The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories

by Fredric Brown

  “But—”

  “Do you promise?”

  “Of course not.”

  Bela Joad sighed. “Then I’m sorry for waking you, Dyer.” He put down his cup and started to rise.

  “Wait! You can’t do that. You can’t just walk out on me!”

  “Can’t I?”

  “All right, all right, I’ll promise. You must have some good reason. Have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll take your word for it.”

  Bela Joad smiled. “Good,” he said. “Then I’ll be able to report to you on my last case. For this is my last case, Dyer. I’m going into a new kind of work.” Rand looked at him incredulously. “What?”

  “I’m going to teach crooks how to beat the lie-detector.”

  Chief Dyer Rand put down his cup slowly and stood up. He took a step toward the little man, about half his weight, who sat at ease on the armless, overstuffed chair.

  Bela Joad still smiled. He said, “Don’t try it, Dyer. For two reasons. First, you couldn’t hurt me and I wouldn’t want to hurt you and I might have to. Second, it’s all right, it’s on the up and up. Sit down.”

  Dyer Rand sat down.

  Bela Joad said, “When you said this thing was big, you didn’t know how big. And it’s going to be bigger; Chicago is just the starting point. And thanks, by the way for those reports I asked you for. They are just what I expected they’d be.”

  “The reports? But they’re still in my desk at headquarters.”

  “They were. I’ve read them and destroyed them. Your copies, too. Forget about them. And don’t pay too much attention to your current statistics. I’ve read them too.”

  Rand frowned. “And why should I forget them?”

  “Because they confirm what Ernie Chappel told me this evening. Do you know, Dyer, that your number of major crimes has gone down in the past year by an even bigger percentage than the percentage by which your convictions for major crimes has gone down?”

  “I noticed that. You mean, there’s a connection?”

  “Definitely. Most crimes—a very high percentage of them—are committed by professional criminals, repeaters. And Dyer, it goes even farther than that. Out of several thousand major crimes a year, ninety percent of them are committed by a few hundred professional criminals. And do you know that the number of professional criminals in Chicago has been reduced by almost a third in the last two years? It has. And that’s why your number of major crimes has decreased.”

  Bela Joad took another sip of his coffee and then leaned forward. “Gyp Girard, according to your report, is now running a vitadrink stand on the West Side, he hasn’t committed a crime in almost a year—since he beat your lie-detector.” He touched another finger. “Joe Zatelli, who used to be the roughest boy on the Near North Side, is now running his restaurant straight. Carey Hutch. Wild Bill Wheeler—Why should I list them all? You’ve got the list, and it’s not complete because there are plenty of names you haven’t got on it, people who went to Ernie Chappel so he could show them how to beat the detector, and then didn’t get arrested after all. And nine out of ten of them—and that’s conservative, Dyer—haven’t committed a crime since!”

  Dyer Rand said, “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “My original investigation of the Chappel case showed me that he’d disappeared voluntarily. And I knew he was a good man, and a great one. I knew he was mentally sound because he was a psychiatrist as well as a criminologist. A psychiatrist’s got to be sound. So I knew he’d disappeared for some good reason.”

  “And when, about nine months ago, I heard your side of what had been happening in Chicago, I began to suspect that Chappel had come here to do his work. Are you beginning to get the picture?”

  “Faintly.”

  “Well, don’t faint yet. Not until you figure how an expert psychiatrist can help crooks beat the detector. Or have you?”

  “Well—”

  “That’s it. The most elementary form of hypnotic treatment, something any qualified psychiatrist could do fifty years ago. Chappel’s clients—of course they don’t know who or what he is; he’s a mysterious underworld figure who helps them beat the rap—pay him well and tell him what crimes they may be questioned about by the police if they’re picked up. He tells them to include every crime they’ve ever committed and any racket they’ve ever been in, so the police won’t catch them up on any old counts. Then he—”

  “Wait a minute,” Rand interrupted. “How does he get them to trust him that far?”

  Joad gestured impatiently. “Simple. They aren’t confessing a single crime, even to him. He just wants a list that includes everything they’ve done. They can add some ringers and he doesn’t know which is which. So it doesn’t matter.”

  “Then he puts them under light waking-hypnosis and tells them they are not criminals and never have been and they have never done any of the things on the list he reads back to them. That’s all there is to it.”

  “So when you put them under the detector and ask them if they’ve done this or that, they say they haven’t and they believe it. That’s why your detector gauges don’t register. That’s why Joe Zatelli didn’t jump when he saw Martin Blue walk in. He didn’t know Blue was dead—except that he’d read it in the papers.”

  Rand leaned forward. “Where is Ernst Chappel?”

  “You don’t want him, Dyer.”

  “Don’t want him? He’s the most dangerous man alive today!”

  “To whom?”

  “To whom? Are you crazy?”

  “I’m not crazy. He’s the most dangerous man alive today—to the underworld. Look, Dyer, any time a criminal gets jittery about a possible pinch, he sends for Ernie or goes to Ernie. And Ernie washes him whiter than snow and in the process tells him he’s not a criminal.”

  “And so, at least nine times out of ten, he quits being a criminal. Within ten or twenty years Chicago isn’t going to have an underworld. There won’t be any organized crimes by professional criminals. You’ll always have the amateur with you, but he’s a comparatively minor detail. How about some more café royale?”

  Dyer Rand walked to the kitchenette and got it. He was wide awake by now, but he walked like a man in a dream.

  When he came back, Joad said, “And now that I’m in with Ernie on it, Dyer, we’ll stretch it to every city in the world big enough to have an underworld worth mentioning. We can train picked recruits; I’ve got my eye on two of your men and may take them away from you soon. But I’ll have to check them first. We’re going to pick our apostles—about a dozen of them—very carefully. They’ll be the right men for the job.”

  “But, Joad, look at all the crimes that are going to go unpunished!” Rand protested.

  Bela Joad drank the rest of his coffee and stood up. He said, “And which is more important—to punish criminals or to end crime? And, if you want to look at it moralistically, should a man be punished for a crime when he doesn’t even remember committing it, when he is no longer a criminal?”

  Dyer Rand sighed. “You win, I guess. I’ll keep my promise. I suppose—I’ll never see you again?”

  “Probably not, Dyer. And I’ll anticipate what you’re going to say next. Yes, I’ll have a farewell drink with you. A straight one, without the coffee.” Dyer Rand brought the glasses. He said, “Shall we drink to Ernie Chappel?”

  Bela Joad smiled. He said, “Let’s include him in the toast, Dyer. But let’s drink to all men who work to put themselves out of work. Doctors work toward the day when the race will be so healthy it won’t need doctors; lawyers work toward the day when litigation will no longer be necessary. And policemen, detectives, and criminologists work toward the day when they will no longer be needed because there will be no more crime.”

  Dyer Rand nodded very soberly and lifted his glass. They drank.

  AND THE GODS LAUGHED

  You know how it is when you’re with a work crew on one of the asteroids. You’re there, stuck for the month you
signed up for, with four other guys and nothing to do but talk. Space on the little tugs that you go in and return in, and live in while you’re there, is at such a premium that there isn’t room for a book or a magazine nor equipment for games. And you’re out of radio range except for the usual once-a-terrestrial-day, system-wide newscasts.

  So talking is the only indoor sport you can go in for. Talking and listening. You’ve plenty of time for both because a work-day, in space-suits, is only four hours and that with four fifteen-minute back-to-the-ship rests.

  Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that talk is cheap on one of those work crews. With most of the day to do nothing else, you listen to some real whoppers, stories that would make the old-time Liars Club back on Earth seem like Sunday-school meetings. And if your mind runs that way, you’ve got plenty of time to think up some yourself.

  Charlie Dean was on our crew, and Charlie could tell some dillies. He’d been on Mars back in the old days when there was still trouble with the bolies, and when living on Mars was a lot like living on Earth back in the days of Indian fighting. The bolies thought and fought a lot like Amerinds, even though they were quadrupeds that looked like alligators on stilts—if you can picture an alligator on stilts—and used blow-guns instead of bows and arrows. Or was it crossbows that the Amerinds used against the colonists?

  Anyway, Charlie’s just finished a whopper that was really too good for the first tryout of the trip. We’d just landed, you see, and were resting up from doing nothing en route, and usually the yarns start off easy and believable and don’t work up to real depth-of-space lying until along about the fourth week when everybody’s bored stiff.

  “So we took this head bolie,” Charlie was ending up, “and you know what kind of flappy little ears they’ve got, and we put a couple of zircon-studded earrings in its ears and let it go, and back it went to the others, and then darned if—” Well, I won’t go on with Charlie’s yarn, because it hasn’t got anything to do with his story except that it brought earrings into the conversation.

  Blake shook his head gloomily and then turned to me. He said, “Hank, what went on on Ganymede? You were on that ship that went out there a few months ago, weren’t you—the first one that got through? I’ve never read or heard much about that trip.”

  “Me either,” Charlie said. “Except that the Ganymedeans turned out to be humanoid beings about four feet tall and didn’t wear a thing except earrings. Kind of immodest, wasn’t it?”

  I grinned. “You wouldn’t have thought so if you’d seen the Ganymedeans. With them, it didn’t matter. Anyway, they didn’t wear earrings.”

  “You’re crazy,” Charlie said. “Sure, I know you were on that expedition and I wasn’t, but you’re still crazy, because I had a quick look at some of the pictures they brought back. The natives wore earrings.”

  “No,” I said. “Earrings wore them.”

  Blake sighed deeply. “I knew it, I knew it,” he said. “There was something wrong with this trip from the start. Charlie pops off the first day with a yarn that should have been worked up to gradually. And now you say—Or is there something wrong with my sense of earring?”

  I chuckled. “Not a thing, Skipper.”

  Charlie said, “I’ve heard of men biting dogs, but earrings wearing people is a new one. Hank, I hate to say it—but just consider it said.”

  Anyway, I had their attention. And now was as good a time as any.

  I said, “If you read about the trip, you know we left Earth about eight months ago, for a six-months’ round trip. There were six of us in the M-94; me and two others made up the crew and there were three specialists to do the studying and exploring. Not the really top-flight specialists, though, because the trip was too risky to send them. That was the third ship to try for Ganymede and the other two had cracked up on outer Jovian satellites that the observatories hadn’t spotted from Earth because they are too small to show up in the scopes at that distance.”

  “When you get there you find there’s practically an asteroid belt around Jupiter, most of them so black they don’t reflect light to speak of and you can’t see them till they hit you or you hit them. But most of them—”

  “Skip the satellites,” Blake interrupted, “unless they wore earrings.”

  “Or unless earrings wore them,” said Charlie.

  “Neither,” I admitted. “All right, so we were lucky and got through the belt. And landed. Like I said, there were six of us. Lecky, the biologist. Haynes geologist and mineralogist. And Hilda Race, who loved little flowers and was a botanist, egad! You’d have loved Hilda—at a distance. Somebody must have wanted to get rid of her, and sent her on that trip. She gushed; you know the type.”

  “And then there was Art Willis and Dick Carney. They gave Dick a skipper’s rating for the trip; he knew enough astrogation to get us through. So Dick was skipper and Art and I were flunkies and gunmen. Our main job was to go along with the specialists whenever they left the ship and stand guard over them against whatever dangers might pop up.”

  “And did anything pop?” Charlie demanded.

  “I’m coming to that,” I told him. “We found Ganymede not so bad, as places go. Gravity low, of course, but you could get around easily and keep your balance once you got used to it. And the air was breathable for a couple of hours; after that you found yourself panting like a dog.”

  “Lot of funny animals, but none of them were very dangerous. No reptilian life; all of it mammalian, but a funny kind of mammalian if you know what I mean.”

  Blake said, “I don’t want to know what you mean. Get to the natives and the earrings.”

  I said, “But of course with animals like that, you never know whether they’re dangerous until you’ve been around them for a while. You can’t judge by size or looks. Like if you’d never seen a snake, you’d never guess that a little coral snake was dangerous, would you? And a Martian zeezee looks for all the world like an overgrown guinea pig. But without a gun—or with one, for that matter—I’d rather face a grizzly bear or a—”

  “The earrings,” said Blake. “You were talking about earrings.”

  I said, “Oh, yes; earrings. Well, the natives wore them—for now, I’ll put it that way, to make it easier to tell. One earring apiece, even though they had two ears. Gave them a sort of lopsided look, because they were pretty fair-sized earrings—like hoops of plain gold, two or three inches in diameter.”

  “Anyway, the tribe we landed near wore them that way. We could see the village—a very primitive sort of place made of mud huts—from where we landed. We had a council of war and decided that three of us would stay in the ship and the other three go to the village. Lecky, the biologist, and Art Willis and I with guns. We didn’t know what we might run into, see? And Lecky was chosen because he was pretty much of a linguist. He had a flair for languages and could talk them almost as soon as he heard them.”

  “They’d heard us land and a bunch of them—about forty, I guess—met us halfway between the ship and the village. And they were friendly. Funny people. Quiet and dignified and acting not at all like you’d expect savages to act toward people landing out of the sky. You know how most primitives react—either they practically worship you or else they try to kill you.”

  “We went to the village with them—and there were about forty more of them there; they’d split forces just as we did, for the reception committee. Another sign of intelligence. They recognized Lecky as leader, and started jabbering to him in a lingo that sounded more like a pig grunting than a man talking. And pretty soon Lecky was making an experimental grunt or two in return.”

  “Everything seemed on the up and up, and no danger. And they weren’t paying much attention to Art and me, so we decided to wander off for a stroll around the village to see what the country was like and whether there were any dangerous beasties or what-not. We didn’t see any animals, but we did see another native. He acted different from the others—very different. He threw a spear at us and then ran. A
nd it was Art who noticed that this native didn’t wear an earring.”

  “And then breathing began to get a bit hard for us—we’d been away from the ship over an hour—so we went back to the village to collect Lecky and take him to the ship. He was getting along so well that he hated to leave, but he was starting to pant, too, so we talked him into it. He was wearing one of the earrings, and said they’d given it to him as a present, and he’d made them a return present of a pocket slide-rule he happened to have with him.”

  “‘Why a slide-rule?’ I asked him. ‘Those things cost money and we’ve got plenty of junk that would make them happier.’”

  “‘That’s what you think,’ he said. ‘They figured out how to multiply and divide with it almost as soon as I showed it to them. I showed them how to extract square roots, and I was starting on cube roots when you fellows came back.’”

  “I whistled and took a close look to see if maybe he was kidding me. He didn’t seem to be. But I noticed that he was walking strangely and—well, acting just a bit strangely, somehow, although I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I decided finally that he was just a bit over-excited. This was Lecky’s first trip off Earth, so that was natural enough.”

  “Inside the ship, as soon as Lecky got his breath back—the last hundred yards pretty well winded us—he started in to tell Haynes and Hilda Race about the Ganymedeans. Most of it was too technical for me, but I got that they had some strange contradictions in them. As far as their way of life was concerned, they were more primitive than Australian bushmen. But they had brains and a philosophy and a knowledge of mathematics and pure science. They’d told him some things about atomic structure that excited hell out of him. He was in a dither to get back to Earth where he could get at equipment to check some of those things.”

  “And he said the earring was a sign of membership in the tribe—they’d acknowledged him as a friend and compatriot and what-not by giving it to him.”

  Blake asked, “Was it gold?”