The Day the Earth Stood Still: Selected Stories of Harry Bates

by Harry Bates

  "I'm surprised that any one with the brains you have should make so feeble a joke!"

  At the word "brains" Frick almost exploded.

  "Brains!" he exclaimed. "Not me! I'm dumb! Dumb as the greasy-haired saxophone player over there! I understand that I used to have brains, but that's all over; it's horrible; let's not think about it. I tell you I'm dumb, now–normally, contentedly dumb!"

  Miles did not know how to understand Frick any more than did I. He reminded him:

  "You used to have an I. Q. Of 248–"

  "I've changed!" Frick interrupted. He was still vehement, but I could see that he was full of internal amusement.

  "But no healthy person's intelligence can drop much in the course of a few years," Miles objected strongly.

  "Yes–I'm dumb!" Frick reiterated.

  My opportunities lay in keeping him on the subject. I asked him, "Why have you come to consider the possession of brains such an awful thing?"

  "Ah, to have seen what I have seen, know what I know!" he quoted.

  Miles showed irritation. "Well, then, let's call him dumb!" he said, looking at me. "To insist on such a stupid jest!"

  I took another turn at arousing Frick. "You are, of course, speaking ironically out of some cryptic notion that exists only in your own head; but whatever this notion, it is absurd. Brains in quantity are the exclusive possession of the human race. They have inspired all human progress; they have made us what we are today, masters of the whole animal kingdom, lords of creation. Two other things have helped–the human hand and human love; but even above these ranks the human brain. You are only ridiculous when you scoff at its value."

  "Oh, love and human progress!" Frick exclaimed, laughing. "Charles, I tell you brains will be the ruination of the human race," he answered with great delight.

  "Brains will be the salvation of the human race!" Miles contradicted with heat.

  "You make a mistake, a very common mistake, Miles," Frick declared, more seriously. "Charles is of course right in placing man at the top of creation, but you're very wrong in assuming he will always remain there. Consider. Nature made the cell, and after a time the cell became a fish; and that fish was the lord of creation. The very top. For a while. For just a few million years. Because one day a fish crawled out of the sea and set about becoming a reptile. He became a magnificent one. Tyrannosaurus Rex was fifty feet long, twenty high; he had teeth half a foot long, and feet armed with claws that were terrible. No other creature could stand against him; he had speed, size, power and ferocity; he became the lord of creation.

  "What happened to the fish? He had been the lord of creation, but, well, he never got anywhere. What about Tyrannosaurus Rex? He, too, was the lord of creation, but he, alas, is quite, quite extinct.

  "Nature tried speed with the fish, then size with the saurians. Neither worked; the fish got stuck, the saurian died off. But did she quit experimenting at that? Not at all–she tried mobility, and we got the monkey. The first monkey swung from limb to limb screeching, 'I am the lord of creation!' and, by Jove, he was! But he could not know that one day, after a few millions of years, one of his poor relations would go down on the ground, find fire, invent writing, assume clothing, devise modern inconveniences, discover he had lost his tail, and crow, 'Behold, I am the lord of creation!'

  "Why did this tailless monkey have his turn? Because his makeup featured brains? You will bellow yes–but I hear Mother Nature laughing at you. For you are only her latest experiment! The lord of creation! That you are–but only for a little while! Only for a few million years!"

  Frick paused, his eyes flashed, his nostrils distended contemptuously. "How dare man be so impertinent as to assume nature has stopped experimenting!" he exclaimed at length.

  In the quiet which followed this surprising outburst I could see Miles putting two and two together. But he took his time before speaking. He relighted his pipe and gave it a good, fiery start before removing it from his mouth and saying, almost in a drawl, "It amounts to this, then. Anticipating that nature is about to scrap brains and try again along new lines, you choose to attempt immortality by denying your own undoubted brains and trying to be the first to jump in the new direction."

  Frick only laughed. "Wrong again, Miles," he said. "I'm just standing pat."

  "To go back a little," I said to Frick; "it seems to me you're assuming far too much when you tell us that the human race is not the last, but only the most recent of nature's experiments."

  The man acted almost shocked. "But have you forgotten what I told you just a little while ago? I said I have terminated the genus Homo Sapiens!"

  Miles snorted with disgust. I was alarmed. Miles tried sarcasm.

  "Have you and Mother Nature already decided, then, what the next lord of creation is to be?"

  "I myself have nothing to say about it," Frick replied with assumed naiveté'. "Nor do I know what it will be. I could find out, but I doubt if I ever shall. It's much more fun not to know–don't you think? Though, if I had to guess," he added, "I should say she will feature instinct."

  This was too much for Miles. He started to rise, saying, as he pushed his chair back, "This is enough. You're either crazy or else you're a conceited fool! Personally, I think it's both!"

  But Frick held him with a gesture, and in a voice wholly sincere said, "Sit down, Miles; keep your shirt on. You know very well I neither lie nor boast. I promise to prove everything I have said."

  Miles resumed his seat and looked at Frick almost sneeringly as he went on, "You're quite right about my being a fool, though. I was one; oh, a most gorgeous fool! But I am not conceited. I am so little conceited that I offer to show you myself in what must surely be the most ridiculous situation that a jackass or a monkey without a tail has ever been in. I'll exchange my dignity for your good opinion; you'll see that I'm not crazy; and then we'll have the most intelligent good laugh possible to Genus Homo. Yes? Shall we?"

  Miles gave me a look which clearly expressed his doubt of Frick's sanity. Frick, seeing, chuckled and offered another inducement.

  "And I'll throw in, incidentally, a most interesting murder!"

  Our friend was completely disgusted. "We came here to eat," he said. "Let's get it over with." And with the words he picked up the menu which had been lying in front of him all this time. Frick looked at me.

  "I'm not hungry," he said. "Are you?"

  I wasn't. I shook my head.

  "Shall we two go, then?"

  I hesitated. I was not overanxious to accompany, alone, a madman on a mission of murder. But I caught Miles' eye, and like the noble he is, he said he'd come too. Frick smiled softly.

  Ten minutes later we had made the short flight along the north shore to Glen Cove, where Frick has his estate, and were escorted by him into a small, bare room on the second floor of the laboratory building which adjoins his beautiful home.

  While we stood there wondering, Frick went into an adjoining room and returned with two chairs, and then, in two more trips, with a third chair and a tray on which rested a large thermos bottle and a tea service for three. The chairs he arranged facing each other in an intimate group, and the tray he set on the floor by the chair he was to take himself.

  "First I have to tell a rather long story," he explained. "The house would be more comfortable, but this room will be more convenient."

  Frick was now a changed man. His levity of before was gone; tense, serious lines appeared on his rugged face; his great head lowered with the struggle to arrange thoughts that were difficult, and perhaps painful, to him. When he spoke, it was softly, in a voice likewise changed.

  My dictograph was still turned on.

  "Charles, Miles," Frick began, "forgive me for my conduct back in the Gardens. I had so much on my mind, and you were so smugly skeptical, that the inclination to overpower you with what I know was irresistible. I had not expected to make any of these revelations to you. I offered to on impulse; but do not fear, I shall not regret it. I think–I see
now that I have been carrying a very heavy load.

  "What I have to say would fill a large book, but I will make it as short as I can. You will not believe me at first, but please be patient, for proof will eventually be forthcoming. Every single thing I said to you is true, even to the murder I must commit–"

  He paused, and seemed to relax, as if tired. Unknown black shadows closed over my heart. Miles watched him closely, quite motionless. We waited. Frick rubbed the flat of his hand slowly over his eyes and forehead, then let it drop.

  "No," he said at length, "I have never been conceited. I don't think so. But there was a time when I was very proud of my intelligence. I worked; I accomplished things that seemed to be important; I felt myself a leader in the rush of events. Work was enough, I thought; brain was the prime tool of life; and with my brain I dared try anything. Anything! I dared try to assemble the equation of a device that would enable me to peer into the future! And when I thought I had it, I started the construction of that device! I never finished it, and I never shall, now; but the attempt brought Pearl to me.

  "Yes," he added, as if necessary that he convince himself, "I am certain that had I not attempted that, Pearl would not have come. Back through the ages she had somehow felt me out–don't ask me how, for I don't know–and through me chose to enter for a brief space this, our time.

  "I was as surprised as you would have been. I was working in this very room, though then it was twice as large and fairly cluttered with clumsy apparatus I have since had removed. I had been working feverishly for months; I was unshaven, red-eyed and dirty–and there, suddenly, she was. Over there, beyond that door at which I'm pointing. She was in a golden-glowing cylinder whose bottom hung two feet off the floor. For a moment she stood suspended there; and then the glow disappeared and she stepped through to the floor.

  "You do not believe me? Well, of course, I don't expect you to. But there will be proof. There will be proof.

  "I was surprised, but somehow I wasn't much frightened. The person of my visitor was not intimidating. She was just a barefooted young woman, very slender, of average height, clad in a shiny black shift which reached her knees. I cannot say she was well formed. Her body was too thin, her hips too narrow, her head too large. And she was miles from being pretty. Her hair and eyes were all right; they were brown; but her face was plain and flat, with an extraordinary and forbidding expression of dry intellectuality. The whole effect of her was not normal, yet certainly not weird; she was just peculiar, different–baroque.

  "She spoke to me in English! In non-idiomatic English with the words run together and an accent that was atrocious! She asked severely, " 'Do you mind too much this intrusion of mine?' "

  " 'Why-why no!' I said when I had recovered from the shock of the sound of her speech. 'But are you real, or just an illusion?'

  " 'I do not know,' she replied. 'That is a tremendous problem. It has occupied the attention of our greatest minds for ages. Excuse me, sir.' And with these last words she calmly sat herself down on the floor, right where she was, and appeared to go off into deep thought!

  "You can imagine my astonishment! She sat there for a full two minutes, while I gaped at her in wonder. When she rose again to her feet she finished with, 'I do not know. It is a tremendous problem.' I began to suspect that a trick was being played on me, for all this was done with the greatest seriousness.

  " 'Perhaps there is a magician outside,' I suggested.

  " 'I am the magician,' she informed me.

  " 'Oh!' I said ironically. 'I understand everything now.'

  " 'Or no, fate is the magician,' she went on as if in doubt. 'Or no, I am–A very deep problem–' Whereupon she sat down on the floor and again went off into meditation!

  "I stepped around her, examining her from all angles, and, since she was oblivious to everything outside of herself, I made a cursory examination of the thing she had come in on. It looked simple enough–a flat, plain, circular box, maybe four feet in diameter and six inches deep, made of a some sort of dull-green metal. Fixed to its center, and sticking vertically upward, was a post of the same stuff capped with a plate containing a number of dials and levers. Around the edge of the upper surface of the box was a two-inch bevel of what seemed to be yellow glass. And that was all–except that the thing continued to remain fixed in the air two feet off the floor!

  "I began to get a little scared. I turned back to the girl and again looked her over from all sides. She was so deep in her thoughts that I dared to touch her. She was real, all right!

  "My touch brought her to her feet again.

  " 'You have a larger head than most men,' she informed me.

  " 'Who are you, anyway?' I asked with increasing amazement. She gave me a name that it took me two days to memorize, so horrible was its jumble of sounds. I'll just say here that I soon gave her another–Pearl–because she was such a baroque–and by that name I always think of her.

  " 'How did you get in?' I demanded.

  "She pointed to the box.

  " 'But what is it?' I wanted to know.

  " 'You have no name,' she replied. 'It goes to yesterday, to last year, to last thousand years–like that.'

  " 'You mean it's a time traveler?' I asked, astounded. 'That you can go back and forth in time?'

  " 'Yes,' she answered. 'I stopped to see you, for you are something like me.'

  " 'You wouldn't misinform me?' I asked sarcastically, feeling I must surely be the victim of some colossal practical joke.

  " 'Oh, no, I would not misinform you,' she replied aridly.

  "I was very skeptical. 'What do you want here?' I asked.

  " 'I should like you to show me the New York of your time. Will you, a little?'

  " 'If you'll take me for a ride on that thing, and it works, I'll show you anything you want,' I answered, still more skeptical.

  "She was glad to do it.

  " 'Come,' she commanded. I stepped gingerly up on the box. 'Stand here, and hold on to this,' she went on, indicating the rod in the center. I did so, and she stepped up to position just opposite me, and very close. I was conscious of how vulnerable I was if a joke was intended.

  " 'You must not move,' she warned me. I assured her I would not. 'Then, when do you want to go?'

  " 'A week back,' I said at random, with, in spite of everything, a creeping sensation going up and down my spine.

  " 'That will do,' she decided, and again she warned me not to move. Then her hands went to the controls.

  "A golden veil sprang up around us and the room grew dim through it, then disappeared. A peculiar silence came over me, a silence that seemed not so much outside of me as within. There was just a second of this, and then I was again looking into the room through the golden veil. Though it dimmed the light I could clearly make out the figure of a man stretched full length on the floor working on the under part of a piece of apparatus there.

  " 'It's I!'' I exclaimed, and every cell in my body leaped at the miracle of it. That this could be! That I could be standing outside of myself looking at myself! That last week had come back, and that I, who already belonged to a later time, could be back there again in it! As I peered, thoughts and emotions all out of control, I saw happen a thing that stilled the last thin voice of inward doubt.

  "The man on the floor rolled over, sat up, turned his face–my face–toward us, and, deep in thought, gently fingered a sore place on his head-from a bump that no one, positively, knew anything about. Trickery seemed excluded.

  "But a contradictory thing occurred to me. I asked Pearl, 'Why doesn't he see us, since he's looking right this way? I never saw anything at the time.'

  " It is only in the next stage toward arriving that we can be seen,' she explained with her hands still on the controls. 'At this moment I'm keeping us unmaterialized. This stage is extremely important. If we tried to materialize within some solid, and not in free space, we should explode.

  " Now, let us return,' she said. 'Hold still.' "The room disappeared; th
e peculiar silence returned; then I saw the room again, dim through the golden veil. Abruptly the veil vanished and the room came clear; and we stepped down on the floor on the day we had left.

  "My legs were trembling so as to be unreliable. I leaned against a table, and my amazing visitor, as it seemed her habit, sat down on the floor.

  "That was my introduction to Pearl."

  CHAPTER IV

  Frick rose and walked to the far corner of the room and back. The thoughts in his mind were causing some internal disturbance, that was obvious.

  I prayed that my dictograph was working properly!

  When Frick sat down again he was calmer. Not for long could any emotion sweep out of control his fine mind and dominating will. With a faint smile and an outflung gesture of his arm he said, "That was the beginning!"

  Again he paused, and ended it with one of his old chuckles. "I showed Pearl New York. I showed her!

  "Charles, Miles, there is just too much," he resumed at a tangent, shaking his head. "There is the tendency to go off into details, but I'll try to avoid it. Maybe some other time. I want to be brief, just now.

  "Well, I got her some clothes and showed her New York City. It was a major experience. For she was not your ordinary out-of-towner, but a baroque out of far future time. She had learned our language and many of our customs; she was most amazingly mental; and yet, under the difficult task of orienting herself to what she called our crudeness, she exhibited a most delicious naiveté.

  "I showed her my laboratory and explained the things I had done. She was not much interested in that. I showed her my house, others too, and explained how we of the twentieth century live.

  " 'Why do you waste your time acquiring and operating gadgets?' she would ask. She liked that word 'gadgets'; it became her favorite. By it she meant electricity, changes of clothing, flying, meals in courses, cigarettes, variety of furniture, even the number of rooms in our homes. She'd say, 'You are a superior man for this time; why don't you throw out all your material luxuries so as to live more completely in the realms of the mind?'