Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  But I'm getting off the subject.

  "Honestly, Bill!" Marge said as she saw me. "The traffic nowadays! We've been tied up for fifteen minutes. I finally decided to get off the bus and walk, even though it is about a hundred in the shade."

  "Come along to the shop," I suggested. "The reception room is air-conditioned and you can watch the world's first baseball game telecast in color. The Giants versus the Dodgers, Carl Erskine pitching."

  Marge brightened. "That'll be more fun than shopping, won't it, Doreen?" she asked, looking down at the kid. "Bill, this is Doreen. She lives across the street from me. Her mother's at the dentist and I said I'd look after her for the day."

  "Hello, Doreen," I said. "What have you in the hatbox? Doll clothes?"

  Doreen gave me a look of faint disgust. "No," she piped, in a high treble. "An unhappy genii."

  "An unhappy--" I did a double take. "Oh, an unhappy genii? Maybe he's unhappy because you won't let him out, ha ha." Even to myself, I sounded idiotic.

  Doreen looked at me pityingly. "It's not a he, it's a thing. Elmer made it."

  I knew when I was losing, so I quit.

  * * * * *

  I hurried Marge and Doreen along toward our little two-story building. Once we got into the air-conditioned reception room, Marge sank down gratefully onto the settee and I switched on the television set with the big 24-inch tube Tom had built.

  Biltom Electronics makes TV components, computer parts, things like that. Tom Kennedy is the brains. Me, Bill Rawlins, I do the legwork, and tend to the business details.

  "It's uncanny the way all those cars suddenly stopped when our bus broke down," Marge said as we waited for the picture to come on. "Any day now this civilization of ours will get so complicated a bus breaking down someplace will bring the whole thing to a halt. Then where will we be?"

  "Elmer says silly-zation is doomed!" Doreen put in happily.

  The way she rolled the word out made me stare at her.

  Marge only nodded. "That's what Elmer says, all right," she agreed, a trifle grim.

  "Why does Elmer say silly-zation is doomed?" I asked Doreen.

  "Because it's getting hotter." The kid gave it to me straight. "All the ice at the North Pole is gonna melt. The ocean is gonna rise two hundred feet. Then everybody who doesn't live on a hill is gonna be drownded. That's what Elmer says and Elmer isn't ever wrong."

  Doreen they called her! Why not Cassandra? The stuff kids spout these days!

  I gave her a foolish grin. I wanted Marge to get the idea I was really a family man at heart. "That's very interesting, Doreen. Now look, there's the baseball game. Let's watch, shall we?"

  We weren't very late after all. It was the top half of the second inning, the score one to one, Erskine in trouble with two men on and only one down. The colors were beautiful. Marge and I were just settling back to watch when Doreen wrinkled her nose.

  "I saw that game yesterday!" she announced.

  "You couldn't have, sweetheart," I told her. "Because it's only being played today. The world's first ball game ever broadcast in color."

  "There was a game on Elmer's TV," Doreen insisted. "The picture was bigger and the colors prettier, too."

  "Absolutely impossible." I was a little sore. I hate kids who tell fibs. "There never was a game broadcast in color before. And, anyway, you won't find a color tube this big any place outside of a laboratory."

  "But it's true, Bill." Marge looked at me, wide-eyed. "Elmer only has a little seven-inch black and white set his uncle gave him. But he's rigged up some kind of lens in front of it, and it projects a big color picture on a white screen."

  I saw that she was serious. My eyes bugged slightly. "Listen," I said, "who is this Elmer character? I want to meet him!"

  "He's my cousin from South America," Doreen answered. "He thinks grownups are stupid." She turned to Marge. "I have to go to the bathroom," she said primly.

  "Through that door." Marge pointed.

  Doreen trotted out, clutching her hat box.

  * * * * *

  "Elmer thinks grownups are stupid?" I howled. "Listen, how old is this character who says silly-zation is doomed and can convert a black and white broadcast into color?"

  "He's thirteen," Marge told me. I goggled at her. "Thirteen," she repeated. "His father is some South American scientist. His mother died ten years ago."

  I sat down beside her. I lit a cigarette. My hands were shaking. "Tell me about him. All about him."

  "Why, I don't know very much," Marge said. "Last year Elmer was sick, some tropic disease. His father sent him up here to recuperate. Now Alice--that's his aunt, Doreen's mother--is at her wits' end, he makes her so nervous."

  I lit another cigarette before I realized I already had one. "And he invents things? A boy genius? Young Tom Edison and all that?"

  Marge frowned. "I suppose you could say that," she conceded. "He has the garage full of stuff he's made or bought with the allowance his father sends him. And if you come within ten feet of it without permission, you get an electric shock right out of thin air. But that's only part of it. It--" she gave a helpless gesture--"it's Elmer's effect on everybody. Everybody over fifteen, that is. He sits there, a little, dark, squinched-up kid wearing thick glasses and talking about how climatic changes inside fifty years will flood half the world, cause the collapse of civilization--"

  "Wait a minute!" I cut in. "Scientists seem to think that's possible in a few thousand years. Not fifty."

  "Elmer says fifty," Marge stated flatly. "From the way he talks, I suspect he's figured out a way to speed things up and is going to try it some day just to see if it works. Meanwhile he fools around out there in the garage, sneering about the billions of dollars spent to develop color TV. He says his lens will turn any ordinary broadcast into color for about twenty-five dollars. He says it's typical of the muddled thinking of our so-called scientists--I'm quoting now--to do everything backward and overlook fundamental principles."

  "Bro-ther!" I said.

  Doreen came trotting back in then, with her hat box. "I'm tired of that game," she said, giving the TV set a bored glance. And as she said it the tube went dark. The sound cut off.

  "Damn!" I swore. "Must be a power failure!" I grabbed the phone and jiggled the hook. No dice. The phone was dead, too.

  "You're funny," Doreen giggled. "It's just the unhappy genii. See?"

  She flicked over the catch on the hatbox.

  And the picture came back on. The sound started up. "--swings and misses for strike two!" The air conditioner began to hum.

  Marge and I stared. Mouths open. Wide.

  * * * * *

  "You did that, Doreen?" I asked it very carefully. "You made the television stop and start again?"

  "The unhappy genii did," Doreen told me. "Like this." She flicked the catch back. The TV picture blacked out. The sound stopped in the middle of a word. The air conditioner whispered into silence.

  Then she flipped the catch the other way.

  "--fouls the second ball into the screen," the announcer said. Picture okay. Air conditioner operating. Everything normal except my pulse and respiration.

  "Doreen, sweetheart--" I took a step toward her--"what's in that box? What is an unhappy genii?"

  "Not unhappy." You know how scornful an eight-year-old can be? Well, she was. "Unhap-pen. It makes things unhappen. Anything that works by electracity, it stops. Elmer calls it his unhappen genii. Just for fun."

  "Oh, now I get it," I said brightly. "It makes electricity not work--unhappen. Like television sets and air conditioners and automobiles and bus engines."

  Doreen giggled.

  Marge sat bolt upright. "Doreen! You caused that traffic jam? You and that--that gadget of Elmer's?"

  Doreen nodded. "It made all the automobile engines stop, just like Elmer said. Elmer's never wrong."

  Marge looked at me. I looked at Marge.

  "A field of some kind," I said. "A field that prevents an electric current fr
om flowing. Meaning no combustion motor using an electric spark can operate. No electric motors. No telephones. No radio or TV."

  "Is that important?" Marge asked.

  "Important?" I yelled. "Think of the possibilities just as a weapon! You could blank out a whole nation's transportation, its communications, its industry--"

  I got hold of myself. I smiled my best I-love-children smile. "Doreen," I said, "let me look at Elmer's unhappen genii."

  The kid clutched the box.

  "Elmer told me not to let anybody look at it. He said he'd statuefy me if I did. He said nobody would understand it anyway. He said he might show it to Mr. Einstein, but not anybody else."

  "That's Elmer, all right," Marge muttered.

  I found myself breathing hard. I edged toward Doreen and put my hand on the hatbox. "Just one quick look, Doreen," I said. "No one will ever know."

  She didn't answer. Just pulled the box away.

  I pulled it back.

  She pulled.

  I pulled.

  "Bill--" Marge called warningly. Too late. The lid of the hatbox came off in my hands.

  * * * * *

  There was a bright flash, the smell of insulation burning, and the unhappen genii fell out and scattered all over the floor.

  Doreen looked smug. "Now Elmer will be angry at you. Maybe he'll disintegrate you. Or paralalize you and statuefy you. Forever."

  "He might at that, Bill," Marge shuddered. "I wouldn't put anything past him."

  I wasn't listening. I was scrambling after the mess of tubes, condensers and power packs scattered over the rug. Some of them were still wired together, but most of them had broken loose. Elmer was certainly one heck of a sloppy workman. Hadn't even soldered the connections. Just twisted the wires together.

  I looked at the stuff in my hands. It made as much sense as a radio run over by a truck.

  "We'll take it back to Elmer," I told Doreen, speaking very carefully. "I'll give him lots of money to build another. He can come down here and use our shop. We have lots of nice equipment he'd like."

  Doreen tossed her head. "I don't think he'll wanta. He'll be mad at you. Anyway, Elmer is busy working on aggravation now."

  "That's for sure!" Marge said in heartfelt tones.

  "Aggravation, eh?" I grinned like an idiot. "Well, well! I'll bet he's good at it. But let's go see him right away."

  "Bill!" Marge signaled me to one side. "Maybe you'd better not try to see Elmer," she whispered. "I mean, if he can build a thing like this in his garage, maybe he can build a disintegrator or a paralysis ray or something. There's no use taking chances."

  "You read too many comics," I laughed it off. "He's only a kid, isn't he? What do you think he is? A superman?"

  "Yes," Marge said flatly.

  "Look, Marge!" I said in feverish excitement. "I've got to talk to Elmer! I've got to get the rights to that TV color lens and this electricity interruptor and anything else he may have developed!"

  Marge kept trying to protest, but I simply grabbed her and Doreen and hustled them out to my car. Doreen lived in a wooded, hilly section a little north of White Plains. I made it in ten minutes.

  * * * * *

  Marge had said Elmer worked in the garage. I kept going up the driveway, swung sharp around the big house--and slammed on the brakes.

  Marge screamed.

  We skidded to a stop with our front end hanging over what looked like a bomb crater in the middle of the driveway.

  I swallowed my heart down again, while I backed away fast.

  We had almost plunged into a hole forty feet across and twenty feet deep in the middle. The hole was perfectly round, like a half section of a grapefruit.

  "What's this?" I asked. "Where's the garage?"

  "That's where the garage should be." Marge looked dazed. "But it's gone!"

  I took another look at that hole scooped out with geometrical precision, and turned to Doreen. "What did you say Elmer was working on?"

  "Agg--" she sobbed, "agg--agg--aggravation." She began to bawl in earnest. "Now he's gone. He's mad. He won't ever come back, I betcha."

  "That's a fact," I muttered. "He may not have been mad, but he certainly was aggravated. Marge, listen! This is a mystery. We've just got to let it stay a mystery. We don't know anything, understand? The cops will finally decide Elmer blew himself up, and we'll leave it at that. One thing I'm pretty sure about--he's not coming back."

  * * * * *

  So that's how it was. Tom Kennedy keeps trying and trying to put Elmer's unhappen genii back together again. And every time he fails he takes it out on me because I didn't get to Elmer sooner. But you can see perfectly well he's way off base, trying to make out I could have done a thing to prevent what happened.

  Is it my fault if the dumb kid didn't know enough to take the proper precautions when he decided to develop anti-gravitation--and got shot off, garage and all, someplace into outer space?

  What do they teach kids nowadays, anyway?

  * * *

  Contents

  INDULGENCE OF NEGU MAH

  by Robert Andrew Arthur

  In his garden, Negu Mah, the Callisto uranium merchant, sat sipping a platinum mug of molkai with his guest, Sliss the Venusian.

  Nanlo, his wife, pushing before her the small serving cart with its platinum molkai decanter, paused for an instant as she entered the shell of pure vitrite which covered the garden, giving it the illusion of out-of-doorness.

  Negu Mah sat at his ease, his broad, merry, half-Oriental face good-humored, his features given a ruddy tinge by the light of rising Jupiter, the edge of whose sphere was beginning to dominate the horizon. Sliss, the intelligent amphibian, squatted across from him in the portable tub of water which he carried with him whenever absent from the swamps of his native Venus.

  The amphibian's popping eyes turned toward her, the wide frog-face split in a smile of appreciation as Nanlo approached. She refilled their mugs deftly and withdrew. But before she reentered the house she could not resist hesitating to glance toward rising Jupiter and the slim shaft of the rocketship silhouetted now against its surface.

  The ship was the cargo rocket Vulcan, newest and swiftest of Negu Mah's freighter fleet. Fully fueled and provisioned, storage space jammed with refrigerated foods that in space the cold of the encompassing void would keep perfectly for generations were it necessary, she would take off in the morning from the close-by landing port for Jupiter's other satellites, then go on to the Saturnian system, returning finally with full holds of uranium for Negu Mah's refineries on Callisto.

  She was a beautiful craft, the Vulcan, and one man could manage her, though her normal crew was seven. She had cost a great sum. But Negu Mah was wealthy.

  Nanlo's face, sylph-like in its beauty, hardened. Negu Mah was wealthy indeed. Had he not bought her, and had she not cost him more, much more, than the Vulcan?

  But no, it was not quite accurate to say that Negu Mah had bought her. However, since time immemorial beautiful daughters had been, if not sold, yet urged into marriages to wealthy men for the benefit of their impoverished families. And though science had made great strides, conquering the realms of the telescope and invading those below the level of the microscope, finding cures for almost every disease the flesh of man was heir to, there was one ailment it had not yet conquered--poverty.

  Nanlo's father had been a rocket port attendant. Once he had been a pilot, but a crash had crippled him for life. Thereafter, his wages had been quite insufficient to sustain him, his brood of half a dozen children, and their hard-working mother.

  But Nanlo, growing up, had developed into a mature beauty that rivaled the exotic loveliness of the wild orchids of Io. And in debarking at the rocket port on a business trip to earth, because hurricanes had forced him to land far south of New York, Negu Mah had seen her.

  Thereafter--But that is a story as ancient as history too.

  It was a truth Nanlo conveniently overlooked now that she had not been unwilling t
o be Negu Mah's bride. It was true she had driven a sharp bargain with him--her father's debts paid, and sufficient more to ease her parents' life and educate her brothers and sisters. Plus a marriage settlement for herself, and a sum in escrow in the Earth Union bank, should she ever divorce him for cruelty or mistreatment. But that had been only innate shrewdness. She would still have married him had he refused her demands for her family. For his wealth fascinated her, and the prospect of being a virtual queen, even of a distant outpost colony such as that on Callisto, appealed to her.

  And she had thought that she was taking little risk, for if she were dissatisfied, the law these days was very lenient toward unhappy marital relationships. It required only definite proof of misconduct, mistreatment, or oppression of any kind to win freedom from an unwanted partner. Nanlo had been confident that after a year or two she would be able to shake free of the bonds uniting her to Negu Mah and take flight for herself into a world made vastly more pleasant by the marriage settlement remaining to her.

  But now she had been married, and had lived on Callisto, for a full five years, and her tolerance of Negu Mah had long since turned to bitter hate. Not because he was a bad husband, but because he was too good a one!

  * * * * *

  There was an ironic humor in the situation, but Nanlo was not disposed to recognize it. Lenient as the law was, yet it required some grounds before it could free her. And she had no grounds whatever. Negu Mah was at all times the model of courtesy and consideration toward her. He granted every reasonable wish and some that were unreasonable--although when he refused one of the latter, it was with a firmness as unshakeable as a rock.

  Their home was as fine as any on earth. She had more than adequate help in taking care of it. She had ample time for any pursuits that interested her. But she used it only to become more and more bitter against Negu Mah because she could find no excuse to divorce him.

  So great had her bitterness become that, if she could have gotten off Callisto in any way, she would have deserted him. This would have meant forfeiting her marriage settlement and the sum that was in escrow. It would also have left her father in debt to Negu Mah for all that Negu Mah had given him. But Nanlo's passionate rebellion had reached such a state of ferment in her breast that she would have accepted all this to strike a blow at the plump, smiling man who now sat drinking molkai in their garden with their guest from Venus.