“You mean we will meet—Him?” General Dell asked.
“Don’t really know,” Fetterer said. “But I should think so. After all—I mean, you know what I mean.”
“But what should we wear?” General MacFee asked, in a sudden panic. “I mean, what does one wear?”
“What do angels wear?” Fetterer asked Ongin.
“I don’t know,” Ongin said.
“Robes, do you think?” General Dell offered.
“No,” Fetterer said sternly. “We will wear dress uniform, without decorations.”
The generals nodded. It was fitting.
And then it was time.
Gorgeous in their battle array, the legions of Hell advanced over the desert. Hellish pipes skirled, hollow drums pounded, and the great host moved forward.
In a blinding cloud of sand, General MacFee’s automatic tanks hurled themselves against the Satanic foe. Immediately, Dell’s automatic bombers screeched overhead, hurling their bombs on the massed horde of the damned. Fetterer thrust valiantly with his automatic cavalry.
Into this melee advanced Ongin’s automatic infantry, and metal did what metal could.
The hordes of the damned overflowed the front, ripping apart tanks and robots. Automatic mechanisms died, bravely defending a patch of sand. Dell’s bombers were torn from the skies by the fallen angels, led by Marchocias, his griffin’s wings beating the air into a tornado.
The thin, battered line of robots held, against gigantic presences that smashed and scattered them, and struck terror into the hearts of television viewers in homes around the world. Like men, like heroes, the robots fought, trying to force back the forces of evil.
Astaroth shrieked a command, and Behemoth lumbered forward. Bael, with a wedge of devils behind him, threw a charge at General Fetterer’s crumbling left flank. Metal screamed, electrons howled in agony at the impact.
Supreme General Fetterer sweated and trembled, a thousand miles behind the firing line. But steadily, nervelessly, he guided the pushing of buttons and the throwing of levers.
His superb corps didn’t disappoint him. Mortally damaged robots swayed to their feet and fought. Smashed, trampled, destroyed by the howling fiends, the robots managed to hold their line. Then the veteran Fifth Corps threw in a counterattack, and the enemy front was pierced.
A thousand miles behind the firing line, the generals guided the mopping up operations.
“The battle is won,” Supreme General Fetterer whispered, turning away from the television screen. “I congratulate you, gentlemen.”
The generals smiled wearily.
They looked at each other, then broke into a spontaneous shout. Armageddon was won, and the forces of Satan had been vanquished.
But something was happening on their screens.
“Is that—is that—” General MacFee began, and then couldn’t speak.
For the Presence was upon the battlefield, walking among the piles of twisted, shattered metal.
The generals were silent
The Presence touched a twisted robot.
Upon the smoking desert, the robots began to move. The twisted, scored, fused metals straightened.
The robots stood on their feet again.
“MacFee,” Supreme General Fetterer whispered. “Try your controls. Make the robots kneel or something.”
The general tried, but his controls were dead.
The bodies of the robots began to rise in the air. Around them were the angels of the Lord, and the robot tanks and soldiers and bombers floated upward, higher and higher.
“He’s saving them!” Ongin cried hysterically. “He’s saving the robots!”
“It’s a mistake!” Fetterer said. “Quick. Send a messenger to—no! We will go in person!”
And quickly a ship was commanded, and quickly they sped to the field of battle. But by then it was too late, for Armageddon was over, and the robots gone, and the Lord and his host departed.
Skulking Permit
Tom Fisher had no idea he was about to begin a criminal career. It was morning. The big red sun was just above the horizon, trailing its small yellow companion. The village, dny and precise, a unique white dot on the planet’s green expanse, glistened under its two midsummer suns.
Tom was just waking up inside his cottage. He was a tall, tanned young man, with his father’s oval eyes and his mother’s easygoing attitude toward exertion. He was in no hurry; there could be no fishing until the fall rains, and therefore no real work for a fisher. Until fall, he was going to loaf and mend his fishing poles.
“It’s supposed to have a red roof!” he heard Billy Painter shouting outside.
“Churches never have red roofs!” Ed Weaver shouted back.
Tom frowned. Not being involved, he had forgotten the changes that had come over the village in the last two weeks. He slipped on a pair of pants and sauntered out to the village square.
The first thing he saw when he entered the square was a large new sign, reading: NO ALIENS ALLOWED WITHIN CITY LIMITS. There were no aliens on the entire planet of New Delaware. There was nothing but forest, and this one village. The sign was purely a statement of policy.
The square itself contained a church, a jail, and a post office, all constructed in the last two frantic weeks and set in a neat row facing the market. No one knew what to do with these buildings; the village had gone along nicely without them for over two hundred years. But now, of course, they had to be built.
Ed Weaver was standing in front of the new church, squinting upward. Billy Painter was balanced precariously on the church’s steep roof, his blond mustache bristling indignantly. A small crowd had gathered.
“Damn it, man,” Billy Painter was saying, “I tell you I was reading about it just last week. Red roof, okay. White roof, never.”
“You’re mixing it up with something else,” Weaver said. “How about it, Tom?”
Tom shrugged, having no opinion to offer. Just then, the mayor bustled up, perspiring freely, his shirt flapping over his large paunch.
“Come down,” he called to Billy. “I just looked it up. It’s the Little Red Schoolhouse, not Churchhouse.”
Billy looked angry. He had always been moody; all Painters were. But since the mayor made him chief of police last week, he had become downright temperamental.
“We don’t have no little schoolhouse,” Billy argued, halfway down the ladder.
“We’ll just have to build one,” the mayor said. “We’ll have to hurry, too.” He glanced at the sky. Involuntarily the crowd glanced upward. But there was still nothing in sight
“Where are the Carpenter boys?” the mayor asked. “Sid, Sam, Marv—where are you?”
Sid Carpenter’s head appeared through the crowd. He was still on crutches from last month when he had fallen out of a tree looking for threstle’s eggs; no Carpenter was worth a damn at tree-climbing.
“The other boys are at Ed Beer’s Tavern,” Sid said.
“Where else would they be?” Mary Waterman called from the crowd.
“Well, you gather them up,” the mayor said. “They gotta build up a little schoolhouse, and quick. Tell them to put it up beside the jail.” He turned to Billy Painter, who was back on the ground, “Billy, you paint that schoolhouse a good bright red, inside and out. It’s very important.”
“When do I get a police chief badge?” Billy demanded. “I read that police chiefs always get badges.”
“Make yourself one,” the mayor said. He mopped his face with his shirttail. “Sure hot. Don’t know why that inspector couldn’t have come in the winter…Tom! Tom Fisher! Got an important job for you. Come on, I’ll tell you all about it.”
He put an arm around Tom’s shoulders and they walked to the mayor’s cottage past the empty market, along the village’s single paved road. In the old days, that road had been of packed dirt. But the old days had ended two weeks ago and now the road was paved with crushed rock. It made barefoot walking so uncomfortable that the villagers simply cut across each othe
r’s lawns. The mayor, though, walked on it out of principle.
“Now look, Mayor, I’m on my vacation—”
“Can’t have any vacations now,” the mayor said. “Not now. He’s due any day.” He ushered Tom inside his cottage and sat down in the big armchair, which had been pushed as close to the interstellar radio as possible.
“Tom,” the mayor said directly, “how would you like to be a criminal?”
“I don’t know,” said Tom. “What’s a criminal?”
Squirming uncomfortably in his chair, the mayor rested a hand on the radio for authority. “It’s this way,” he said, and began to explain.
Tom listened, but the more he heard, the less he liked. It was all the fault of that interstellar radio, he decided. Why hadn’t it really been broken?
No one had believed it could work. It had gathered dust in the office of one mayor after another, for generations, the last silent link with Mother Earth. Two hundred years ago, Earth talked with New Delaware, and with Ford IV, Alpha Centauri, Nueva Espana, and the other colonies that made up the United Democracies of Earth. Then all conversations stopped.
There seemed to be a war on Earth. New Delaware, with its one village, was too small and too distant to take part. They waited for news, but no news came. And then plague struck the village, wiping out three-quarters of the inhabitants.
Slowly the village healed. The villagers adopted their own ways of doing things. They forgot Earth.
Two hundred years passed.
And then, two weeks ago, the ancient radio had coughed itself into life. For hours, it growled and spat static, while the inhabitants of the village gathered around the mayor’s cottage.
Finally words came out: “…hear me, New Delaware? Do you hear me?”
“Yes, yes, we hear you,” the mayor said.
“The colony is still there?”
“It certainly is,” the mayor said proudly.
The voice became stem and official. “There has been no contact with the Outer Colonies for some time, due to unsettled conditions here. But that’s over, except for a little mopping up. You of New Delaware are still a colony of Imperial Earth and subject to her laws. Do you acknowledge the status?”
The mayor hesitated. All the books referred to Earth as the United Democracies. Well, in two centuries, names could change.
“We are still loyal to Earth,” the mayor said with dignity.
“Excellent. That saves us the trouble of sending an expeditionary force. A resident inspector will be dispatched to you from the nearest point, to ascertain whether you conform to the customs, institutions and traditions of Earth.”
“What?” the mayor asked, worried.
The stern voice became higher-pitched. “You realize, of course, that there is room for only one intelligent species in the Universe—Man! All others must be suppressed, wiped out, annihilated. We can tolerate no aliens sneaking around us. I’m sure you understand, General.”
“I’m not a general. I’m a mayor.”
“You’re in charge, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then you are a general. Permit me to continue. In this galaxy, there is no room for aliens. None! Nor is there room for deviant human cultures, which, by definition, are alien. It is impossible to administer an empire when everyone does as he pleases. There must be order, no matter what the cost.”
The mayor gulped hard and stared at the radio.
“Be sure you’re running an Earth colony, General, with no radical departures from the norm, such as free will, free love, free elections, or anything else on the proscribed list Those things are alien, and we’re pretty rough on aliens. Get your colony in order, General. The inspector will call in about two weeks. That is all.”
The village held an immediate meeting, to determine how best to conform with the Earth mandate. All they could do was hastily model themselves upon the Earth pattern as shown in their ancient books.
“I don’t see why there has to be a criminal,” Tom said.
“That’s a very important part of Earth society,” the mayor explained. “All the books agree on it. The criminal is as important as the postman, say, or the police chief. Unlike them, the criminal is engaged in antisocial work. He works against society, Tom. If you don’t have people working against society, how can you have people working for it? There’d be no jobs for them to do.”
Tom shook his head. “I just don’t see it.”
“Be reasonable, Tom. We have to have Earthly things. Like paved roads. All the books mention that And churches, and school- houses, and jails. And all the books mention crime.”
“I won’t do it,” Tom said.
“Put yourself in my position,” the mayor begged. “This inspector comes and meets Billy Painter, our police chief. He asks to see the jail. Then he says, ‘No prisoners?’ I answer, ‘Of course not. We don’t have any crime here.’ ‘No crime?’” he says. ‘But Earth colonies always have crime. You know that.’ ‘We don’t,’ I answer. ‘didn’t even know what it was until we looked up the word last week.’ ‘Then why did you build a jail?’ he asks me. ‘Why did you appoint a police chief?’
The mayor paused for breath. “You see? The whole thing falls through. He sees at once that we’re not truly earthlike. We’re faking it. We’re aliens!”
“Hmm,” Tom said, impressed in spite of himself.
“This way,” the mayor went on quickly, “I can say, ‘Certainly we’ve got crime here, just like on Earth. We’ve got a combination thief and murderer. Poor fellow had a bad upbringing and he’s maladjusted. Our police chief has some clues, though. We expect an arrest within twenty-four hours. We’ll lock him in the jail, then rehabilitate him.’”
“What’s rehabilitate?” Tom asked.
“I’m not sure. I’ll worry about that when I come to it. But now do you see how necessary crime is?”
“I suppose so. But why me?”
“Can’t spare anyone else. And you’ve got narrow eyes. Criminals always have narrow eyes.”
“They aren’t that narrow. They’re no narrower than Ed Weaver’s.”
“Tom, please,” the mayor said. “We’re all doing our part. You want to help, don’t you?”
“I suppose so,” Tom repeated wearily.
“Fine. You’re our criminal. Here, this makes it legal.”
He handed Tom a document. It read: SKULKING PERMIT. Know all Men by these Presents that Tom Fisher is a Duly Authorized Thief and Murderer. He is hereby required to Skulk in Dismal Alleys, Haunt Places of Low Repute, and Break the Law.
Tom read it through twice, then asked, “What law?”
“I’ll let you know as fast as I make them up,” the mayor said. “All Earth colonies have laws.”
“But what do I do?”
“You steal. And kill. That should be easy enough.” The mayor walked to his bookcase and took down ancient volumes entitled The Criminal and his Environment, Psychology of the Slayer, and Studies in Thief Motivation.
“These’ll give you everything you need to know. Steal as much as you like. One murder should be enough, though. No sense overdoing it.”
“Right,” Tom nodded. “I guess I’ll catch on.”
He picked up the books and returned to his cottage.
It was very hot and all the talk about crime had puzzled and wearied him. He lay down on his bed and began to go through the ancient books.
There was a knock on his door.
“Come in,” Tom called, rubbing his tired eyes.
Marv Carpenter, oldest and tallest of the redheaded Carpenter boys, came in, followed by old Jed Farmer. They were carrying a small sack.
“You the town criminal, Tom?” Marv asked.
“Looks like it.”
“Then this is for you.” They put the sack on the floor and took from it a hatchet, two knives, a short spear, a club and a blackjack.
“What’s all that?” Tom asked, sitting upright
“Weapons, of course,�
�� Jed Farmer said testily. “You can’t be a real criminal without weapons.”
Tom scratched his head. “Is that a fact?”
“You’d better start figuring these things out for yourself,” Farmer went on in his impatient voice. “Can’t expect us to do everything for you.”
Marv Carpenter winked at Tom. “Jed’s sore because the mayor made him our postman.”
“I’ll do my part,” Jed said. “I just don’t like having to write all those letters.”
“Can’t be too hard,” Marv Carpenter said, grinning. “The postmen do it on Earth and they got a lot more people there. Good luck, Tom.”
They left.
Tom bent down and examined the weapons. He knew what they were; the old books were full of them. But no one had ever actually used a weapon on New Delaware. The only native animals on the planet were small, furry, and confirmed eaters of grass. As for turning a weapon on a fellow villager—why would anybody want to do that?
He picked up one of the knives. It was cold. He touched the point. It was sharp.
Tom began to pace the floor, staring at the weapons. They gave him a queer sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He decided he had been hasty in accepting the job.
But there was no sense worrying about it yet He still had those books to read. After that, perhaps he could make some sense out of the whole thing.
He read for several hours, stopping only to eat a light lunch. The books were understandable enough; the various criminal methods were clearly explained, sometimes with diagrams. But the whole thing was unreasonable. What was the purpose of crime? Whom did it benefit? What did people get out of it?
The books didn’t explain that He leafed through them, looking at the photographed faces of criminals. They looked very serious and dedicated, extremely conscious of the significance of their work to society.
Tom wished he could find out what that significance was. It would probably make things much easier.
“Tom?” he heard the mayor call from outside.
“I’m in here, Mayor,” Tom said.
The door opened and the mayor peered in. Behind him were Jane Farmer, Mary Waterman and Alice Cook.
“How about it, Tom?” the mayor asked.
Citizen in Space Page 17
