Invaders of Earth

by Groff Conklin

  Miss Maclntire, who’d recovered from the shock of Honey LaRue, spoke up. “We’ve got an eel by the tail, as it said. We can’t handle it and we can’t let it go. We’ll have to call in experts in zoology and physics . . .” Mr. Formeller exchanged outraged glances with Mr. Tedder “. . . and have them study the polymorph with the best instruments available.”

  “All this is very well,” Mr. Formeller said, “but what I’d like to know is how this polymorph got into your classroom, Tedder.”

  Mr. Tedder cautiously stepped up to the demonstration bench and took the knob of the telegraph key in his fingers. “This was the switch in a Ziegler’s Effect apparatus I’d set up for demonstration. I just tapped it, like this . . .” Mr. Tedder slapped the key down.

  There was a glare of sudden greenness, and the air popped like a broken vacuum tube as it rushed in to occupy space suddenly vacated.

  The Extragalactic Polymorph was gone. Mr. Coar wrinkled his brow and thought furiously of geranium-plants-in-pots, to no avail. Miss Maclntire thought wistfully of the handsome Greek gentleman who’d addressed her with an obscure quotation. Mr. Tedder, Stetzel, and Guenther bent their combined brains to steady consideration of Miss Honey LaRue, and for a moment they thought they heard the lustful bellow of a supernal saxaphone. But Honey stayed away.

  “If we’d only taken photographs!” Mr. Formeller wailed. “Maybe the things we saw, we saw only in our minds. The polymorph’s real form would have registered on film.”

  “Maybe if Mr. Tedder would duplicate that apparatus of his and .. .” Miss Maclntire paused uncertainly. The arcana of physics were as unknown to her as was the Greek ablative to Mr. Tedder. “Well, do the same thing that you did before. Maybe he’ll come back.”

  “No.” Mr. Tedder was glum. “It won’t be back. When you think that all objects are constantly changing in space and time, you see how wonderful it is that anything ever gets anywhere. The Extragalactic Polymorph won’t be back. Its appearance was an accident; a huge, incredible, once-in-all-history coincidence.”

  ~ * ~

  On the twenty-third planet of a sun of a galaxy that lay beyond the ken of even the two-hundred-inch mirror of Palomar and the giant refractors of Luna, a planet the name of which cannot be expressed in human phonetics, a Young Being in the early stages of prematurity chortled with its Id. Its teacher was back! Swiftly, the youngster threw aside the messy slice of pimento loaf that was draped across the silver cube and commanded, “Zzzrf me a Klompfr!” A Klompfr appeared, and the Young Being spilled its delight out into the minds of its elders.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  William F. Temple

  A DATE TO REMEMBER

  Here is an example of one of the most frequently encountered ideas in the science fiction of earthly invasions—the Guidance Theme. In most of these stories we are to assume that, from careful cover that conceals them from all but our hero, kindly and immensely wise Outsiders are leading us forward subtly and nearly unnoticeably to an improved future.

  This story tells of Guidance that has been going on for literally thousands of years, and still leads us by the hand. The only unlikely thing about this piece of chronological detective work by Mr. Temple is that the Guiders should be so persistent in their efforts to help out so mulish and suicidally bent a race as ours. This gives his tale a certain air of idealistic unreality.

  ~ * ~

  BELL was ostensibly reading The Week in Washington and secretly worrying about something that wasn’t in the newspaper at all when the phone rang. He reached out from his armchair and took it.

  “Hello. . . . Oh, hello, Mick. Well, I didn’t want to go out tonight. Is it really important? Can’t wait till the morning? Well, I don’t know— hang on a minute.”

  He clapped his hand over the mouthpiece and looked across at his wife who was in the opposite chair. She was knitting calmly.

  “Pet,” he said, “give me six reasons why I can’t go out tonight. Quick.”

  “There aren’t any reasons, and it’s no good lying to Mick, anyway,” she said. “You know he can read anyone like a book. If he says it’s important, you can bet it’s important.”

  “Hey, are you my wife or his? Cooperate, darn you!”

  “Just tell him plainly you don’t want to go.”

  Bell grunted and addressed the receiver. “If it’s all the same to you, Mick, I’d rather not. You see, any moment, now, something might happen…”

  “Nothing’s due to happen for three or four days yet,” said his wife, joining up a fresh ball of wool.

  “All right, Mick,” said Bell wearily. “You don’t have to keep at me. My wife’s on your side, anyway. I’ll come right away. ‘By.”

  He went and got his hat and coat. He pulled the window curtain aside and took a peek at the black night.

  “Raining like crazy,” he said. “Bess, you’re a double-crossing, heartless she-cat.”

  He bent and kissed her hard. “And I love you very much,” he added.

  He paused at the door for a final injunction: “If anything starts, ring me right away.”

  The moment Stanley Bell stepped out of the yellow cab, it was as though someone had yanked out the bathtub plug up in heaven. The rain had ceased to a drizzle, but now it came down with a woosh. It bounced up off the sidewalk like rubber. Bell had twenty feet to cover between the cab door and the entrance to the apartment building. He ran, but he might as well have lain full length in the gutter—he could have got no wetter.

  “Filthy night,” he said to the elevator attendant. “Michael Grahame’s apartment—the penthouse.”

  The attendant slammed the gate and made no answer. He’d been on duty a long time and felt tired. He looked at the fast-growing pool at Bell’s feet, knew he’d have to mop it up, and felt more tired.

  As the elevator mounted, Bell thought about Michael Grahame.

  They’d been friends for twenty years, and all of that time Mick had climbed as steadily as this elevator. From scholarships to college, from college to study in the top-drawer clinics of psychiatry in Vienna, from Vienna to Atlantic City and private practice and authorship—then on to New York, some measure of fame and wealth and this penthouse on upper Fifth Avenue.

  Symbolically, Mick was roof garden and Bell was roughly fifth floor, though they’d started together at ground level. But Mick didn’t look at it symbolically. His values never changed. That was why their friendship endured. And Stanley Bell prized that friendship as he prized nothing but his wife’s love.

  Why did he so regard Mick ? As the elevator whirred up, he analyzed the feeling. It was because Mick was reassurance. He represented firmness and sanity in the chaos of dying faiths, toppling values, and the growing greeds and fears of this world. The world was going crazy because of the thousand frustrations of a thousand desires.

  Mick’s sanity and strength lay in the fact that he never seemed to want anything, that he was never frightened to give. If you coveted the Delacroix over his mantel he would give it to you as lightly as he would hand you a cigar.

  He never asked for anything himself, never envied anyone, and, because he wanted nothing from the world, it became his friend and lavished wealth and honor on him.

  Bell’s saga had been different. His rise in the publishing world had been in the teeth of opposition. Had the opposition been of his own creation? Had he assumed, in this highly competitive business, that everyone so engaged was his rival—indeed, his enemy? And had he thus made fresh enemies for himself?

  Bell realized now that something like that lay at the root of his own indifferent progress. That he was symptomatic of the current world outlook. That he was a fool among approximately two billion other fools. Suddenly he was blazing mad at himself.

  He carried this fury out of the elevator with him, past the ebony plate announcing in gilt, michael grahame: consulting psychiatrist, and into Grahame’s living room. The tenant was reclining in a saddlebag armchair, slippered feet on a footstool, gaz
ing lazily up at the smoke rising from his cigar.

  “Mick,” said Bell furiously, “sometime we’re going to have one of our long, cozy talks about life and how it should be lived. And I’ll be going for your throat because you, knowing better, have allowed me to act like a fool for so long.

  “But not tonight. I’m not staying a minute longer than I can help. Now, why in Hades have you dragged me over here on a night like this when you know very well—”

  “There’s a glass of rum and hot water on the sideboard for you,” said Grahame calmly. “Thought you’d need it.”

  “Thanks,” said Bell and went for it.

  “Blast!” he said, “I’m leaving wet footprints all over your Kairwan carpet.”

  “Hang your clothes in the airing chamber. There are slippers here and a dressing gown warming on the radiator.”

  “I’m not staying. I’ve got to—”

  “Get out of those wet things, of course,” took up Grahame. “Or you certainly won’t be staying—in this world for long. Bess will have to spare you for half an hour, while your things dry, or she might have to spare you forever.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Bell ungraciously.

  As he changed, he said, “What’s it all about, anyway?”

  Grahame looked at him. Both men were in their forties. Bell was thin, taut, and anxious-looking. Grahame was large, corpulent, relaxed, and radiated serenity.

  “About my last book,” said Grahame.

  “What about it? It’s still selling. I’m reprinting it next month.”

  “I mean my latest book,” said Grahame. “That.”

  He indicated a Florentine leather folder on the table enclosing a thick wad of typescript. Bell went over to it in his drawers.

  “You never told me about this. When did you start it?”

  “Fifteen years ago,” said Grahame.

  Bell raised his eyebrows and the cover of the folder simultaneously. The first page said:

  the whole man

  Book I: Involuntary Hypnosis: Change of Emphasis.

  Book II: The Power Complex and Resolution.

  Book III: Free Will and Determinism: a Synthesis.

  Book IV: Full Integration.

  He flipped the pages over. It was very technical. Up till now all Grahame’s books had been the wide-selling popular sort—Master That Inferiority!, More Abundant Living, The Dynamo in Yourself. And so on.

  Bell donned the dressing gown thoughtfully. “It’ll take a lot of paper, printing, and binding,” he said slowly. “Trade conditions are still none too easy.” “You think it won’t sell.”

  There was no note of query in Grahame’s voice. He said it flatly, as though he knew exactly what was in Bell’s mind.

  “It won’t sell anything like your usual stuff,” said Bell. “It’ll be expensive to produce, and I’ll have plenty left on my hands. I’d do it out of my regard for you only—well, frankly, Mick, I don’t think the firm’s finances will stand it.

  “We’ve been shaky for a long time. Your popular psychology stuff has been our mainstay for years. Every other risk I’ve taken has fallen flat. I’m a rotten businessman.”

  “Actually,” said Grahame, “you’re a pretty good businessman. Only you’re in the wrong business. Publishing isn’t your racket. You’ve no sense of what the public wants.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m catching the one a.m. train to Chicago—lecture tour,” said Grahame. “I’ll be away for a long time. I asked you to come here tonight to hammer a few things into your head. First, The Whole Man will be a best seller. You’ll make a pile out of it. And I’ll make my name out of it.”

  “You’ve already made your name.”

  “Purely marginal frame. The Whole Man will make world history. It’ll have ten times the influence of Das Kapital. Second, there’s no time to lose about it. I want you to take it back with you tonight and lay it on the line right away. If it’s going to shake the world out of its war hypnosis, it’ll have to start doing it pretty darn quick before the radioactive clouds start rolling.”

  Bell gave a short, harsh bark of laughter which expressed the cynicism of the age. To Grahame, keen prober of mental states, it said a lot.

  “So you’ve written mankind off, Stan?” he said benignly.

  “Naturally. It’s incurable. We’re one of nature’s mistakes. We were designed wrong at the start.”

  “Yet there’s a lot worth while in homo saps,” said Grahame. “It really would be one of nature’s mistakes to scrap him now. I don’t think she will.”

  “Where’s your evidence for this optimism?” grunted Bell.

  Grahame waved his hand in a circular movement to indicate the adorned walls of the room. The gesture embraced the originals and reproductions of a Delacroix, a Van Eyck, two Corots, Van Gogh’s “Champ d’Oliviers,” Greuze’s “Milkmaid.”

  It included the loaded bookshelves and the cream of the world’s poetry and Tolstoi, Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, Shaw, Wells. In its orbit came the Ming vase, the Rodin statuette, and the view of the Golden Gate bridge.

  “That,” he said. “And much, much more. Where’s your evidence for your pessimism?”

  “That,” said Bell, and stabbed a finger at the Sunday newspaper draped over the arm of Grahame’s chair.

  The paper was dated February 1, 1948. The headlines and subheadings sprang out at one—THE COLD WAR. . .BREAKDOWN OF TALKS. . .WILL CONSCRIPTION COME AGAIN?. . .SCIENTIST SAYS. . .MOLOTOV SAYS. . .BRITAIN SAYS. . .TRUMAN SAYS. . . .

  Grahame picked it up and turned to an inner page. “Here’s an item of interest, Stan,” he said and began to read: “Moscow, Saturday. The size—’”

  “I’m not interested in what Moscow says,” interrupted Bell petulantly. “I’m not interested in what anyone says. It’s what they do that matters. Everyone’s gabbing about peace and preparing for war. They make me sick.”

  “They won’t face the fact that the causes of war lie neither in economics nor in political history but in psychology,” murmured Grahame. “However, for once, this isn’t about war. Here, read the thing yourself.”

  He tossed the paper to Bell. The publisher read it with a frown.

  MARTIANS CAME IN 1908

  —says Soviet writer

  Moscow, Saturday: The size of a hole in the crust of the earth made by a heavenly body on June 30, 1908, has convinced the Soviet writer, A. Kazantsev, that Martians arrived on earth that day in an uranium-propelled spaceship.

  Whatever hit the earth that day at Tungus, Siberia, left no fragments of itself behind, Kazantsev stated at the Moscow Planetarium today.

  He said it could only have been a Martian ship laden with enough uranium to carry it back to the planet.

  “Certain it is,” he said, “that no meteorite could have done the damage the Tungus missile did, blasting an area greater than all the Moscow region and sending seismic shocks twice around the world.

  “I believe the Martians left the planet in 1907 and arrived in June, 1908, but their ship exploded,” he said.

  “So what?” asked Bell.

  “Have you never wondered why Mars has never sent us visitors as far as is known ? It’s an older planet than Earth and therefore presumably with a more advanced civilization, technically and morally. Don’t you think they should have sent us explorers, missionaries, ambassadors, or colonists long before this? In fact, long before 1908?”

  “I haven’t given it a thought. Maybe the Martians haven’t, either. Maybe there aren’t any Martians.”

  “Maybe,” said Grahame. “But there’s definitely carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars, and the new infrared spectrometer shows that the polar caps are certainly solidified water. The temperatures are extreme by Earthly standards but far from making life impossible—even Earthly life. The vegetation—”

  He went on about the flora and topography of Mars and was giving the facts of the canal controversy when Bell interrupted impatiently.

  “Look, Mick, a
t another time I’d be glad to sit at your feet and hear all about it. I mean that. But I’m not going to sit here taking lessons in astronomy when I may be needed at home. You wanted to give me the new book. Right, I’ll take it with me and see if I can get it out when I’ve counted the petty cash. If that’s all, I’ll be going.”

  “Wait,” said Grahame and produced his checkbook. He wrote out a check and thrust it on Bell. It was for a sum that made Bell blink.

  “Finance the book with that,” said Grahame. “Get a large edition out quickly. That’ll settle your doubts about losing out on it.”