The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  “Interesting,” said Soames. “That kind of building has been suggested as ultra-modern architecture. They don’t have an external steel frame. There’s a central mast from which all the floors are hung. They have to be braced by cables, which make catenary curves like suspension-bridges on end.”

  Zani went on with her drawing. Gail said:

  “It isn’t fantasy, then. Look at this. It’s a—maybe you’ll call it a car. Only it looks like a sled. Or maybe a motorcycle.”

  She showed him a finished sketch. With a childish directness, yet a singular effect of direct observation, Zani had drawn a vehicle. It did not have wheels. It rested on what looked like two short, thick runners like skids.

  “This isn’t fantasy, either,” said Soames. “There’ve been wheelless vehicles built lately. They’re held an inch or so above the ground by columns of air pouring out. They ride on cushions of air. But they have to have perfect highways. It isn’t likely that a child would draw them if she hadn’t seen them.”

  In silence, Gail showed other sketches. A man and woman in costumes somehow related to those the children had worn at the beginning. There was a picture of a group of people.

  “Odd,” said Soames. “Everybody wears a belt like the children have on now. Everybody. As if it were official.”

  He glanced at Zani. She wore a belt over American-style young-girl’s clothing today. The belt was neither leather nor plastic nor anything that could have a name put to it. It had two round and two square medallions placed two on each side of the fastening, which was not a buckle. The others wore the same. Soames puzzled over it for a moment.

  Gail offered him another sheet of paper.

  “I’m going to tear this up when you’ve seen it.”

  It was a landscape, sketched in with surprisingly bold strokes of the soft pencil. The time was night. Near the bottom of the picture there was a city of the strange, catenary-curve architecture. It was drawn so small, though, that most of the picture was black sky. But there was a blazing light upon the city, and it came from something monstrous and jagged and incandescent and vast, plunging upon the city from the sky, trailing flames behind it.

  “And this,” said Gail, very quietly.

  It was a picture of a crater, a ring-mountain, the scene of the impact of something terrible and huge. It was a chasm with circular, broken rocky walls. There was a fallen tree in the foreground, near the spot from which the sketch seemed to have been made.

  “You’re right not to show anyone else those drawings,” said Soames. “The kids are in a bad enough fix as visitors of a superior race. If it should be realized that they’re not here by accident, but somehow to open a way for invasion by the population of a whole planet, well, you can just imagine…”

  * * * *

  Zani giggled suddenly, and he jumped. But her eyes were on the paper before her. Soames glanced out the window. Mal had toppled over, and one of the puppies had climbed valiantly on her back and was pulling with all his tiny might at a puppy-mouthful of her hair. His tail wagged vigorously the while. Hod laughed, and Mal giggled, and inside the cottage Zani—who could not see what had happened—giggled with them.

  “She couldn’t see it, but she knew what happened,” said Soames. “I suspect this place is so top-secret that it’s a breach of security to remember it outside. If anybody notices that little trick the kids can do, they’ll be suspected of casually inspecting high-secrecy stuff while drawing pictures or playing with little dogs.”

  * * * *

  Soames returned to his quarters. He set to work upon the highly necessary task of pretending that he was a castaway from the children’s civilization in order to improvise conveniences that as a castaway he’d consider crude, but as an aborigine amazing.

  From time to time, though, he wondered sardonically about the public-relations program on the children. He’d prepared a complete report about the ship, telling in detail about its arrival and adding everything he could infer about the civilization that had made it, except its location on the Earth of aeons ago and its imminent doom. Gail had written what she considered the best human-interest story of her life about the children. Neither report was asked for. Nobody knew where either was to be sent. Soames guessed sardonically at a change of policy somewhere.

  But the problem justified worry, the simple, relatively insignificant problem of the children here and now, with all thought of flaming skies and upheaved earth put firmly aside.

  The children had to be revealed. But the world would automatically assume that the crew of an alien spaceship must be in some fashion monsters. But four nicely raised children? Space-travellers? Spaceships navigated by boys and girls who liked to play with puppies? Such innocuous persons to represent the most deadly danger the modern world had faced?

  But they did represent it. There was no way out of the fact. And somehow the facts had to be put across. The public-relations counsellors who had interviewed the children pointed out the means. They got the job.

  The advance publicity was thoroughly professional. The spaceship’s company was to be revealed in the most stupendous broadcast of all time. For the second time in history, a trans-Atlantic relay patrol would form two relay-channels from North America to Europe. It would reach Japan via the Aleutians and a relay-ship, by wire from Japan to all Asia and—again relayed—to Australia. South Africa would get the coverage by land-wire down the continent from the Pillars of Hercules. The Mediterranean basin, the Near East, Scandinavia, and even Iceland would see the spectacle. Detailed instructions were given to Gail to give to the children.

  The very top feminine TV personality of America would serve as hostess, substituting for Gail, who must try to make the children understand. Miss Linda Beach could establish a personal contact with any audience. One had only to watch her to respond to her charm, her wholesomeness, her adroit sincerity. She had sold soap, automobiles, vitamin tablets and dessicated soup. Obviously, she was the perfect saleswoman for the children out of space.

  “I hope the professionals know what they’re doing,” Soames had said to Gail. “I’m a simple soul who’d be inclined to tell the truth without trimmings. It might not be easy, and it might not be comfortable, but it would be fact.”

  * * * *

  A small fast transport came to get the children and Gail and Soames. It took off.

  Soames took a seat beside Fran. He took out a pencil and a pad of paper. He drew a sketch of a boy flying a kite, and added a close-up drawing of the kite. He drew a boy walking on stilts, and a drawing of how stilts were made. Soames hadn’t actually seen a boy walking on stilts for years, and it might now be a lost art, but Fran showed interest. Soames drew a bicycle with a boy on it, and then modified the bike into a motorcycle. He hoped his sketches would strike Fran as interesting, if primitive, things a boy might do for his own satisfaction.

  Fran was intrigued. Presently he took the pencil and made sketches of his own. A boy with a belt like his rode something which vaguely resembled a sledge or a motorcycle. He made a detailed drawing of a runner. This was an air-sled, such as Zani had pictured in more elaborate form. Fran sketched the air-column generator, and it was utterly simple and a boy of fourteen could make it. After painful scrutiny Soames realized that it was a ram-jet engine which would start itself and operate in still air. In the modern world, it would make gas-turbine engines practical for locomotives and motorcars.

  The transport landed. A motorcycle escort surrounded the car with drawn curtains which carried the children from Idlewild into New York. In time the car dived down into the freight entrance of the new Communications Building on 59th Street. Secret Service men had cleared all corridors so the children reached their dressing-rooms unseen.

  Linda Beach appeared an hour later and began the rehearsal.

  The children gathered the purpose of the thing by watching the monitors. They chattered together, and the girls went pleasantly through what was expected of them. Hod seemed quite numb, and Fran scowled. But h
e was more gracious when he saw Soames going through similar antics.

  The rehearsal ended. There was another long wait. This was to introduce the children—from a totally unknown and superior civilization—to a world which considered them strangers from space, when they were actually from a much more improbable homeland. The world was waiting to see this. Time dragged.

  All over the world people were waiting to get a first glimpse of creatures whose coming might mean the end of the world.

  Presently it began.

  The show, naturally, opened with a tremendous fanfare of trumpets, played from tape.

  Then Linda Beach appeared. She introduced Gail and Soames and Captain Moggs.

  This broadcast was supposed to be strictly informative. It was, however, produced with the attitude and the technique and the fine professionalism of specialists in the area of subconscious selling. So it put its audience—the vast majority of it—into the exact mood of people who surrender themselves to mildly lulling make-believe. When Captain Moggs told of the finding of the ship, her authoritative manner and self-importance made people feel, without regard to their thoughts, that she was an un-funny comedian. The audience remembered with decreasing concern that some interesting monsters were supposed to be in the show later and that they were waiting to see them.

  The introduction of the children was a disappointment, but a mild one. When they were produced and identified, the television-watching syndrome was fully developed. There was a feeling, of course, that the show fell down in interest and that it did not live up to its advance publicity. But the television audience is used to that. Its members continued to watch with slightly dulled eyes, listening with partly attentive ears, automatically waiting for a commercial when it could get some beer or an equivalent without missing anything.

  Even when tumult and confusion began; when Linda Beach tried to hold the show together in the teeth of uproar behind her, the tranquillized state of the audience continued. When Linda Beach’s necklace was snatched from her neck it seemed intended to be funny.

  It wasn’t until the very end that anything occurred really to break the mood professionally produced shows are designed to achieve. That occurrence startled the viewers out of their semi-comatose state, just as blatant obscenity or intolerable profanity would have done. Linda Beach, in fine sincerity and in tribute to the children, made a statement which was utterly explosive. When the show ended, people all over the world were roused and horrified and enraged.

  Only small children, waiting in space-helmets and with ray-guns ready, complained aggrievedly that there hadn’t been any monsters. The adults felt that there had been. That there were.

  They hated the children with a strictly personal hatred based on panic combined with shame.

  CHAPTER 7

  Soames’ rehearsed part in the broadcast was finished after he and Gail and Captain Moggs had told the story of the finding of the ship. Their narratives were deftly guided by Linda Beach’s questions.

  Soames wanted to get out of sight. He was sunk in gloom. It was a show instead of what he would have considered a presentation of the facts, though nearly everything said had been factual. He left the studio.

  In an uninhabited room he found himself staring out a window, down at the crowd before the Communications Building.

  It was a restless crowd, now. The ground-floor plate-glass windows had been filled with television screens, and those near them could see the broadcast and hear it through out-door loud-speakers. But this crowd was a special one, in that it hadn’t gathered to see the broadcast but extraterrestrial monsters, in the flesh or fur or scales or however they might appear. It now knew that the monsters had arrived and there was no chance of seeing them direct. It had been harangued by orators and people who already began to call themselves humanity-firsters. It felt cheated.

  There were a large number of teen-agers in the crowd.

  At the window, Soames recognized the oddity of the crowd below him. An ordinary, curiosity-seeking crowd would contain a considerable percentage of women. This did not. There were shouting voices which Soames heard faintly. They were orators declaiming assorted emotional opinions about monsters from space, obviously in the belief that they were beyond dispute and needed to be acted on at once. There was competition among these orators. Some had bands of supporters around them to aid their effectiveness by applause and loud agreement. Soames saw, too, at least one hilarious group of college-age boys who might have been organized by a college humor magazine. They waved cardboard signs. “Space-Monsters Go Home!”

  The unattended monitor set, placed around some corner in a corridor, gave out an excellently modulated reproduction of the program going on the air. An Italian physicist asked questions about the qualifications of such young children as space navigators. Soames listened abstractedly. He knew unhappily that if the children weren’t convincing as visitors from space, they’d be much less plausible in their true roles as fugitives out of time.

  * * * *

  The collegians surged here and there, making a demonstration in favor of mirth. There were also youthful members of less innocuous groups, swaggering, consciously ominous members of organizations known as the Maharajas and the Comets and the Toppers. Members of these groups eyed members of other such groups with challenging, level gazes.

  Voices harangued. Collegians attempted to sing what must have seemed to them a deliciously satirical song. But it did not please the non-collegian Maharajas or Comets or the Toppers.

  A Russian scientist took over on the broadcast. He had been flown to the United States especially for the occasion. He asked elaborate and carefully loaded questions. They had been prepared as propaganda stumpers by people who in their way were as skilled in public relations as the producers of this show. Linda Beach applied the charm which had sold soap, vitamins, automobiles and dessicated soup. Soames heard the exchanges from the monitor set.

  Outside, in the street, a brick suddenly fell among the collegians. More bricks fell among those engaged in an impromptu meeting of Humanity Firsters. Police whistles blew. A plate-glass window crashed. A collegian suddenly had a bloody face and a flying wedge of Maharajas scornfully cut through the formerly singing group, wielding belts and bludgeons for the honor of having started a riot on 57th Street. They fought past the college crowd and into a band of the Comets. There they found a rumble ready-made. Haranguing orators found themselves jostled. Fights broke out among members of groups which had come to stage demonstrations against extraterrestrials. The fighting spread to individuals.

  Police-car sirens wailed. Squad-cars came careening out of uptown-traffic streets and converged on the tumult. The sirens produced violent surgings of the crowd. There was a wild rush in this direction as a siren sounded from that, and then an equally wild rush in another direction still as blazing headlights and a moving howl came from elsewhere. Rushing figures surged against the doors to the lobby of the Communications Building.

  Members of the Toppers and the Comets and the Maharajas and other fanatics rushed up the stairs. There was a sign “On the Air” lighted from behind outside the studio in which the world-wide broadcast was in progress. There was a door. They opened it.

  The watching world heard the racket as a former Nobel prize-winner’s stilted questions about the children were drowned out. This was not a planned invasion. It was a totally chaotic rushing-about of people who’d been half hysterical to start with, who had been crushed in a senselessly swaying mob, had been pushed bodily into a building-lobby jammed past endurance, and escaped into a maze from which they’d blundered into a studio with a broadcast going on. Stagehands and necktie-less persons rushed to throw them out. But the noise grew greater while Linda Beach tried gamely to cover it up.

  It was not easy. In fact, it was impossible. One of the Toppers found himself cornered by two stagehands and dashed triumphantly across that sacrosanct space, the area in a camera’s field of vision. He raced behind Linda Beach, then smiling pleasantl
y and talking at the top of her voice to cover the noise behind her. The Topper snatched as he went by. Linda Beach staggered, and her necklace broke, and this particular juvenile delinquent plunged into the crowd by the doorway and wormed his way through to lose himself in the crush outside.

  But now the cops from the squad-cars were at work.

  * * * *

  The lobby began to be partially cleared. Fugitives from panic came down into the street where they were commanded to get moving and keep moving. They did.

  And Soames arrived at the studio. He’d fought his way there with a sort of white-hot passion, because Gail was where this lunatic mob might trample her. He raged, and then he saw her standing with precarious composure out of the way of everything.

  Fran dragged fiercely at his arm. His eyes burned. He thrust something upon Soames and frantically repeated the one word of his scanty English vocabulary which seemed to fit. The word was, “Try! Try! Try!” He reached around Soames’ waist and linked a belt about him.

  Soames had the abrupt conviction that he was going mad. He stood, himself, in the studio where the tumult was now almost ended. But he looked up at himself from the level of his own breast. Also he was down in the lobby of the Communications Building, mingling with the thinning mob there, allowing himself to be shepherded out into the street. There he was surrounded by people taller than himself. That part of his awareness reached the open air and moved swiftly westward. That part of him put his hand in his pocket—but Soames had nothing to do with the action—and felt things there. There was a chain with sharp-edged, faceted things on it. There was a belt with shaped metallic objects fastened to it.…

  “Try!” cried Fran desperately. “Try!”

  And suddenly Soames realized. He heard the street-sounds through someone else’s ears. He saw the street through someone else’s eyes. Simultaneously he saw himself in the studio through someone else’s eyes, Fran’s. And this explained the behavior of the children with puppies and English lessons and items of information which all of them seemed to know when one knew. The children were not telepathic. They could not read each other’s minds. But some one or all of the decorative squares and circles on their belts enabled them to share each other’s sense-impressions. They were both broadcasters and receivers of sensory impressions. And therefore it was because Soames had Mal’s belt about him that he could see what Fran saw, and hear what Fran heard, and also he saw and heard and felt what an oily-haired member of the Toppers saw and heard and felt with Hod’s belt in his pocket beside Linda Beach’s necklace, snatched from her neck even before the camera.