The Fredric Brown Megapack: 33 Classic Science Fiction Stories

by Fredric Brown

  The ball that was Earth began to glow. Brightly to shine.

  “You see the intelligence that rules Earth,” said the voice. “The sum of the black and the white and the red, that are one, divided only as the lobes of a brain are divided, the trinity that is one.”

  The glowing ball and the stars behind it faded, and the darkness became deeper darkness and then there was dim light, growing brighter, and he was back in the room with the man standing at the desk.

  “You saw,” said the man whom he hated. “But you do not understand. You ask, what you have seen, what is The Brightly Shining? It is a group intelligence, the true intelligence of Earth, one intelligence among three in the Solar system, one among many in the universe.

  “What, then, is man? Men are pawns, in games of—to you—unbelievable complexity, between the red and the black, the white and the black, for amusement. Played by one part of an organism against another part, to while away an instant of eternity. There are vaster games, played between galaxies. Not with man.

  “Man is a parasite peculiar to Earth, which tolerates his presence for a little while. He exists nowhere else in the cosmos, and he does not exist here for long. A little while, a few chessboard wars, which he thinks he fights himself—You begin to understand.”

  The man at the desk smiled.

  “You want to know of yourself. Nothing is less important. A move was made, before Lodi. The opportunity was there for a move of the red; a stronger, more ruthless personality was needed; it was a turning point in history—which means in the game. Do you understand now? A pinch-hitter was put in to become Emperor.”

  He managed two words. “And then?”

  “The Brightly Shining does not kill. You had to be put somewhere, sometime. Long later a man named George Vine was killed in an accident; his body was still usable. George Vine had not been insane, but he had had a Napoleonic complex. The transference was amusing.”

  “No doubt.” Again it was impossible to reach the man at the desk. The hatred itself was a wall between them. “Then George Vine is dead?”

  “Yes. And you, because you knew a little too much, must go mad so that you will know nothing. Knowing the truth will drive you mad.”

  “No!”

  The instrument smiled.

  VIII

  The room, the cube of light, dimmed; it seemed to tilt. Still standing, he was going over backward, his position becoming horizontal instead of vertical.

  His weight was on his back and under him was the soft-hard smoothness of his bunk, the roughness of a gray sheet blanket. And he could move; he sat up.

  Had he been dreaming? Had he really been outside the asylum? He held up his hands, touched one to the other, and they were wet with something sticky. So was the front of his shirt and the thighs and knees of his trousers.

  And his shoes were on.

  The blood was there from climbing the wall. And now the analgesia was leaving, and pain was beginning to come into his hands, his chest, his stomach and his legs. Sharp biting pain.

  He said aloud. “I am not mad. I am not mad.” Was he screaming it?

  A voice said, “No. Not yet.” Was it the voice that had been here in the room before? Or was it the voice of the man who had stood in the lighted room? Or had both been the same voice?

  It said, “Ask, ‘What is man?’”

  Mechanically, he asked it.

  “Man is a blind alley in evolution, who came too late to compete, who has always been controlled and played with by The Brightly Shining, which was old and wise before man walked erect.

  “Man is a parasite upon a planet populated before he came, populated by a Being that is one and many, a billion cells but a single mind, a single intelligence, a single will—as is true of every other populated planet in the universe.

  “Man is a joke, a clown, a parasite. He is nothing; he will be less.”

  “Come and go mad.”

  He was getting out of bed again; he was walking. Through the doorway of the cubicle, along the ward. To the door that led to the corridor; a thin crack of light showed under it. But this time his hand did not reach out for the knob. Instead he stood there facing the closed door, and it began to glow; slowly it became light and visible.

  As though from somewhere an invisible spotlight played upon it, the door became a visible rectangle in the surrounding blackness; as brightly visible as the crack under it.

  The voice said, “You see before you a cell of your ruler, a cell unintelligent in itself, yet a tiny part of a unit which is intelligent, one of a million units which make up the intelligence which rules the earth—and you. And which earth-wide intelligence is one of a million intelligences which rule the universe.”

  “The door? I don’t—”

  The voice spoke no more; it had withdrawn, but somehow inside his mind was the echo of silent laughter.

  He leaned closer and saw what he was meant to see. An ant was crawling up the door.

  His eyes followed it, and numbing horror crawled apace, up his spine. A hundred things that had been told and shown him suddenly fitted into a pattern, a pattern of sheer horror. The black, the white, the red; the black ants, the white ants, the red ants; the players with men, separate lobes of a single group brain, the intelligence that was one. Man an accident, a parasite, a pawn; a million planets in the universe inhabited each by an insect race that was a single intelligence for the planet—and all the intelligences together were the single cosmic intelligence that was—God!

  The one-syllable word wouldn’t come. He went mad, instead.

  He beat upon the now—dark door with his bloody hands, with his knees, his face, with himself, although already he had forgotten why, had forgotten what he wanted to crush.

  He was raving mad—dementia praecox, not paranoia—when they released his body by putting it into a strait jacket, released it from frenzy to quietude.

  He was quietly mad—paranoia, not dementia praecox—when they released him as sane eleven months later.

  Paranoia, you see, is a peculiar affliction; it has no physical symptoms, it is merely the presence of a fixed delusion. A series of metrazol shocks had cleared up the dementia praecox and left only the fixed delusion that he was George Vine, a reporter.

  The asylum authorities thought he was, too, so the delusion was not recognized as such and they released him and gave him a certificate to prove he was sane.

  He married Clare; he still works at the Blade—for a man named Candler. He still plays chess with his cousin, Charlie Doerr. He still sees—for periodic checkups—both Dr. Irving and Dr. Randolph.

  Which of them smiles inwardly? What good would it do you to know? Yes it was, is, one of those four.

  It doesn’t matter. Don’t you understand? Nothing matters!

  SENTRY

  He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and he was fifty thousand light-years from home.

  A strange blue sun gave light and the gravity, twice what he was used to, made every movement difficult.

  But in tens of thousands of years this part of war hadn’t changed. The flyboys were fine with their sleek spaceships and their fancy weapons. When the chips are down, though, it was still the foot soldier, the infantry, that had to take the ground and hold it, foot by bloody foot. Like this damned planet of a star he’d never heard of until they’d landed him there. And now it was sacred ground because the aliens were there too. The aliens, the only other intelligent race in the Galaxy…cruel, hideous and repulsive monsters.

  Contact had been made with them near the center of the Galaxy, after the slow, difficult colonization of a dozen thousand planets; and it had been war at sight; they’d shot without even trying to negotiate, or to make peace.

  Now, planet by bitter planet, it was being fought out.

  He was wet
and muddy and hungry and cold, and the day was raw with a high wind that hurt his eyes. But the aliens were trying to infiltrate and every sentry post was vital.

  He stayed alert, gun ready. Fifty thousand light-years from home, fighting on a strange world and wondering if he’d ever live to see home again.

  And then he saw one of them crawling toward him. He drew a bead and fired. The alien made that strange horrible sound they all make, then lay still.

  He shuddered at the sound and sight of the alien lying there. One ought to be able to get used to them after a while, but he’d never been able to. Such repulsive creatures they were, with only two arms and two legs, ghastly white skins and no scales.

  ETAOIN SHRDLU

  It was rather funny for a while, the business about Ronson’s Linotype. But it began to get a bit too sticky for comfort well before the end. And despite the fact that Ronson came out ahead on the deal, I’d have never sent him the little guy with the pimple, if I’d guessed what was going to happen. Fabulous profits or not, poor Ronson got too many gray hairs out of it.

  “You’re Mr. Walter Merold?” asked the little guy with the pimple. He’d called at the desk of the hotel where I live, and I’d told them to send him on up.

  I admitted my identity, and he said, “Glad to know you, Mr. Merold. I’m—” and he gave me his name, but I can’t remember now what it was. I’m usually good at remembering names.

  I told him I was delighted to meet him and what did he want, and he started to tell me. I interrupted him before he got very far, though.

  “Somebody gave you a wrong steer,” I told him. “Yes, I’ve been a printing technician, but I’m retired. Anyway, do you know that the cost of getting special Linotype mats cut would be awfully high? If it’s only one page you want printed with those special characters, you’d do a lot better to have somebody hand-letter it for you and then get a photographic reproduction in zinc.”

  “But that wouldn’t do, Mr. Merold. Not at all. You see, the thing is a secret. Those I represent— But skip that. Anyway, I daren’t let anyone see it, as they would have to, to make a zinc.”

  Just another nut, I thought, and looked at him closely.

  He didn’t look nutty. He was rather ordinary-looking on the whole, although he had a foreign—rather an Asiatic—look about him, somehow, despite the fact that he was blond and fair-skinned. And he had a pimple on his forehead, in dead center just above the bridge of the nose. You’ve seen ones like it on statues of Buddha, and Orientals call it the pimple of wisdom and it’s something special.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Well,” I pointed out, “you can’t have the matrices cut for Linotype work without letting somebody see the characters you want on them, can you? And whoever runs the machine will also see—”

  “Oh, but I’ll do that myself,” said the little guy with the pimple. (Ronson and I later called him the L.G.W.T.P., which stands for “little guy with the pimple,” because Ronson couldn’t remember his name, either, but I’m getting ahead of my story.) “Certainly the cutter will see them, but he’ll see them as individual characters, and that won’t matter. Then the actual setting of the type on the Linotype I can do myself. Someone can show me how to run one enough for me to set up one page—just a score of lines, really. And it doesn’t have to be printed here. Just the type is all I’ll want. I don’t care what it costs me.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “I’ll send you to the proper man at Merganthaler, the Linotype people. They’ll cut your mats. Then, if you want privacy and access to a Linotype, go see George Ronson. He runs a little county biweekly right here in town. For a fair price, he’ll turn his shop over to you for long enough for you to set your type.”

  And that was that. Two weeks later, George Ronson and I went fishing on a Tuesday morning while the L.G.W.T.P. used George’s Linotype to assemble the weird-looking mats he’d just received by air express from Mergenthaler. George had, the afternoon before, showed the little guy how to run the Linotype.

  We caught a dozen fish apiece, and I remember that Ronson chuckled and said that made thirteen fish for him because the L.G.W.T.P. was paying him fifty bucks cash money just for one morning’s use of his shop.

  And everything was in order when we got back except that George had to pick brass out of the hellbox because the L.G.W.T.P. had smashed his new brass matrices when he’d finished with them, and hadn’t known that one shouldn’t throw brass in with the type metal that gets melted over again.

  The next time I saw George was after his Saturday edition was off the press. I immediately took him to task.

  “Listen,” I said, “that stuff about misspelling words and using bum grammar on purpose isn’t funny anymore. Not even in a country newspaper. Were you by any chance trying to make your newsletters from the surrounding towns sound authentic by following copy out the window, or what?”

  Ronson looked at me kind of funny and said, “Well—yes.”

  “Yes, what?” I wanted to know. “You mean you were deliberately trying to be funny, or following copy out the—”

  He said, “Come on around and I’ll show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  “What I’m going to show you,” he said, not very lucidly. “You can still set type, can’t you?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Come on, then,” he said firmly. “You’re a Linotype technician, and besides you got me into this.”

  “Into what?”

  “Into this,” he said, and wouldn’t tell me a thing more until we got there. Then he rummaged in all pigeonholes of his desk and pulled out a piece of dead copy and gave it to me.

  His face had a kind of wistful look. “Walter,” he said, “maybe I’m nuts, and I want to find out. I guess running a local paper for twenty-two years and doing all the work myself and trying to please everybody is enough to get a man off his rocker, but I want to find out.”

  I looked at him, and I looked at the copy sheet he’d handed to me. It was just an ordinary sheet of foolscap and it was in handwriting that I recognized as that of Hank Rogg, the hardware merchant over at Hales Corners who sends in items from there. There were the usual misspellings one would expect from Hank, but the item itself wasn’t news to me. It read: “The weding of H.M. Klaflin and Miss Margorie Burke took place yesterday evening at the home of the bride. The bridesmades were—”

  I quit reading and looked up at George and wondered what he was getting at. I said, “So what? This was two days ago, and I attended the wedding myself. There’s nothing funny about—”

  “Listen, Walter,” he said, “set that for me, will you? Go over and sit down at the Linotype and set that whole thing. It won’t run over ten or twelve lines.”

  “Sure, but why?”

  “Because— Well, just set it, Walter. Then I’ll tell you why.” So I went out in the shop and sat down at the Linotype, and I ran a couple of pi lines to get the feel of the keyboard again, and then I put the copy on the clipboard and started. I said, “Hey, George, Marjorie spells her name with a j, doesn’t she, instead of a g?”

  And George said, “Yeah,” in a funny tone of voice.

  I ran off the rest of the squib, and then looked up and said, “Well?”

  He came across and lifted the stick out of the machine and read the slugs upside down like all printers read type, and he sighed. He said, “Then it wasn’t me. Lookit, Walter.”

  He handed me the stick, and I read the type, or started to.

  It read: “The weding of H.M. Klaflin and Miss Margorie Burke took place yesterday evening at the home of the bride. The bridesmades were—”

  I grinned. “Good thing I don’t have to set type for a living anymore, George. I’m slipping; three errors in the first five lines. But what about it? Now tell me why you wanted me to set it.”

  He said, “Set the first c
ouple lines over again, Walter. I—I want you to find out for yourself.”

  I looked up at him and he looked so darned serious and worried that I didn’t argue. I turned back to the keyboard and started out again: “The wedding of—” My eyes went up to the assembly slide and read the characters on the front of the mats that had dropped, and I saw that it read, “The weding of—”

  There’s one advantage about a Linotype you may not know if you’re not a printer. You can always make a correction in a line if you make it before you push the lever that sends in the line of matrices to cast the slug. You just drop the mats you need for the correction and put them in the right place by hand.

  So I pushed the d key to get another d matrix to correct the misspelled word “weding”—and nothing happened. The keycam was going around all right and the click sounded O.K., but no d mat dropped. I looked up top to see if there was a distributor stop and there wasn’t.

  I stood up. “The d channel’s jammed,” I said. To be sure before I started to work on it, I held the d key down a minute and listened to the series of clicks while the keyboard cam went round.

  But no d matrix dropped.

  “Skip it, Walter,” said George Ronson quietly. “Send in the line and keep on going.”

  I sat down again and decided to humor him. If I did, I’d probably find out what he was leading up to quicker than if I argued. I finished the first line and started the second and came to the word “Margorie” on copy. I hit the M key, the a, r, j, o—and happened to glance at the assembly slide. The matrices there read “Margo—”

  I said, “Damn,” and hit the j key again to get a j mat to substitute for the g, and nothing happened. The j channel must be jammed. I held the j key down and no mat dropped. I said, “Damn,” again and stood up to look over the escapement mechanism.