked around in it for a minute. The room was still quiet, everybody still watching him. He returned with the only poetry anthology our little library boasts. He flipped the pages, found what he w
anted.
“Yeah, here it is,” he said. He read softly, so low I could hardly hear him.
At length did cross an Albatross,
Through the fog it came;
As it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.
‘God save thee, ancient mariner,
From fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so?’—
‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross.’”
He closed the book and tossed it to the table.
“Yeah, that’s it, all right,” he murmured. “We shot the Albatross. They sent us ambassadors of peace and goodwill, this Galactic Union. And what did we do?”
“We killed them,” I answered him.
The room had been silent from Jack Casey’s first words. Now one of the other pilots said, “Any other nation would have done the same thing.”
I said quietly, “That makes it only the worse; that makes all of humanity equally guilty.”
Someone else put in, softly, “The question now is what will this Galactic Union do when they learn we…shot the Albatross they sent us?”
A voice near the door barked, “Attention!” and General McCord and Colonel Heddrick entered. We scrambled to our feet.
Their faces were wan.
The general didn’t waste time. “Our radar, which you know has been trained on space for the past eight weeks, as has every other radar set on Earth, has picked up six spaceships approaching us. It is expected that they will enter Earth’s atmosphere in the region of the Poles, as previously. You gentlemen will take off immediately to—” He hesitated for a long moment, then finished lamely, “—to meet them.”
Somebody said, voicing the electric shock which had gone through the room, “You mean intercept them, sir? Are we to assume they’re hostile?”
The general rubbed a hand over mouth and chin, checking his shave. “We don’t know…as yet.”
THE ENEMY WITHIN
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
The Second Mack Reynolds Megapack Page 9
