He picked up an enlargement of one portion of a land mass, put a hand magnetic lens over it. The magnification showed clusters of dwellings, linked together by lines and double lines upon the ground— certainly the ultimate proof of low-order civilization, when beings chose to live clustered together, commuting by land, when they could spread themselves out over the surface of their planet and use the roads of the sky.
The Commander made a sign in the air with his fingers and a door popped open at the end of the vast room. An aide ran toward the desk, halted, covered his face in salute.
“Sir?”
“How long has the scout been gone?”
The aide removed his hands from his eyes. “A day and a night, sir. He should be back any time, now.”
“Fool!” The Commander roared out the word. “Did I ask for your guesses? I know he’s due back. He is, in fact, one hour overdue.” He did not know if this was or was not true, but it was good discipline policy. “Lock him away when he arrives.”
The other covered his face respectfully. “Yes, sir.” He turned, ran from the desk and out the door.
For a few minutes the Commander kept busy by calling the ten ray-centers of the three-mile-long ship, demanding to know if they were ready to beam. They were. He then spent a while ordering all unit leaders to hold their sections in readiness for inertialess drive. The unit leaders protested politely that they were. He called engine, commanded that they “look sharp.” Meekly they assured him that all was well.
With only small satisfaction, the Commander rose from his desk, paced slowly over to the port again. As he gazed out at the Moon’s bland surface, he reflected that there was something about this nine-planet system they were in that made him edgy … made him want to keep active and alert.
And where was that thrice-blasted scout?
He decided to have him flogged when he returned. Good discipline policy.
The Scout woke from his drunken sleep and glanced at the clock on the dash of his little craft. It was very late, he saw. He would have to think of a fine excuse when he returned or they would put him in Truth and learn that all Scouts took the precious freedom of voyages to become intoxicated for a while.
Not much time! He would have to take what he could find in the vicinity. Small difference it made, though, since the beings of the planet were surely doomed.
The Scout yawned, then lifted the ship from the mountain and arrowed it down into the folds of the valley. His visor translated the immediate night into light, showing him the typically repugnant surface features of a type J planet: foliage, sharp young geology, water flowing in natural beds. A world like a hundred others he’d visited in the name of Law.
When the floor of the valley came up he leveled off, then silently sped along in search of dwellings. Beneath him, on level stretches of land, stood odd four-legged creatures. The dominants of this world? he wondered. Probably not. The extremities of their limbs appeared to be too blunt and crude to do even the simple tooling he’d noticed during his flight in. Beasts of transport, no doubt. Boldly, he swooped low over a group, scattering them in panic.
The meadow ended with almost sheer mountain wall, and the Scout whipped his craft up its face and down the opposite side. Something flickered in his vision screen and he swung the controls. A dwelling! In a moment he was back over it, hanging motionless. Sure enough, a revolting crude shack that nestled high in the branches of one of this world’s surface growths.
This was it. There was no time nor need to search further.
He locked the controls, then turned on the deadly screen that would kill all life directly beneath, save one properly shielded such as himself, and would stun all life attempting to enter the edges of the field.
Pulling on his helmet, the Scout reached to the stud at his belt and reduced his weight to but a fraction of itself. Then he opened the hatch and clambered out into the air.
His first few minutes of exploration in the tree house were disappointing. There was no life, no corpses about for him to dissect and study. But the hunting club puzzled him. Obviously tooled by machinery and scuffed from much killing, it bore what might be a word burnt into its thickened end: “SPAULDING.” He realized he was in an extremely primitive section of the planet, for this weapon was, no doubt, a trade article from some more advanced portion of the globe. Too bad he’d had to land in this region. Dull.
The club he chucked into the bag over his shoulder.
A round object, made of some fairly soft material, with seams twisting over its surface next caught his eye. He took it up, shook it. It, too, bore the symbol “SPAULDING.” Probably a totem word. Perhaps the sign of this particular tribe. He put it with the club. It was followed by a small package of soft white cylinders which were stuffed with crumbles of dried weed. Each cylinder bore the sign ‘
‘camel” as did the container, which also showed a beast, somewhat like those he had buzzed.
And beyond that there was nothing.
A simple people indeed, he pondered. He was about to leave when he noticed the stack of artifacts in one comer. The Scout bent to examine them. They seemed to be composed of the same material as the white of the “CAMEL” cylinders, but thicker and bound together in long, wide, flat construction. There were bright colors on the outside of each, and just as he discovered that the individual leaves of material could be separated and turned, the alarm bell sounded twice in his helmet. Life had blundered into the outer edges of his field.
Hastily, the Scout put a score of his latest finds into his sack and left the tree house. And without bothering to search for the life that had triggered his alarm (Law specified a Scout was to flee in such an instance) he adjusted his weight and rose up to his waiting ship.
Minutes later he had passed the world’s satellite and was in view of his parent craft.
The Commander’s first action was to order the Scout flogged before his comrades as an example of what awaited those who became lax in the performance of important duties. His second was to assemble the Council of Experts. When the eight old men had taken their places about the table, the Commander saluted them in the name of Law, then summoned his aide. “Is Decontamination through?”
It is, sir.
“Then have the findings brought in.”
The officer ran from the room and returned in a moment with the Scout’s bulging sack. Gently he placed it in the center of the round table before the council. After saluting he took his leave again.
“Gentlemen,” began the Commander, “we are met again to pass judgment on a corrupt, life-harboring planet. By the authority vested in me through the line of my father I charge you with the voice of Law.” And so on, and on, with the ancient words of the ritual. The eight old experts hardly listened. They had sat through countless identical sessions during the hundreds of years of their lives. Theirs was but to view the oddities that would presently be arranged before them, make mental records of their descriptions, and offer one or two tentative guesses as to the nature of the articles. But in any event, the action that followed would be the same. The creatures responsible for the articles would shortly be snuffed out … in the glorious and awful name of Law.
So they hardly listened.
When the Commander had finished with the rites of the occasion he unsnapped the bag and after peering within it gingerly brought out the Scout’s first find. Only now did the old men appear to take much notice. A few even leaned forward slightly. All eyes centered on what their Commander held.
“A totemic object?” asked the youngest.
“No. A lever,” said the eldest.
“For killing,” added the next.
“But it was made by machine,” put in a fourth.
For a moment they were silent. The Commander placed the “machine-made killing-lever” on the table. It described a short little half-roll, bringing the printing into view.
“A religious design,” said the youngest. “Obviously pagan.”
“But rather we
ll worked.”
No one found anything further to say, so the Commander brought forth from the bag the next object. A mild flurry of interest ensued when it was discovered that this soft globular thing bore the same “religious design.” But the sages would not venture an opinion as to the thing’s purpose, so the Commander took out the package of white cylinders.
Only the next to the eldest made any comment. He claimed that he had seen such articles in his youth, brought out from a system of three worlds that swung above a nova. The white things there, he reminisced, were units of value, useful in bartering. They were designed to be spent quickly, lest the stuffing fall out. The other experts agreed that these were no doubt also moneys.
The Commander had been listening with but half an ear. Privately, he had long considered the experts to be but a muttering pack of senile dolts … dead weight, useless cargo on the ship. They worked not, neither did they breed. But Law demanded their presence. The Law, he mused, seemed strange at times.
He discovered the Council was waiting for him. Frowning to cover his embarrassment, he took out the last of the Scout’s finds. For a moment all of them were struck by the bright colors on the flat surface. The one old man reached out a trembling hand. “Records,” he murmured incredulously. “Records such as our own race is said to have once made, long long ago before Law.” Reverently, he examined the cover, then with remarkable agility for one so decrepit he jumped to his feet and flung the thing from him. His face twitched with horror.
The others shocked and disbelieving, fell to examining the rest of the new articles. In a moment, cries of alarm filled the council room. Chairs were upset, dignity forgotten. Only the eldest retained his composure, although with difficulty, for he could hardly manage to control the palsied shaking of his hands. The astonished Commander leaned over his shoulder and watched as the ancient turned the pages.
What he saw made the blood drum in his ears, made his vision swim, and only faintly did he hear the old one’s croaking words. “Praise to Law, which we so carelessly accepted, for Law has saved us from the fiendish denizens of this planet. Had we attempted to exterminate them, their space armadas would have taken instant revenge. For they are obviously mightier than we.” He put down the bright record of space craft vaster than the one which they occupied and took up another. On its cover was depicted a world being blasted into flaming wreckage, and within was shown the pictorial history of a space fleet, engaged in repelling an alien invasion, and who followed up their successful repulse by annihilating the entire system of the aliens.
Five more of the record books did they examine before the Commander’s stunned mind at last reeled beneath the hideous concepts and he could look no more. Dumbly, he managed to reach the phones and order the ship thrown into emergency drive to some far and lost point in space and dimension.
And as he waited for the shuddering wrench that signaled inter-dimensional shift, he tried to forget the horrors they had so narrowly escaped: creatures who could make themselves invisible, who had mastered space travel, who worked in magic more powerful than that of Laws, who could whiff out entire solar systems, who could survive incredible mishaps and hardships. Creatures who were no less than gods!
A wave of fear tore at the Commander as the glittering Moon faded away. Eternal nothingness of grey enclosed the ship… .
The sun was up when Eddie recovered consciousness. Stiff and cold, he sat and looked around sleepily a moment before remembering. Then, as he saw Rags sitting before him, tail wagging happily, it all began to come back: Last night, sometime; humming lights above the tree house, someone moving about up there, himself sneaking up to see, then … nothing. He must have tripped and knocked himself out, somehow. Eddie snatched up the .22 and aimed it at the tree. “Whoever’s up there,” he said, getting to his feet, “had better come on out!”
Nothing happened.
Eddie bent down cautiously, his eyes still fixed on the tree house, picked up a rock and hurled it through the shanty’s open door. A bird fluttered from die gnarled oak, sailed across the morning meadow chirping angrily.
“This is your last chance. Come on out, or I’m comin’ up and get you!” The bird’s being there made him quite sure that everything was all right, so after a moment he pulled the knotted rope from its concealment in a cleft of the tree and went up hand over hand.
A strange odor lingered inside the shack. Something like … Eddie sniffed, frowned … something like a freshly blown fuse, but outside of that nothing seemed amiss at first. Then he discovered his softball and bat were missing. He found he didn’t care too much. The season was over anyway; and besides, hunting and riding and fishing were more fun.
He looked further.
The cigarettes! He hoped the thief wouldn’t snitch on him to Dad. But that didn’t make too much sense, he realized. The thief—a tramp, probably—was far away by now, maybe at this very minute trying to trade the ball and bat for a meal or a drink.
And those humming fights? Even now he wasn’t too sure he’d seen them. Stars, probably. The Little Dipper, or maybe fireflies, or lightning. Sure.
He turned to go. The sun told him it was almost seven o’clock. Mother would be furious if she found him out in the morning without having dressed properly, or eaten.
It was then he saw that something else was missing, but because it was so late he didn’t stop to worry. “Mandrake The Magician,”
“The Invisible Boys,”
“Buck Rogers,”
“Bat Man” … they were all old comic books. He’d finished with them months ago.
Eddie clambered down the rope, and seconds later he and Rags were joyfully racing along the trail that led to home.
It was a beautiful morning.
DEAR DEVIL
ERIC FRANK RUSSELL
★ ★
Here is a tale which may or may not seem to you to belong in a collection of stories about Man’s attempt to conquer space. In it, the people who have adventured into space are not men at all, but another race of mortals—one which might appear at first glance to be more horrible than human. And yet, if human beings are going to move among the stars and meet beings as strange to them as they themselves will seem to the inhabitants of other worlds, they must be prepared to believe that aliens are a part of life, too.
Fander, the Martian in this tale, is a creature far removed from anything that Earth people have ever seen or experienced. He is a poet and an artist, not a scientist; a Martian so far removed from the technical skills of his own world that he does not know what makes the devices of his people work. How he found that out is part of this story.
Behind this tale is an idea of real importance: the notion of what actually ties all thinking life together. Mr. Russell knows that this common denominator is not scientific knowledge but the ability to share the experience of being alive. Even though Fander is not at all like anything on Terra, he does not doubt that the children and the adults of the new planet where he has cast his lot will find out that he feels, deep down, very much like them.
One of the best things about science fiction is that not all of its material is scientific. Our science is created by us, and our fiction is really no more than the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. So perhaps the Martian in this story is only a human being in disguise. If so, he is very wise. He knows that there is something wonderful in almost everything, if you can learn to see it—and when you learn to see it you have to believe in what you have seen. He knows, too, that when you really feel sure that what you have seen is important, you must stick with it.
This kind of understanding does not come from equations and charts. It comes from inside the people who have it. When human beings set their feet on the ladder to the stars, it will be a greater and more hopeful adventure if there is someone like Fander along.
★ ★
The first Martian vessel descended upon Earth with the slow, stately fall of a grounded balloon. It did resemble a large balloon in that it
was spherical and had a strange buoyancy out of keeping with its metallic construction. Beyond this superficial appearance all similarity to anything Terrestrial ceased.
There were no rockets, no crimson venturis, no external projections other than several solaradiant distorting grids which boosted the ship in any desired direction through the cosmic field. There were no observation ports. All viewing was done through a transparent band running right around the fat belly of the sphere. The bluish, nightmarish crew were assembled behind that band, surveying the world with great multi-faceted eyes.
They gazed through the band in utter silence as they examined this world which was Terra. Even if they had been capable of speech they would have said nothing. But none among them had a talking faculty in any sonic sense. At this quiet moment none needed it.
The scene outside was one of untrammeled desolation. Scraggy blue-green grass clung to tired ground right away to the horizon scarred by ragged mountains. Dismal bushes struggled for life here and there, some with the pathetic air of striving to become trees as once their ancestors had been. To the right, a long, straight scar through the grass betrayed the sterile lumpiness of rocks at odd places. Too rugged and too narrow ever to have been a road, it suggested no more than the desiccating remnants of a long-gone wall. And over all this loomed a ghastly sky.
Captain Skhiva eyed his crew, spoke to them with his sign-talking tentacle. The alternative was contact-telepathy which required physical touch.
“It is obvious that we are out of luck. We could have done no worse had we landed on the empty satellite. However, it is safe to go out. Anyone who wishes to explore a little while may do so.”
Space, Space, Space - Stories about the Time when Men will be Adventuring to the Stars Page 9
