Brett lost sight of it as he plunged down with the reproduction of an antique bazooka in his hand. He used the bazooka as a staff, in his haste. Then he ran, and so did all the others until, panting, they came in sight of the debris.
But they saw something more than debris. There was the brightly clad figure of one of the ship’s crew on the ground. Another figure worked furiously, not at the spilled-out body but at something caught in the splintered framework. It came clear. It was a ball of considerable size. It loosened and came free as if it had been designed to be dropped. The straining figure pushed it fiercely until it was near the prone figure on the ground. Then the laboring stopped, and that crew member stared desperately at the sky, and then fiercely all around.
Halliday groaned between pantings.
“An atomic bomb!” he gasped. “They’ll set it off—to take us with them—”
Brett raged. Then he heard his own voice shouting: “Spread out, everybody! Show yourselves but don’t go closer!”
The figure heard his shout. It whirled upon him. It saw him and his companions. But they stayed behind. Brett would have shouted again, but that his breath had left him.
He walked on, swallowing, his reproduction of an ancient bazooka dangling in his hand. The figure by the object that must be a bomb—was a girl. It was the girl whose picture he had in his pocket, or at the least her identical twin. She regarded him with a terrible fierceness.
Brett walked forward, trying to get his breath back and his mind straight. He’d thought of food, but now he thought of something else. The figure on the ground stirred feebly. It turned its head. It was a man. Human. Bearded. Bearded! This particular situation was agonizing. In inherited, acquired, instinctive, legendary, and religious hatred of all things Thalassian—because of what Thalassia had done to her world aeons since—this girl was hungrily ready to set off that atom bomb. She would die in its flame, but so would Brett. At the moment, the other eleven members of the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition might not. She waited in a terrible impatience for them to come closer.
Brett stopped. She moved toward the bomb, turning only to regard him with eyes that seemed to flame. She reached out her hand.
And Johnny did the only possible, the only obvious and inevitable thing. She was about to detonate the atomic bomb that had been the ship’s sole armament. Because in so doing she would surely kill one individual she considered a Thalassian. Her own life was a cheap price to pay for that achievement, and she might bag the others too. She moved to detonate the bomb.
Brett blew it up.
His action was instinct, but also it was sound sense. Because an atomic bomb contains remarkably little explosive. It is different from all other bombs in that what explosive it contains exists only to move slugs of fissionable material into a critical mass which then detonates. There is no atomic explosive unless there is a critical mass. Until it is actually fired, an atomic bomb is a rather delicate piece of mechanism only.
Brett’s bazooka-shell hit the case. The rocket fuel in the shell blew. It smashed in the case. It jammed the delicate mechanism. The actual explosive in the bomb flared smokily, but it was not even enough to singe the girl beside it. Brett plunged forward and grabbed her before she could take any further measures.
* * * *
There was great confusion, then Kent came to Brett and said phlegmatically:
“That whiskered man’s got a broken leg. Better set it, eh?”
“I would,” agreed Brett. He stared at the girl, both of whose wrists he held firmly. She returned his gaze with eyes which had ceased to burn as flames, and now were filled with an absolute, stunned astonishment.
Halliday came up a little later.
“Carstairs!” he said irritably. “That man with a beard—He is a man, isn’t he?”
“I hope so!” said Brett with deep earnestness.
He continued to look at the girl. She opened her mouth to catch her breath in purest bewilderment.
“He’s been pulling our beards!” said Halliday angrily. “He seemed astonished when we set his leg. He almost fainted when he counted our fingers. I can see that! We’ve got five fingers and the Thalassians had six. But why the devil should he want to pull beards? Every one of us, separately! He can’t seem to get over the fact that we have five fingers and grow whiskers! He’s got a beard!”
“Maybe,” said Brett, “the Thalassians didn’t have beards. Which may be why he wears one. Maybe—I’ll see.”
Gently and respectfully but very firmly, he lifted the girl’s right hand to his chin. She had already stared at his fingers. Now she grabbed at his beard. Johnny’s beard was no more than half an inch long but she pulled it. Hard.
She called in an excited, agitated voice to the bearded man whose leg was now in splints. Then she addressed Brett, pouring out a flood of unintelligible phrases. Halliday looked on with a cynical relief.
“She seems now,” he observed, “to be neither notably ferocious nor remarkably afraid. I suspect that if you turn her loose she will probably signal for help. I only hope she’ll explain that we aren’t Thalassians and that we have five fingers and pullable beards! I’d never have guessed that the way to make friends with these people was shoot at an atom bomb and let my fingers be counted and my whiskers pulled!”
“Yes,” said Johnny absorbedly. He loosened his grip on the girl’s wrists. She looked at him with bright, still-surprised eyes. She looked pleased, too.
“Carstairs!” fumed Halliday. “See if you can ask her how the hell human beings got out here—were here when back home they were hunting mammoths—if she’s human—talk to her and find out what we’ve got to know or go crazy! They can’t come from Earth! Where did they come from?”
“I’m—getting ready to ask now,” said Brett.
He fumbled in his pocket and found the locket he’d picked up on Firing Plaza One. He handed it to the girl. She exclaimed, and called something to the bearded man. He grunted, staring at the hands and beards of the members of the Expedition and plainly making painful but drastic readjustments of all his previous opinions. The girl looked back at Brett, expectant. He beamed suddenly. She smiled back.
He tapped himself on the chest.
“Brett,” he said.
She cocked her head on one side, puzzled. Then she brightened. She tapped him on the chest.
“Br-r-rette!” she said happily.
Communication between theoretically intelligent beings of two different star systems had begun.
SAM, THIS IS YOU (1955)
You are not supposed to believe this story, and if you ask Sam Yoder about it, he is apt to say that it’s all a lie. But Sam is a bit sensitive about it. He does not want the question of privacy to be raised again—especially in Rosie’s hearing. And there are other matters. But it’s all perfectly respectable and straightforward.
It could have happened to anybody—well, almost anybody. Anybody, say, who was a telephone lineman for the Batesville and Rappahannock Telephone Company, and who happened to be engaged to Rosie, and who had been told admiringly by Rosie that a man as smart as he was ought to make something wonderful of himself. And, of course, anybody who’d taken that seriously and had been puttering around on a device to make private conversations on a party-line telephone possible, and almost had the trick.
It began about six o’clock on July second, when Sam was up a telephone pole near Bridge’s Run. He was hunting for the place where that party line had gone dead. He’d hooked in his lineman’s phone and he couldn’t raise Central, so he was just going to start looking for the break when his phone rang back, though the line had checked dead.
Startled, he put the receiver to his ear. “Hello. Who’s this?”
“Sam, this is you,” a voice replied.
“Huh?” said Sam. “What’s that?”
“This is you,” the voice on the wire repeated. “You, Sam Yoder. Don’t you recognize your own voice? This is you, Sam Yoder, calling from the twelfth of July. Don�
�t hang up!”
Sam hadn’t even thought of hanging up. He was annoyed. He was up a telephone pole, trying to do some work, resting in his safety belt and with his climbing irons safely fixed in the wood. Naturally, he thought somebody was trying to joke with him, and when a man is working is no time for jokes.
“I’m not hanging up,” said Sam dourly, “but you’d better!”
The voice was familiar, though he couldn’t quite place it. If it talked a little more, he undoubtedly would. He knew it just about as well as he knew his own, and it was irritating not to be able to call this joker by name.
The voice said, “Sam, it’s the second of July where you are, and you’re up a pole by Bridge’s Run. The line’s dead in two places, else I couldn’t talk to you. Lucky, ain’t it?”
“Whoever you are,” Sam said formidably, “it ain’t going to be lucky for you if you ever need telephone service and you’ve kept wasting my time. I’m busy!”
“But I’m you!” insisted the voice persuasively. “And you’re me! We’re both the same Sam Yoder, only where I am, it’s July twelfth. Where you are, it’s July second. You’ve heard of time-traveling. Well, this is time-talking. You’re talking to yourself—that’s me—and I’m talking to myself—that’s you—and it looks like we’ve got a mighty good chance to get rich.”
Then something came into Sam’s memory and every muscle in his body went taut and tight, even as he was saying to himself, “It can’t be!”
But he’d remembered that if a man stands in a corner and talks to the wall, his voice will sound to him just the way it sounds to somebody else. Being in the telephone business, he’d tried it and now he did recognize the voice. It was his. His own. Talking to him. Which, of course, was impossible.
“Look,” said hoarsely, “I don’t believe this!”
“Then listen,” the voice said briskly. And Sam’s face grew red. It burned. His ears began to feel scorched. Because the voice—hisvoice—was telling him strictly private matters that nobody else in the world knew. Nobody but himself and Rosie.
“Quit it!” groaned Sam. “Somebody might be listening! Tell me what you want and ring off!”
The voice told him what it wanted. His own voice. It sounded pleased. It told him precisely what it wanted him to do. And then, very kindly, it told him exactly where the two breaks in the line were. And then it rang off.
* * * *
He sweated when he looked at the first of the two places. A joining was bad and he fixed that. It was where his voice had said it would be. And that was as impossible as anything else.
When he’d fixed the second break, Sam called Central and told her he was sick and was going home, and that if there were any other phones that needed fixing today, people were probably better off without phone service, anyhow.
He went home and washed his face, and made himself a brew of coffee and drank it, and his memory turned out to be unimpaired. Presently he heard himself muttering.
So he said defiantly, “There ain’t any crazy people in my family, so it ain’t likely I’ve gone out of my head. But God knows nobody but Rosie knows about me telling her sentimental that her nose is so cute, I couldn’t believe she ever had to blow it! Maybe it was me, talking to myself!”
Talking to oneself is not abnormal. Lots of people do it. Sam missed out the conclusion to be drawn from the fact that he’d answered himself back.
He reasoned painfully, “If somebody drove over to Rappahannock, past Dunnsville, and telephoned back that there was a brush fire at Dunnsville, I wouldn’t be surprised to get to Dunnsville and find a brush fire there. So if somebody phones back from next Tuesday that Mr. Broaddus broke his leg next Tuesday—why, I shouldn’t be surprised to get to next Tuesday and find he done it. Going to Rappahannock, past Dunnsville, and going to next Thursday, past next Tuesday, ain’t so much difference. It’s only the difference between a road-map and a calendar.”
Then he began to see implications. He blinked.
“Yes, sir!” he said in awe. “I wouldn’t’ve thought of it if I hadn’t told myself on the telephone, but there is money to be made out of this! I must be near as smart as Rosie thinks I am! I’d better get that dinkus set up!”
He’d more or less half-heartedly worked out an idea of how a party-line telephone conversation could be made private, and just out of instinct, you might say, he’d accumulated around his house a lot of stuff that should have been on the phone company’s inventory. There were condensers and transmitters and selective-ringing bells and resistances and the like. He’d meant to put some of them together some day and see what happened, but he’d been too busy courting Rosie to get at it.
* * * *
Now he did get started. His own voice on the telephone had told him to. It had warned him that one thing he had intended wouldn’t work and something else would. But it was essentially simple, after all. He finished it and cut off his line from Central and hooked this gadget in. He rang. Half a minute later, somebody rang back.
“Hello!” said Sam, quivering. He’d broken the line to Central, remember. In theory, he shouldn’t have gotten anybody anywhere. But a very familiar voice said “Hello” back at him, and Sam swallowed and said, “Hello, Sam. This is you in the second of July.”
The voice at the other end said cordially that Sam had done pretty well and now the two of them—Sam in the here and now and Sam in the middle of the week after next—would proceed to get rich together. But the voice from July twelfth sounded less absorbed in the conversation than Sam thought quite right. It seemed even abstracted. And Sam was at once sweating from the pure unreasonableness of the situation and conscious that he rated congratulation for the highly technical device he had built. After all, not everybody could build a time-talker!
He said with some irony, “If you’re too busy to talk—”
“I’ll tell you,” replied the voice from the twelfth of July, gratified. “I am kind of busy right now. You’ll understand when you get to where I am. Don’t get mad, Sam. Tell you what—you go see Rosie and tell her about this and have a nice evening. Ha-ha!”
“Now what,” asked Sam cagily, “do you mean by that ‘ha-ha’?”
“You’ll find out,” said the voice. “Knowin’ what I know, I’ll even double it. Ha-ha, ha-ha!”
There was a click. Sam rang back, but got no answer. He may have been the first man in history to take an objective and completely justified dislike to himself.
But presently he grumbled, “Smart, huh? Two can play at that! I’m the one that’s got to do things if we are both goin’ to get rich.”
He put his gadget carefully away and combed his hair and ate some cold food around the house and drove over to see Rosie. It was a night and an errand which ordinarily would have seemed purely romantic. There were fireflies floating about, and the Moon shone down splendidly, and a perfumed breeze carried mosquitoes from one place to another. It was the sort of night on which, ordinarily, Sam would have thought only of Rosie, and Rosie would have optimistic ideas about how housekeeping could, after all, be done on what Sam made a week.
They got settled down in the hammock on Rosie’s front porch, and Sam said expansively, “Rosie, I’ve made up my mind to get rich. You ought to have everything your little heart desires. Suppose you tell me what you want so I’ll know how rich I’ve got to get.”
Rosie drew back. She looked sharply at Sam. “Do you feel all right?”
He beamed at her. He’d never been married and he didn’t know how crazy it sounded to Rosie to be queried on how much money would satisfy her. There simply isn’t any answer to the question.
“Listen,” said Sam tenderly. “Nobody knows it, but tonight Joe Hunt and the Widow Backus are eloping to North Carolina to get married. We’ll find out about it tomorrow. And day after tomorrow, on the Fourth of July, Dunnsville is going to win the baseball game with Bradensburg, seven to five, all tied till the ninth inning, and then George Peeby is going to hit a homer with Fred Holmes
on second base.”
Rosie stared at him. Sam explained complacently. The Sam Yoder in the middle of the week after next had told him what to expect in those particular cases. He would tell him other things to expect. So Sam was going to get rich.
Rosie said, “Sam! Somebody was playing a joke on you!”
“Yeah?” Sam answered comfortably. “Who else but me knows what you said to me that time you thought I was mad at you and you were crying out back of the well-house?”
“Sam!”
“And nobody else knows about that time we were picnicking and a bug got down the back of your dress and you thought it was a hornet.”
“Sam Yoder!” wailed Rosie. “You never told anybody about that!”
“Nope,” said Sam truthfully. “I never did. But the me in the week after next knew. He told me. So he had to be me talking to me. Couldn’t’ve been anybody else.”
Rosie gasped. Sam explained all over again. In detail. When he had finished, Rosie seemed dazed.
Then she said desperately, “Sam! Either you’ve t-told somebody else everything we ever said or did together, or else—there’s somebody who knows every word we ever said to each other! That’s awful! Do you really and truly mean to tell me—”
“Sure I mean to tell you,” said Sam happily. “The me in the week after next called me up and talked about things nobody knows but you and me. Can’t be no doubt at all.”
Rosie shivered. “He—he knows every word we ever said! Then he knows every word we’re saying now!” She gulped. “Sam Yoder, you go home!”
Sam gaped at her. She got up and backed away from him.
“D-do you think,” she chattered despairingly, “that I—that I’m g-going to talk to you when s-somebody else—listens to every w-word I say and—knows everything I do? D-do you think I’m going to m-marry you?”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 109
