by Hank Davis
I got up. There was no sound around me, except the pattering of the steady, whispering rain on the tent roof. I couldn’t even hear any noise from my squad mates. Which was fine, since we had individual tents, and they weren’t that close.
My exercise fatigues, which I wore as pajamas on these missions, were not water proof, so I pulled on the regulation rain poncho before stepping out to check the perimeter units.
While I was looking at the last one—showing nothing had breached our perimeter line—I heard steps behind me, and turned to see Gack, also awake, and also wearing a rain poncho. He was walking with a sort of exaggerated, comedic stealth, which surprised me, because Gack was known for many things, but none of them was physical comedy.
I said, “You heard it too?”
“What?” he asked, stopping.
“You heard the sound of something falling?” I asked. “And the scream?”
His eyes shot out. What I mean by this is that his eyes came out of his head, straight at me, then sagged onto his face, suspended from springs. He put them back in, matter of fact, and said, “Uh, no.”
I was trying to tell myself I hadn’t seen what I’d thought I’d seen. But there are things that you can’t deny. And if I’d gone around the bend, it still wouldn’t run to seeing people’s eyes pop out on springs. I kept my face as absolutely neutral as I could, and nodded, “Okay,” I said, but walked sideways towards Gack’s tent, and drummed my fingers on the outside of it. When no one answered, I stooped momentarily to unfasten the magnetic closure in the front.
The tent was . . . covered in blood. And in the middle of it all was an anvil, huge and improbable. An antique anvil, of the sort that people had used to beat metal on. The kind of thing you only saw in museums.
I jumped sideways at a whistle above me, and jumped out of the way, just as a big square thing fell where I’d been seconds before. I turned around to see Gack—or whatever it was that looked like Gack—hop towards me at crazed speed.
I did what any man would do. I screamed and ran. Right into the LT who had got out of his tent. I have no idea what I told him, but it probably didn’t matter, as he took a look at Gack, then jumped out of the way in his turn, pulling me along as yet another square thing fell where we’d been.
By now the camp was bedlam, with everyone running around in a state of undress, and pseudo-Gack hopping around and, somehow, perhaps causing heavy objects to appear.
LaBlue, finally, had the presence of mind to shoot at pseudo-Gack. There was a sound like “phlui” as the energy weapon hit Gack, and there was a feeling like an implosion, as Gack disappeared and air rushed in to fill the place he’d been.
It was a while before anyone spoke, and then it was Sarge, who said, “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it wasn’t Gack. Gack is dead. In his tent.”
The funny thing is that the anvil I’d seen in the tent was no longer there, only Gack pâté all over the inside surfaces. The other things that had fallen, mostly square boxes, were also not there anymore. The LT said they were safes, things used to keep documentation and valuables in the pre-space days. But none of us had any idea why the pseudo-Gack had dropped them everywhere, or even if he had or if they were just an associated phenomenon to whatever had killed Gack and taken his form.
Still, in moments like this, it was good to have protocol to fall back upon. Gack had to be buried on this planet, and his grave appropriately marked. We decided to strike the tent and bury the whole thing, and did just that, digging a deep grave in an area just at the edge of the camp. Everyone had gone around and checked the perimeter and verified that neither biological nor electromagnetic violation had occurred, so we were all jumpy and looking at each other. And I, particularly, was alert to the sound of something that wasn’t quite heard with the ears. Something like boing or paff felt at the back of the neck.
For a moment, as we were digging soggy reddish dirt back in atop the tent that contained the mortal remains of Gack, I thought I heard-felt that boing, but nothing strange happened.
Until we were setting the marker to show Gack’s universal birth and death date, that is. That was when the LT gave Sarge a cigar. This in itself was weird enough, because smoking was not just a rare enough thing, but a very expensive habit. There were some planets where it might be more common, like the place in Andromeda where they grew tobacco. But to carry one to Earth quarters and bring it on an expedition was unlikely, since if you had a cigar you could sell it for a lot of money on Earth.
Sarge seemed to sense the strangeness of it, and stood there, holding the cigar in between his fingers, until the LT snapped, gave an odd little laugh, took the cigar from Sarge’s hand, jammed it in Sarge’s mouth, brought out a little stick, aflame, and set fire to the end of the cigar. At which point the cigar exploded, blackening Sarge’s face.
It took a moment, and I might have been the first to react. I ran to where I’d last seen the LT before this, and found him behind a spear of rock. He had been crushed by what looked like an antique musical instrument, the kind you still see on Earth sometimes, called a Grand Piano.
Four of us shot the LT at the same time. Or rather we shot the creature who was hopping around our camp, looking but not moving like the LT. This time it had no effect. Or rather, for a moment, it created a hole in the middle of its chest, but then it looked at it and said “uh oh” and the hole healed.
LaBlue who was nearer hit the pseudo-LT on the head with his pack, the one he’d carried on his back here, and which contained his folded tent and all his gear.
The pseudo-LT folded down like an accordion, and ran. He ran right off the perimeter, and disappeared.
Leaving us all breathing hard, scared, and not at all sure what we were facing. Sarge organized those of us who remained. He detailed Jackel and Tadd to dig the LT’s grave and move the body—easier since the piano had of course disappeared—and he and I and LaBlue went around the perimeter, checking all the readings.
“How is it possible,” LaBlue said, “for whatever it is to get past our perimeter without setting off the alarms?”
I was biting the inside of my lip to keep from screaming in frustration at the events, but I’d been thinking about it since Gack had bought it. “All the life forms we’ve found have been either energy or flesh,” I said. “Well, except those bio forms that are plants, including ambulatory ones, but for the purpose of this discussion, we’ll call them flesh. But that doesn’t preclude life forms made of something else.”
“What else could it be?” LaBlue asked. “What other than energy or biological beings.”
“Minerals, I suppose?” Sarge asked.
LaBlue shook his head. “Nah, the alarms would detect different substances from the ones previously identified for this site,” he said. “It would detect movement too.”
“Are we dealing with another sentient planet?” I asked.
LaBlue shrugged. “Even if it were, certainly we’d have detected movement. And besides, why would aliens pelt us with Earth antiques?”
I had no answer to it, partly because at that moment I heard-felt “boing” and jumped aside just in time to avoid a black, globular object which fell where we’d been, and which said ACME on the side and had a sort of rope on top. The end of the rope was burning.
I recognized it then, and it all fell in a pattern in my mind. I screamed, “Take cover.” Then jumped behind a rock spear.
There was an explosion, and a flash of fire.
When we emerged, three of us were fine, but LaBlue had been too close to the explosion and was dead, a startled look on his face.
Sarge sighed, and Jackel and Tadd looked too stunned to even mention digging another grave, but I said, “Wait, I think I know what’s happening?”
“Oh?” Sarge said.
“Yes, Sarge. You know how we got to some worlds and found that they were capturing our entertainment transmissions and knew about us from them?”
“Not very well
,” Sarge said. “I mean, they didn’t know about us very well. The older transmissions, which would have reached the more distant stars are also more substantially degraded by the time they get there. Some races managed to reconstruct all of a movie or a series of transmissions, which is why that place in Proxima is the ILoveLucy planet, but—”
“Cartoons,” I said.
“Beg your pardon?” LaBlue said, so surprised that he spoke before Sarge reacted.
“Cartoons were drawn adventures from the time before computers were significant in entertainment,” I said. “Middle twentieth century. Drawn adventures that were animated by drawing a lot of similar freeze frames, then making them move very fast to give the impression of movement, on movie.”
“Sounds inefficient,” Sarge said.
“It was, but it was also very imaginative. The cartoonists, as they were called, created a whole universe of creatures, like . . . animated anthropomorphic rabbits, a world without death, where characters pulled themselves from under heavy weights, or recovered easily from explosions. The projectiles were often safes, pianos or anvils.”
“How do you know this, Bronk?” Sarge asked.
“I grew up on a backward planet, sergeant. Until we got more advanced technology when I was fifteen, we had locally built televisions and we watched a lot of antique entertainment on them.”
“I see. So you think the beings on this planet, whatever they are reconstituted those signals—”
“Possibly from one of the colony planets closer than Earth,” I said. “Yes, sir.”
“And that they think this is what human beings on Earth are actually like?”
“It’s possible, sir. It seems like few species have the imagination humans have, and those cartoons . . . well, if you didn’t know the time and place they came from, you too might not believe someone just made them up out of whole cloth. Heck, even knowing the time and the place.”
“But what are they?” LaBlue said. “What are these creatures? What makes them?”
I shrugged. “We know there are energies in the universe we can’t measure or get a full fix on. Take the singing ghosts of Antares 5. Some people think they are powered by thought.”
“That is—” the Sergeant said, and then used a word that was also archaic and referred to the excreta of an Earth bovine.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Or as we like to put it not scientifically proven. But we still can’t explain the ghosts, sir. Or it could be anything else. There are those who posit time as a form of energy, and if that’s so, then these things could be time itself. That’s not important,” I said. “The important thing is this: how do we survive their attacks, their ability to mimic those of us they kill and replace, and how do we get back to Earth in one piece?”
The Sergeant said a word that rhymed with ducked, followed by, “if I know. The gate won’t open again for another six hours.” He looked around at the shambles of the camp. “The question is whether any of us will be alive and sane enough to report.”
Which is when Jackel and Tadd started chasing each other with the shovels. Which by itself was not as bad as the fact that when one hit the other with a shovel, the other would walk around for a while looking like he’d been compressed, then would pop back to normal size with a sound like “boing.”
Sarge and I fell back, retreating behind a spear of stone. Behind us was the edge of a cliff. We stared at the camp where Jackel and Tadd hit each other amiably and ran around in the deranged motions of cartoon characters.
If I squinted, I could see two immobile forms, out by the graves. Three, if I focused really hard, though the third was a little far off and indistinct. Three.
I turned around to look at Sarge, who looked back at me.
I heard “boing” and felt it at the back of my neck, and rolled out of the way, and shot at Sarge, even as an anvil fell between us.
Sarge got a hole in his chest, said “uh, oh” and ran.
He ran right off the edge of the cliff in a straight line, until he looked down and realized there was nothing under him. And then he fell.
I went to the edge of the cliff and looked down, to see his—its?—crumpled body far below.
Well, that was that. I was the only human being still left. I’d have to last long enough, until the gate to Earth opened again.
Back in the camp, the pseudo-Jackel and pseudo-Tadd were dropping pianos on each other and crawling out from under them to fight another day.
I couldn’t understand the purpose of it, and it made my eyes pop out. I had to keep pushing them in when they dangled in springs against my face. It got old fast.
Clutching my gun tightly, I prepared to keep the strange creatures at bay.
I couldn’t wait till the gate to Earth opened again.
HISTORICAL NOTE
by Murray Leinster
History has diverged from this 1951 story by the Dean of science fiction. The Soviet Union did come apart (though, alas, at this writing it may be coming back together) though not in the way that Leinster chronicled. But it would have been a lot more fun if this had been the way that the U.S.S.R. became the U.S.S.Was.
William Fitzgerald Jenkins (1886-1975) was a prolific and successful writer, selling stories to magazines of all sorts, from pulps like Argosy to the higher-paying slicks such as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, writing stories ranging from westerns, to mysteries, to science fiction. However, for SF he usually used the pen name of Murray Leinster, and he used it often. Even though SF was a less lucrative field than other categories of fiction, he enjoyed writing it (fortunately for SF readers everywhere) and wrote a great deal of it, including such classics as “Sidewise in Time,” “First Contact,” and “A Logic Named Joe,” the last being a story you should keep in mind the next time someone repeats the canard that SF never predicted the home computer or the internet. Leinster did it (though under his real name, this time) in Astounding Science-Fiction in 1946! His first SF story was “The Runaway Skyscraper,” published in 1919, and his last was the third of three novelizations of the Land of the Giants TV show. For the length of his career, his prolificity, and his introduction of original concepts into SF, fans in the 1940s began calling him the Dean of science fiction, a title he richly deserved.
Professor Vladimir Rojestvensky, it has since been learned, remade the world at breakfast one morning while eating a bowl of rather watery red-cabbage soup, with black bread on the side. It is now a matter of history that the soup was not up to par that day, and the black bread in Omsk all that week was sub-marginal. But neither of these factors is considered to have contributed to the remaking of civilization.
The essential thing was that, while blowing on a spoonful of red-cabbage soup, Professor Rojestvensky happened to think of an interesting inference or deduction to be drawn from the Bramwell-Weems Equation expressing the distribution of energy among the nucleus particles of the lighter atoms. The Bramwell-Weems Equation was known in Russia as the Gabrilovitch-Brekhov Formula because, obviously, Russians must have thought of it first. The symbols, however, were the same as in the capitalist world.
Professor Rojestvensky contemplated the inference with pleasure. It was very interesting indeed. He finished his breakfast, drank a glass of hot tea, wrapped himself up warmly, and set out for his classrooms in the University of Omsk. It was a long walk, because the streetcars were not running. It was a fruitful one, though. For as he walked, Professor Rojestvensky arranged his reasoning in excellent order. When he arrived at the University he found a directive from the Council of Soviet Representatives for Science and Culture. It notified him that from now on Soviet scientists must produce more and better and more Earth-shaking discoveries—or else. Therefore he would immediately report, in quadruplicate, what first-rank discoveries he was prepared to make in the science of physics. And they had better be good.
He was a modest man, was Professor Rojestvensky, but to fail to obey the directive meant losing his job. So he quakingly prepared a paper out
lining his extension of the Bramwell-Weems Equation—but he was careful to call it the Gabrilovitch-Brekhov Formula and persuaded one of his students to make four copies of it in exchange for a quarter of a pound of cheese. Then he sent off the four copies and slept badly for weeks afterward. He knew his work was good, but he didn’t know whether it was good enough. It merely accounted for the mutual repulsion of the molecules of gases, it neatly explained the formation of comets’ tails, and it could have led to the prediction of clouds of calcium vapor already observed in interstellar space. Professor Rojestvensky did not guess he had remade the world.
Weeks passed, and nothing happened. That was a bad month in Russian science. The staffs of Medical Research and Surgical Advancement had already reported everything they could dream up. Workers in Aerodynamic Design weren’t sticking out their necks. The last man to design a new plane went to prison for eight years when a fuel line clogged on his plane’s test flight. And Nuclear Fission workers stuck to their policy of demanding unobtainable equipment and supplies for the furtherance of their work. So Professor Rojestvensky’s paper was absolutely the only contribution paddable to Earth-shaking size. His paper itself was published in the Soviet Journal of Advanced Science. Then it was quoted unintelligibly in Pravda and Tass, with ecstatic editorials pointing out how far Russian science was ahead of mere capitalist-imperialistic research. And that was that.
Possibly that would have been the end of it all, but that some two weeks later an American jet bomber flew twelve thousand miles, dropped fifteen tons of simulated bombs—actually condensed milk lowered to Earth by parachutes—and returned to base without refueling. This, of course, could not be allowed to go unchallenged. So a stern directive went to Aerodynamic Design. An outstanding achievement in aviation must be produced immediately. It must wipe the Americans’ decadent, capitalistic eyes. Or—so the directive said explicitly—else.
The brain trust which was Aerodynamic Design went into sweating executive session, seeking a really air tight procedure for passing the buck. They didn’t want to lose their jobs, which were fairly fat ones, any more than Professor Rojestvensky had. They had to cook up something in a hurry, something really dramatic, with an out putting the blame squarely on somebody else if it didn’t work. They couldn’t blame Aviation Production, though. The head of that splendid organization had in with the Politbureau. Something new and drastic and good was needed.
