“And the Satan group, Doctor—do they believe the devil is not smart enough to know that his command may backfire?”
“Evil is always stupid, Mr. President.”
“And your personal opinion, Dr. Burke? You have not said to which faction you belong.”
The minister smiled. “I am one of the very small faction which does not accept that the phenomenon was of supernatural origin at all, either from God or the devil.”
“Then whom do you believe X to be, Doctor?”
“My personal guess is that X is extra-terrestrial. Perhaps as near as Mars, perhaps as far as another Galaxy.”
* * * *
The President sighed and said, “No, Walter, I simply cannot take time out for lunch. If you’ll bring me a sandwich here, I’ll have to apologize to my next visitor or two for eating while I talk. And coffee, lots of coffee.”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Just a minute, Walter. The telegrams that have been coming in since eight-thirty last night—how many are there now?”
“Well over forty thousand, sir. We’ve been working at classifying them, but we’re several thousand behind.”
“And?”
The presidential secretary said, “From every class—ministers, truck drivers, crackpots, business leaders, everybody. Offering every theory possible—but pretty much only one conclusion. No matter who they think instigated that broadcast or why, they want to disobey its command. Yesterday, I would say that nine-tenths of our population was resigned to war; well over half thought we ought to start it first. Today—well, there’s always a lunatic fringe; about one telegram out of four hundred thinks we should go to war. The others—well, I think that today a declaration of war would cause a revolution, Mr. President.”
“Thank you, Walter.”
The secretary turned at the doorway. “A report from the army recruiting corps—enlistments thus far today have been fifteen—throughout the entire country. An average day for the past month, up to noon, was about eight thousand. I’ll send in your sandwich, sir.”
“Professor Winslow, I hope you will pardon my eating this sandwich while we talk. You are, I am told, professor of semantics at New York University, and the top man in your field?”
Professor Winslow smiled deprecatingly. “You would hardly expect me to agree to that, Mr. President. I presume you wish to ask questions about last night’s—uh—broadcast?”
“Exactly. What are your conclusions?”
“The word ‘fight’ is hardly analyzable. Whether it was meant in fact or in reverse is a matter for the psychologists—and even they are having grave difficulty with it, until and unless they learn who gave that command.”
The President nodded.
“But, Mr. President, the rest of the broadcast, the phrase in another voice that preceded the command. ‘And now a word from our sponsor’—that is something which should give us something to work on, especially as we have studied it carefully in many languages, and worked out fully the connotation of every word.”
“Your conclusion?”
“Only this; that it was carefully worded, designed, to conceal the identity of the broadcaster or broadcasters. Quite successfully. We can draw no worthwhile conclusions.”
“Dr. Abrams, has any correlating phenomenon been noticed at your or any other observatory?”
“Nothing, Mr. President.” The little man with the gray goatee smiled quietly. “The stars are all in their courses. Nothing observable is amiss with the universe. I fear I can give you no help—except my personal opinion.”
“Which is?”
“That—regardless of the meaning, pro or con, of the command to fight—the opening phrase meant exactly what it said. That we are sponsored.”
“By whom? God?”
“I am an agnostic, Mr. President. But I do not rule out the possibility that man isn’t the highest natural being in the universe. It’s quite large, you know. Perhaps we’re an experiment conducted by someone—in another dimension, anywhere. Perhaps, generally speaking, we’re allowed to go our way for the sake of the experiment. But we almost went too far, this time, toward destroying ourselves and ending the experiment. And he didn’t want it ended. So—” He smiled gently. “—a word from our sponsor.”
The President leaned forward across the desk, almost spilling his coffee. “But, if that is true, was the word meant?”
“I think that whether it was meant—in the sense in which you mean the word ‘meant’—is irrelevant. If we have a sponsor, he must know what its effect will be, and that effect—whether it be war or peace—is what he wanted to achieve.”
The President wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.
“How do you differentiate this—sponsor from the being most people call God?”
The little man hesitated. “I’m not sure I do. I told you I was an agnostic, not an atheist. However, I do not believe He sits on a cloud and has a long white beard.”
“Mr. Baylor, I particularly wish to thank you for coming here. I am fully aware that you, as head of the Communist Party in the United States, are against everything I stand for. Yet I wish to ask you what the opinion of the Communists here is of the broadcast of yesterday evening.”
“There is no matter of opinion. We know what it is.”
“Of your own knowledge, Mr. Baylor, or because Moscow has spoken?”
“That is irrelevant. We are perfectly aware that the Capitalistic countries instigated that broadcast. And solely for the purpose of inciting us to start the war.”
“And for what reason would we do that?”
“Because you have something new. Something in electronics that enabled you to accomplish what you accomplished last night and that is undoubtedly a decisive weapon. However, because of the opinion of the rest of the world, you do not dare to use it if you yourselves—as your warmongers have been demanding, as indeed you have been planning to do—start the war. You want us to start it and then, with world opinion on your side, you would be able to use your new weapon. However, we refuse to be propagandized.”
“Thank you, Mr. Baylor. And may I ask you one question strictly off the record? Will you answer in the first person singular, not plural, your own personal, private opinion?”
“You may.”
“Do you, personally, really believe we instigated that broadcast?”
“I—I do not know.”
“The afternoon mail, Walter?”
“Well over a hundred thousand letters, Mr. President. We have been able to do only random sampling. They seem to be about the same as the telegrams. General Wickersham is anxious to see you, sir. He thinks you should issue a proclamation to the army. Army morale is in a terrible state, he says, and he thinks a word from you—”
The President smiled grimly. “What word, Walter? The only single word of importance I can think of has already been given—and hasn’t done army morale any good at all. Tell General Wickersham to wait; maybe I’ll be able to see him within a few days. Who’s next on the list?”
“Professor Gresham of Harvard.”
“His specialty?”
“Philosophy and metaphysics.”
The President sighed. “Send him in.”
“You actually mean, Professor, that you have no opinions at all? You won’t even guess whether X is God, devil, extra-galactic superman, terrestrial scientist, Martian—?”
“What good would a guess do, Mr. President? I am certain of only one thing—and that is that we will never know who or what X is. Mortal or immortal, terrestrial or extra-galactic, microcosmic or macrocosmic, four dimensional or twelve, he is sufficiently more clever than we to keep us from discovering his identity. And it is obviously necessary to his plan that we do not know.”
“Why?”
“It is obvious that he wants us to disobey that command, isn’t it? And who ever heard of men obeying a command unless they knew—or thought they knew—who gave it? If anybody ever learns who gave that command, he can de
cide whether to obey it or not. As long as he doesn’t know, it’s psychologically almost impossible for him to obey it.”
The President nodded slowly. “I see what you mean. Men either obey or disobey commands—even commands they think come from God—according to their own will. But how can they obey an order, and still be men, when they don’t know for sure where the order came from?”
He laughed. “And even the Commies don’t know for sure whether we Capitalists did it or not. And as long as they’re not sure—”
“Did we?”
The President said, “I’m beginning to wonder. Even though I know we didn’t, it doesn’t seem more unlikely than anything else.” He tilted back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. After a while he said softly, “Anyway, I don’t think there’s going to be a war. Either side would be mad to start it.”
There wasn’t a war.
SOMETHING GREEN
The big sun was crimson in a violet sky. At the edge of the brown plain, dotted with brown bushes, lay the red jungle.
McGarry strode toward it. It was tough work and dangerous work, searching in those red jungles, but it had to be done. And he’d searched a thousand of them; this was just one more.
He said, “Here we go, Dorothy. All set?”
The little five-limbed creature that rested on his shoulder didn’t answer, but then it never did. It couldn’t talk, but it was something to talk to. It was company. In size and weight it felt amazingly like a hand resting on his shoulder.
He’d had Dorothy for—how long? At a guess, four years. He’d been here about five, as nearly as he could reckon it, and it had been about a year before he’d found her. Anyway, he assumed that Dorothy was of the gender sex, if for no better reason than the gentle way she rested on his shoulder, like a woman’s hand.
“Dorothy,” he said, “reckon we’d better get ready for trouble. Might be lions or tigers in there.”
He unbuckled his sol-gun holster and let his hand rest on the butt of the weapon, ready to draw it quickly. For the thousandth time, at least, he thanked his lucky stars that the weapon he’d managed to salvage from the wreckage of his spacer had been a sol-gun, the one and only weapon that worked practically forever without refills or ammunition. A sol-gun soaked up energy. And, when you pulled the trigger, it dished it out. With any weapon but a sol-gun he’d never have lasted even one year on Kruger III.
Yes, even before he quite reached the edge of the red jungle, he saw a lion. Nothing like any lion ever seen on Earth, of course. This one was bright magenta, just enough different in color from the purplish bushes it crouched behind so he could see it. It had eight legs, all jointless and as supple and strong as an elephant’s trunk, and a scaly head with a beak like a toucan’s.
McGarry called it a lion. He had as much right to call it that as anything else, because it had never been named. Or if it had, the namer had never returned to Earth to report on the flora and fauna of Kruger III. Only one spacer had ever landed here before McGarry’s, as far as the records showed, and it had never taken off again. He was looking for it now; he’d been looking for it systematically for the five years he’d been here.
If he found it, it might—just barely might—contain intact some of the electronic transistors which had been destroyed in the crash-landing of his own spacer. And if it contained enough of them, he could get back to Earth.
He stopped ten paces short of the edge of the red jungle and aimed the sol-gun at the bushes behind which the lion crouched. He pulled the trigger and there was a bright green flash, brief but beautiful—oh, so beautiful—and the bushes weren’t there any more, and neither was the lion.
McGarry chuckled softly. “Did you see that, Dorothy? That was green, the one color you don’t have on this bloody red planet of yours. The most beautiful color in the universe, Dorothy. Green! And I know where there’s a world that’s mostly green, and we’re going to get there, you and I. Sure we are. It’s the world I came from, and it’s the most beautiful place there is, Dorothy. You’ll love it.”
He turned and looked back over the brown plain with brown bushes, the violet sky above, the crimson sun. The eternally crimson sun Kruger, which never set on the day side of this planet, one side of which always faced it as one side of Earth’s moon always faces Earth.
No day and night—unless one passed the shadow line into the night side, which was too freezingly cold to sustain life. No seasons. A uniform, never-changing temperature, no wind, no storms.
He thought for the thousandth, or the millionth, time that it wouldn’t be a bad planet to live on, if only it were green like Earth, if only there was something green upon it besides the occasional flash of his sol-gun. It had breathable atmosphere, moderate temperature ranging from about forty Fahrenheit near the shadow line to about ninety at the point directly under the red sun, where its rays were straight down instead of slanting. Plenty of food, and he’d learned long ago which plants and animals were, for him, edible and which made him ill. Nothing he’d ever tried was outright poisonous.
Yes, a wonderful world. He’d even got used, by now, to being the only intelligent creature on it. Dorothy was helpful, there. Something to talk to, even if she didn’t talk back.
Except—Oh, God—he wanted to see a green world again.
Earth, the only planet in the known universe where green was the predominant color, where plant life was based on chlorophyll.
Other planets, even in the solar system, Earth’s neighbors, had no more to offer than greenish streaks in rare rocks, an occasional tiny life-form of a shade that might be called brownish green if you wanted to call it that. Why, you could live years on any planet but Earth, anywhere in the cosmos, and never see green.
McGarry sighed. He’d been thinking to himself, but now he thought out loud, to Dorothy, continuing his thoughts without a break. It didn’t matter to Dorothy. “Yes, Dorothy,” he said, “it’s the only planet worth living on—Earth! Green fields, grassy lawns, green trees. Dorothy, I’ll never leave it again, once I get back there. I’ll build me a shack out in the woods, in the middle of trees, but not trees so thick that the grass doesn’t grow under them. Green grass. And I’ll paint the shack green, Dorothy. We’ve even got green pigments back on Earth.”
He sighed and looked at the red jungle ahead of him.
“What’s that you asked, Dorothy?” She hadn’t asked anything, but it was a game to pretend that she talked back, a game to keep him sane. “Will I get married when I get back? Is that what you asked?”
He gave it consideration. “Well, it’s like this, Dorothy. Maybe and maybe not. You were named after a woman back on Earth, you know. A woman I was going to marry. But five years is a long time, Dorothy. I’ve been reported missing and presumably dead. I doubt if she’s waited this long. If she has, well, I’ll marry her, Dorothy.”
“Did you ask, what if she hasn’t? Well, I don’t know. Let’s not worry about that till I get back, huh? Of course, if I could find a woman who was green, or even one with green hair, I’d love her to pieces. But on Earth almost everything is green except the women.”
He chuckled at that and, sol-gun ready, went on into the jungle, the red jangle that had nothing green except the occasional flash of his sol-gun.
Funny about that. Back on Earth, a sol-gun flashed violet. Here under a red sun, it flashed green when he fired it. But the explanation was simple enough. A sol-gun drew energy from a nearby star and the flash it made when fired was the complementary color of its source of energy. Drawing energy from Sol, a yellow sun, it flashed violet. From Kruger, a red sun, green.
Maybe that, he thought, had been the one thing that, aside from Dorothy’s company, had kept him sane. A flash of green several times a day. Something green to remind him what the color was. To keep his eyes attuned to it, if he ever saw it again.
It turned out to be a small patch of jungle, as patches of jungle went on Kruger III. One of what seemed countless millions of such patches. And maybe it reall
y was millions; Kruger III was larger than Jupiter. But less dense, so the gravity was easily bearable. Actually it might take him more than a lifetime to cover it all. He knew that, but did not let himself think about it. No more than he let himself think that the ship might have crashed on the dark side, the cold side. Or than he let himself doubt that, once he found the ship, he would find the transistors he needed to make his own spacer operative again.
The patch of jungle was less than a mile square, but he had to sleep once and eat several times before he had finished it. He killed two more lions and one tiger. And when he finished it, he walked around the circumference of it, blazing each of the larger trees along the outer rim so he wouldn’t repeat by searching this particular jungle again. The trees were soft; his pocketknife took off the red bark down to the pink core as easily as it would have taken the skin off a potato.
Then out across the dull brown plain again, this time holding his sol-gun in the open to recharge it.
“Not that one, Dorothy. Maybe the next. The one over there near the horizon. Maybe it’s there.”
Violet sky, red sun, brown plain.
“The green hills of Earth, Dorothy. Oh, how you’ll love them.”
The brown never-ending plain.
The never-changing violet sky.
Was there a sound up there? There couldn’t be. There never had been. But he looked up. And saw it.
A tiny black speck high in the violet, moving. A spacer. It had to be a spacer. There were no birds on Kruger III. And birds don’t trail jets of fire behind them—
He knew what to do; he’d thought of it a million times, how he could signal a spacer if one ever came in sight. He raised his sol-gun, aimed it straight into the violet air and pulled the trigger. It didn’t make a big flash, from the distance of the spacer, but it made a green flash. If the pilot were only looking or if he would only look before he got out of sight, he couldn’t miss a green flash on a world with no other green.
He pulled the trigger again.
And the pilot of the spacer saw. He cut and fired his jets three times—the standard answer to a signal of distress—and began to circle.
The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 14
