The Alien MEGAPACK®

by Talmage Powell

Reda Dani was worried.

  He puffed on his pipe and failed to get any smoke. Why was it, he wondered, that a culture that could devise an overdrive for interstellar flight could not invent a pipe that would stay lit? He toyed with the notion of dropping the whole pipe into the vaporizer, but rejected the notion. Primarily to prove a point to himself, he refilled the mutinous artifact and tried again.

  He wiped his hands nervously and checked his watch.

  Four hours to zero. Time for the final check.

  He walked through the great ship, his stomach a cold knot inside of him. The question he had lived with for years crawled endlessly through his brain, a monstrous worm twisted into a mocking interrogation mark—

  Had he made the right decision?

  The problem of picking a single man to represent your culture in a crucial situation was virtually beyond solution, and Reda Dani knew it. He had wrestled with it so long that he knew every angle, every consideration, every argument.

  The only thing he didn’t know for sure was the answer.

  He listened to his heels clicking down the corridor and knew that it was too late to back down now. They would have to go through with it.

  It was no great task to think of someone you knew who was gifted along one particular line—a mathematician, an artist, a sociologist. It was not even inordinately difficult to find individuals who might have talent and training in all three fields. Conceivably, some fantastic individual, somewhere, somehow, might be an expert in ten fields, or even twenty.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t good enough.

  There was, certainly, an excellent possibility that any good man could successfully represent his people in the coming encounter; maybe a diplomat could do it. The catch was that “an excellent possibility” wasn’t adequate for this situation. There was too much at stake.

  You had to be sure.

  Easy enough to state, but how did you go about it? You needed a representative who was capable of responding to any imaginable trickery or force. Unpleasant as it was, you had to plan on the possibility that the people of Earth would not keep faith. You had to be ready to take advantage of either the worst or the best—whichever offered itself.

  The characteristics of the required representative could be listed briefly. One, he had to make a good impression. Two, he had to be prepared for anything, insofar as possible, so that he could not be outwitted. Three, he had to be able to make a complete and accurate report back to his superiors; no one person, naturally, could be entrusted with the power of decision in such a case. Fourth and last, he had to have some sort of built-in defense mechanism, so that he could not possibly be made to reveal any classified information, no matter what pressures were brought to bear.

  Of course, no such human being existed.

  Once you accepted that fact, there was only one thing to do.

  * * * *

  Reda Dani passed through the security check and into the special control room, his pipe still going. He hoped that was a good omen.

  It had better be.

  He nodded to his co-workers and looked around. The control room was ready.

  There was a large, spherical screen that filled the entire center of the chamber—blank now. Around the screen were fifty chairs, each with a small control panel on one arm. The potential occupants of the chairs milled around in a fog of blue smoke and fast conversation—semantics experts, philosophers, chemists, anthropologists, psychologists, generals, writers, doctors, corporation managers, diplomats.

  Above the spherical screen, placed so that the observer could look down into it, was another chair, completely surrounded by integration controls that coordinated the information from below.

  Reda Dani looked at it, nervously. His chair.

  He climbed up into it and settled himself. He clamped on his headphones and switched on the master control panel. He put down his pipe, reluctantly, and picked up an auxiliary phone.

  “Trial run,” he said.

  The others took their places, silent now, and cut in their sets. The spherical screen flashed white and came to life. It showed four rather drab green walls, a ceiling, a floor.

  A storeroom.

  Reda Dani steadied his hands and moved his fingers over the control panel. There wasn’t a sound. Gradually, the scene in the spherical screen shifted, swaying very slightly, just as a view does through the eyes of a walking man.

  There was a door. It opened and shut.

  A corridor, long and featureless, moving up and down. Another door—

  A polite knock. The door of the special control room clicked open. The view in the screen switched to the room they were sitting in. Reda Dani saw himself clearly, pale and nervous over the control panel.

  A space-suited figure came into the room, carefully. Behind the glass in his helmet could be seen a rather pleasant face with an easy smile.

  He stopped, respectfully.

  “My name is Hada Nire,” the figure said in a well-modulated voice. It spoke in English. “May I be of some assistance?”

  There was a buzz of approval from the assembled men.

  Reda Dani relaxed a little.

  There was no denying it—the robot was well made.

  * * * *

  Reda Dani began to worry in earnest again after they landed the ship just outside the restricted area on Mars.

  They started the space-suited assemblage of radio controls, tri-di, and testing apparatus toward the tiny building in the desert where the meeting was to take place. Reda Dani sat tensely in his chair, watching every move in the spherical screen. The robot walked gracefully through the shifting sands. He looked convincing.

  But he wasn’t human, of course.

  What if they find out? Reda Dani asked himself. What if I’ve thrown away our only chance, just out of fear?

  The problem was exactly analogous to hunting for a house to live in. If you couldn’t find precisely what you wanted, at the price you could afford to pay, there was only one course of action open to you.

  Build your own.

  The thing they had called Hada Nire wasn’t really a robot; he was not a mechanical man with a mind of his own. Rather, he was an integrated synthesis of fifty remote minds—fifty men, each with a control panel, each able to take over in any conceivable situation, each seeing out of his eyes in the spherical screen and hearing every word by radio.

  Hada Nire, whatever else he may have been, was no fool.

  Reda Dani watched him, step by step, on automatic now. He saw him walk through the desert. He saw the little building come into view before him.

  Beyond the building, a dark figure. Walking.

  The man from Earth.

  Who had they sent?

  * * * *

  The final step in the scientific method is known as the solution. From the solution, if all has gone well, may often be derived certain General Principles…

  * * * *

  Ralph Hawley paced up and down the evaluation room, alternately staring at his watch and smoking cigarettes in short, jerky puffs. The others sat nervously in their chairs, watching him.

  “What’s he doing?” he asked again. “Where in the living hell can he be?”

  Lee Gomez, by profession a philosopher and by temperament not given to impatience or, indeed, to haste in any known form, said, “Park yourself, Ralph. Svend isn’t overdue yet, and he’s no doubt doing just what he’s supposed to be doing—to wit, contacting our non-Earthly friends.”

  “Ummmm,” Ralph Hawley said, hooking his thumbs in his suspenders. Then, sensing the inadequacy of the phrase, he added: “Three cheers for Svend, he’s true blue.”

  Damn Gomez anyway—he was right entirely too often, and Hawley knew it, and it annoyed him.

  “My professional opinion,” put in Dr. Weinstein, “is that we are all suffering from a no
ne-too-rare scientific malady. I don’t wish to be quoted on this, gentlemen, but my diagnosis is Gestaltus adrenalinfusorium—wholesale jitters. As a remedy, I propose a spot of medicinal brandy.”

  Ralph Hawley ran a hand through his lank, graying hair. “Not yet, Doc. Not that we all can’t use a snort or two.”

  He continued his pacing, which was in itself highly unusual. Ralph Hawley, under normal circumstances, was anything but a nervous man. He was tall, rather spare, with a pleasantly horse-like face. He was addicted to sloppy clothes, infrequent speech, and relaxed movements. By trade, he was a social psychologist working in the field of mass communications, and he was the last person in the world that he himself would have selected to head the project.

  “Where is he?” he asked again, lighting another cigarette.

  A red light flashed. A buzzer sounded.

  A speaker said: “Svend Graves has entered the ship. He has not been harmed. He reports a non-antagonistic contact with some complications. As instructed, we have sent him on to the evaluation room. This is Major Bernatzik, Intelligence.”

  A knock on the door. A pause.

  The door opened and Svend Graves walked in. Every eye in the room was on him. He took it well, never losing his poise for an instant.

  “I’m quite all right,” he said calmly. “You can relax.”

  No one relaxed.

  Svend Graves walked up to Ralph Hawley, smiling. “It all went off like clockwork, Ralph,” he said. “I couldn’t get a good look at their man, but there was no trouble. I’m ready to give a full report, from the beginning.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Svend,” Ralph Hawley said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Ralph Hawley sighed. Then, quickly, he reached out and turned Svend Graves off.

  Hawley stripped off Svend’s shirt and opened the panel in his chest. He took out the cameras, the recorders, the analyzers, the dials, the data cards.

  “Print these up and get a reading,” he told the specialists.

  The thing that had been Svend Graves stood motionless in the center of the room, looking at nothing.

  It was four hours later.

  The last film had been studied, the last card interpreted, the last sentence broken down and evaluated.

  There was a long, shocked silence.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Ralph Hawley said finally.

  There was a chorus of voices:

  “They didn’t trust us!”

  “They tried to trick us!”

  “They sent a remote-controlled robot—”

  “Of all the crummy stunts—”

  Ralph Hawley sat down in a chair.

  “Don’t you see what this means?” he said.

  The others saw it too.

  “They tried the identical trick on us that we tried on them,” a psychologist said. “Roughly identical, anyway.”

  “They worked out the same basic solution to the same problem,” an anthropologist said.

  “They’re our kind, damn them,” said Gomez, the philosopher. “Look at them—insecure, scared, tricky, smart, capable, baby-faced liars.”

  Ralph Hawley closed his eyes.

  There was only one basic solution to the problem, of course, if you assumed that the two cultures saw the problem in the same terms. No human being could be saddled with a job like that; it was unthinkable. And so the aliens had sent a robot, and Earth had sent—

  Svend Graves.

  An artificial humanoid mechanism, twenty years in the making, designed to perform with inhuman skill in a contact situation. Designed to believe it was a human being, so that it had no part to play. Designed with built-in recording devices, skilled behavior patterns—but lacking classified data.

  A robot and an android.

  Two representatives from two very similar cultures. “Gentlemen,” said Ralph Hawley, “we are equals.”

  The red light flashed again.

  The speaker said: “Hawley, we’ve got Reda Dani on the line. He’s calling from the alien ship. Says he wants to talk to you.”

  “Put him on in here,” Hawley said.

  The communicator in the room came to life. Reda Dani looked at him and smiled.

  Ralph Hawley smiled back.

  “I see we didn’t fool you,” Reda Dani said.

  “No. And I guess we didn’t fox you any, either.”

  “No,” agreed Reda Dani. “Damned clever, though.”

  “Thank you. That stunt of yours was pretty neat, too.”

  A pause.

  “Look, Ralph,” Reda Dani said. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Why not come on over yourself? The drinks are on me, and maybe we can get some real talking done.”

  Ralph Hawley didn’t hesitate. “You’ve made yourself a deal, Reda,” he said. “See you in half an hour.”

  He switched off the communicator.

  The other specialists were laughing and clapping each other on the back.

  The tension was gone. They had not failed.

  * * * *

  The others gathered in a knot around him as he stepped into the port of the space shuttle that would carry him to Reda Dani’s ship.

  Everyone was trying to shake his hand and wish him well.

  Just before he left, an aide appeared with a case of Hawley’s own liquor, which was respectfully loaded aboard the shuttle.

  “I thought Reda asked you to have a drink on him,” Gomez objected. “Why take your own liquor?”

  Ralph Hawley grinned.

  “A man can’t be too careful,” he said, and closed the port behind him.

  THE BEES OF DEATH, by Robert Moore Williams

  Originally published in Fantastic Adventures, October 1949.

  The beginning was commonplace, stodgy, unimaginative. Necessarily this story must start with a man digging a ditch, a dull, uninspiring, back-breaking task. This was what Zeke Tuttle thought. He was digging the ditch.

  Zeke Tuttle would have preferred to be off fishing, or just loafing in the shade, or doing anything except dig a ditch, but Professor Featherstone wanted the ditch dug, and Zeke, caught without a dime to his name, had agreed to dig it, a fact which he now regretted. It was a hot afternoon and the June sun was broiling down. Added to the discomfort from the hot sunshine was the fact that the ditch had to be dug in hard-pan.

  Zeke called it hard-pan. In reality it was glacial till, although Zeke didn’t know this. In the long ago, a retreating glacier had deposited clay, pebbles, and small stones here, and this combination had formed into a compact mass almost as hard as stone. Zeke had heard of glaciers but he did not know there had ever been any of these huge beds of ice here in New York state. If anybody had told him that 25,000 years in the past the rugged hills surrounding him had been covered with ice a mile thick, Zeke would have called the man a liar.

  “Ain’t never been that much ice nowhere,” he would have said.

  Scientific facts had not yet penetrated to the circles in which Zeke moved. One fact, scientific or otherwise, came home with a bang when Zeke’s pick uncovered what looked like a cannonball in the bottom of the ditch he was digging.

  Finding the cannonball pleased him. Professor Featherstone might give him a dollar for a genuine cannonball. Zeke had no idea how a cannonball would get buried under three feet of glacial till.

  “Maybe it was shot here in the Revolution,” he thought, bending to pick it up.

  Swish!

  * * * *

  The cannonball didn’t wait for him to pick it up. It jumped out of the ditch on its own accord. It leaped ten feet into the air, then looped outward and gently came to rest on the ground.

  Eyes almost popping out of his head, Zeke stared at it. He had no difficulty in deciding what he was going to do. “Run!” his legs said. He hopped out of his di
tch like a rabbit smoked out of its hole, and headed for a patch of trees nearby. For a tall, gawky, ungainly individual, he got up remarkable speed in a short distance. Panting, he dived behind the nearest tree.

  He thought he had jarred the cannonball with his pick and it was going to explode. He waited for the explosion. It didn’t come. He poked his head around the tree and looked back.

  The ball lay on the ground where it had fallen. Zeke watched it for several minutes. Cannonballs were equipped with fuses, he knew, and the fuse in this one might still be burning. He waited ten minutes.

  “If she was goin’ to explode, she would have already done it by now,” he thought. He went back to the ball.

  It lay on the ground. He nudged it with his shovel, rolled it over looking for the fuse hole.

  There wasn’t any hole for the fuse.

  The ball was made of lead, he saw. Black lead. The metal had crystallized from age but it was obviously lead. Zeke looked down in the ditch. There was a round pocket where the ball had lain.

  He scratched his head.

  “Now how in the heck did that thing jump out of that ditch?” he wondered.

  He walked around the ball several times, staring suspiciously at it. He stirred it with his toe, rolling it over and over. Since it showed no inclination to do any more jumping, he ventured to pick it up. He got another surprise.

  A ball the size of this one, made out of solid lead, ought to have weighed thirty to forty pounds. When he lifted it, Zeke expected it to weigh that much.

  It didn’t weigh five pounds.

  “Must be holler,” he thought. He shook it to see if he could hear anything rattling around in it. Nothing rattled. As to what he was going to do with it, there was only one answer: sell it to Featherstone and make himself a buck or two. The professor had been known to buy Indian arrowheads, stones, axes, and knives from farmers who had picked them up in their fields.

  Carrying the ball in his hands, he started up the slope of the hill to the house owned by the professor.

  “I’ll see if I can touch him for five bucks,” he decided.

  * * * *

  The house Featherstone occupied was built on a hillside and was hidden from casual view by a heavy growth of trees. If it had been on level ground it would have been four stories high, but since it was built on a hillside it never managed to reach a greater height than one story. On the first, or lower, level there was a garage, with space for three cars. On the next level, up and farther back on the hillside, was a large dining room and a kitchen. On the third level was a large living room, four bedrooms, and a bath. On the top terrace was a glassed-in compartment designed by the builder as a combination solarium and look-out point.