The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories

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The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 18

by Fredric Brown


  “I’m coming to that,” I told him. I was feeling cramped from sitting so long in one position on the bunk, and I stood up and stretched.

  There isn’t much room to stretch in an asteroid tug and my hand hit against the pistol resting in the clips on the wall. I said, “What’s the pistol for, Blake?”

  He shrugged. “Rules. Has to be one hand weapon on every space-craft. Heaven knows why, on an asteroid ship. Unless the council thinks some day an asteroid may get mad at us when we tow it out of orbit so it cracks up another. Say, did I ever tell you about the time we had a little twenty-ton rock in tow and—”

  “Shut up, Blake,” Charlie said. “He’s just getting to those damn earrings.”

  “Yeah, the earrings,” I said. I took the pistol down from the wall and looked at it. It was an old-fashioned metal project weapon, twenty-shot, circa 2000. It was loaded and usable, but dirty. It hurts me to see a dirty gun.

  I went on talking, but I sat back down on the bunk, took an old handkerchief out of my duffle-box and started to clean and polish the hand-gun while I talked.

  I said, “He wouldn’t let us take the earring off. Acted just a little funny about it when Haynes wanted to analyze the metal. Told Haynes he could get one of his own if he wanted to mess with it. And then he went back to rhapsodizing over the superior knowledge the Ganymedeans had shown.”

  “Next day all of them wanted to go to the village, but we’d made the rule that not more than three of the six of us would be outside the ship at once, and they’d have to take turns. Since Lecky could talk their grunt-lingo, he and Hilda went first, and Art went along to guard them. Looked safe enough to work that proportion now—two scientists to one guard. Outside of that one native that had thrown a spear at Art and me, there hadn’t been a sign of danger. And he’d looked like a half-wit and missed us by twenty feet anyway. We hadn’t even bothered to shoot at him.”

  “They were back, panting for breath, in less than two hours. Hilda Race’s eyes were shining and she was wearing one of the rings in her left ear. She looked as proud as though it was a royal crown making her queen of Mars or something. She gushed about it, as soon as she got her wind back and stopped panting.”

  “I went on the next trip, with Lecky and Haynes.”

  “Haynes was kind of grumpy, for some reason, and said they weren’t going to put one of those rings in his ear, even if he did want one for analysis. They could just hand it to him, or else.”

  “Again nobody paid much attention to me after we got there, and I wandered around the village. I was on the outskirts of it when I heard a yell—and I ran back to the center of town but fast, because it sounded like Haynes.”

  “There was a crowd around a spot in the middle of—well, call it the compound. Took me a minute to wedge my way through, scattering natives to all sides as I went. And when I got to the middle of things, Haynes was just getting up, and there was a big stain of red on the front of his white linen coat.”

  “I grabbed him to help him up, and said, ‘Haynes, what’s the matter? You hurt?’”

  “He shook his head slowly, as though he was kind of dazed, and then he said, ‘I’m all right, Hank. I’m all right. I just stumbled and fell.’ Then he saw me looking at that red stain, and smiled. I guess it was a smile, but it didn’t look natural. He said, ‘That’s not blood, Hank. Some native red wine I happened to spill. Part of the ceremony.’”

  “I started to ask what ceremony, and then I saw he was wearing one of the gold earrings. I thought that was damn funny, but he started talking to Lecky, and he looked and acted all right—well, fairly all right. Lecky was telling him what a few of the grunts meant, and he acted awful interested—but somehow I got the idea he was pretending most of that interest so he wouldn’t have to talk to me. He acted as though he was thinking hard, inside, and maybe he was making up a better story to cover that stain on his clothes and the fact that he’d changed his mind so quick about the earring.”

  “I was getting the notion that something was rotten in the state of Ganymede, but I didn’t know what. I decided to keep my yap shut and my eyes open till I found out.”

  “I’d have plenty of time to study Haynes later, though, so I wandered off again to the edge of the village and just outside it. And it occurred to me that if there was anything I wasn’t supposed to see, I might stand a better chance of seeing it if I got under cover. There were plenty of bushes around and I picked out a good clump of them and hid. From the way my lungs worked, I figured I had maybe a half hour before wed have to start back for the ship.”

  “And less than half that time had gone by before I saw something.”

  I stopped talking to hold the pistol up to the light and squint through the barrel. It was getting pretty clean, but there were a couple of spots left up near the muzzle end.

  Blake said, “Let me guess. You saw a Martian traaghound standing on his tail, sing Annie Laurie.”

  “Worse than that,” I said. “I saw one of those Ganymede natives get his legs bit off. And it annoyed him.”

  “It would annoy anyone,” said Blake. “Even me, and I’m a pretty mild-tempered guy. What bit them off?”

  “I never found out,” I told him. “It was something under water. There was a stream there, going by the village, and there must have been something like crocodiles in it. Two natives came out of the village and started to wade across the stream. About half-way over one of them gave a yelp and went down.”

  “The other grabbed him and pulled him up on the other bank. And both his legs were gone just above the knees.”

  “And the damnedest thing happened. The native with his legs off stood up on the stumps of them and started talking—or grunting—quite calmly to his companion, who grunted back. And if tone of voice meant anything, he was annoyed. Nothing more. He tried walking on the stumps of his legs, and found he couldn’t go very fast.”

  “And then he gave a gesture that looked for all the world like a shrug, and reached up and took off his earring and held it out to the other native. And then came the strangest part.”

  “The other native took it—and the very instant the ring left the hand of the first one—the one with his legs off—he fell down dead. The other one picked up the corpse and threw it in the water, and went on.”

  “And as soon as he was out of sight I went back to get Lecky and Haynes and take them to the ship. They were ready to leave when I got there.”

  “I thought I was worried a bit, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. Not till I started back to the ship with Lecky and Haynes. Haynes, first thing I noticed, had the stain gone from the front of his coat. Wine or—whatever it was—somebody’d managed to get it out for him, and the coat wasn’t even wet. But it was torn, pierced. I hadn’t noticed that before. But there was a place there that looked like a spear had gone through his coat.”

  “And then he happened to get in front of me, and I saw that there was another tear or rip just like it in back of his coat. Taken together, it was like somebody’d pushed a spear through him, from front to back. When he’d yelled.”

  “But if a spear’d gone through him like that, then he was dead. And there he was walking ahead of me back to the ship. With one of those earrings in his left ear—and I couldn’t help but remember about that native and the thing in the river. That native was sure enough dead, too, with his legs off like that, but he hadn’t found it out until he’d handed that earring away.”

  “I can tell you I was plenty thoughtful that evening, watching everybody, and it seemed to me that they were all acting strange. Especially Hilda—you’d have to watch a hippopotamus acting kittenish to get an idea. Haynes and Lecky seemed thoughtful and subdued, like they were planning something, maybe. After a while Art came up from the glory hole and he was wearing one of those rings.”

  “Gave me a kind of shiver to realize that—if what I was thinking could possibly be true—then there was only me and Dick left. And I’d better start comparing notes with Dick pretty soo
n. He was working on a report, but I knew pretty soon he’d make his routine inspection trip through the storerooms before turning in, and I’d corner him then.”

  “Meanwhile, I watched the other four and I got surer and surer. And more and more scared. They were trying their darnedest to act natural, but once in a while one of them would slip. For one thing, they’d forget to talk. I mean, one of them would turn to another as though he was saying something, but he wouldn’t. And then, as though remembering, he’d start in the middle of it—like he’d been talking without words before, telepathically.”

  “And pretty soon Dick gets up and goes out, and I followed him. We got to one of the side storerooms and I closed the door. ‘Dick,’ I asked, ‘have you noticed it?’ And he wanted to know what I was talking about.”

  “So I told him. I said, ‘Those four people out there—they aren’t the ones we started with. What happened to Art and Hilda and Lecky and Haynes? What the hell goes on here? Haven’t you noticed anything out of the ordinary?’”

  “And Dick sighed, kind of, and said, ‘Well, it didn’t work. We need more practice, then. Come on and we’ll tell you all about it.’ And he opened the door and held out his hand to me—and the sleeve of his shirt pulled back a little from the wrist and he was wearing one of those gold things, like the others, only he was wearing it as a bracelet instead of an earring.”

  “I—well, I was too dumbfounded to say anything. I didn’t take the hand he held out, but I followed him back into the main room. And then—while Lecky, who seemed to be the leader, I think—held a gun on me, they told me about it.”

  “And it was even screwier, and worse, than I’d dare guess.”

  “They didn’t have any name for themselves, because they had no language—what you’d really call a spoken or written language—of their own. You see, they were telepathic, and you don’t need a language for that. If you tried to translate their thought for themselves, the nearest word you could find for it would be ‘we’—the first person plural pronoun. Individually, they identified themselves to one another by numbers rather than names.”

  “And just as they had no language of their own, they had no real bodies of their own, nor active minds of their own. They were parasitic in a sense that Earthmen can’t conceive, They were entities, apart from—Well, it’s difficult to explain, but in a way they had no real existence when not attached to a body they could animate and think with. The easiest way to put it is that a detached—uh—earring god, which is what the Ganymedean natives called them—was asleep, dormant, ineffective. Had no power of thought or motion in itself.” Charlie and Blake were looking bewildered. Charlie said, “You’re trying to say, Hank, that when one of them came in contact with a person, they took over that person and ran him and thought with his mind but—uh—kept their own identity? And what happened to the person they took over?”

  I said, “As near as I could make out, he stayed there, too, as it were, but was dominated by the entity. I mean, there remained all his memories, and his individuality, but something else was in the driver’s seat. Running him. Didn’t matter whether he was alive or dead, either, as long as his body wasn’t in too had shape. Like Haynes—they’d had to kill him to put an earring on him. He was dead, in that if that ring was removed, he’d have fallen flat and never got up again, unless it was put back.”

  “Like the native whose legs had been cut off. The entity running him had decided the body was no longer practicable for use, so he handed himself back to the other native, see? And they’d find another body in better shape for him to use.”

  “They didn’t tell me where they came from, except that it was outside the solar system, nor just how they got to Ganymede. Not by themselves, though, because they couldn’t even exist by themselves. They must have got as far as Ganymede as parasites of visitors that had landed there at some time or other. Maybe millions of years ago. And they couldn’t get off Ganymede, of course, till we landed there. Space travel hadn’t developed on Ganymede—” Charlie interrupted me again, “But if they were so smart, why didn’t they develop it themselves?”

  “They couldn’t,” I told him. “They weren’t any smarter than the minds they occupied. Well, a little smarter, in a way, because they could use those minds to their full capacity and people—Terrestrial or Ganymedean—don’t do that. But even the full capacity of the mind of a Ganymedean savage wasn’t sufficient to develop a space-ship.”

  “But now they had us—I mean, they had Lecky and Haynes and Hilda and Art and Dick—and they had our space-ship, and they were going to Earth, because they knew all about it and about conditions there from our minds. They planned, simply, to take over Earth and—uh—run it. They didn’t explain the details of how they propagate, but I gathered that there wouldn’t be any shortage of earrings to go around, on Earth. Earrings or bracelets or, however they’d attach themselves.”

  “Bracelets, probably, or arm or leg bands, because wearing earrings like that would be too conspicuous on Earth, and they’d have to work in secret for a while. Take over a few people at a time, without letting the others know what was going on.”

  “And Lecky—or the thing that was running Lecky—told me they’d been using me as a guinea pig, that they could have put a ring on me, taken me over, at any time. But they wanted a check on how they were doing at imitating normal people. They wanted to know whether or not I got suspicious and guessed the truth.”

  “So Dick—or the thing that was running him—had kept himself out of sight under Dick’s sleeve, so if I got suspicious of the others, I’d talk it over with Dick—just as I really did do. And that let them know they needed a lot more practice animating those bodies before they took the ship back to Earth to start their campaign there.”

  “And, well, that was the whole story and they told it to me to watch my reactions, as a normal human. And then Lecky took a ring out of his pocket and held it out toward me with one hand, keeping the pistol on me with the other hand.”

  “He told me I might as well put it on because if I didn’t, he could shoot me first and then put it on me—but that they greatly preferred to take over undamaged bodies and that it would be better for me, too, if I—that is, my body—didn’t die first.”

  “But naturally, I didn’t see it that way. I pretended to reach out for the ring, hesitantly, but instead I batted the gun out of his hand, and made a dive for it as it hit the floor.”

  “I got it, too, just as they all came for me. And I fired three shots into them before I saw that it wasn’t even annoying them. The only way you can stop a body animated by one of those rings is to fix it so it can’t move, like cutting off the legs or something. A bullet in the heart doesn’t worry it.”

  “But I’d backed to the door and got out of it—out into the Gandymedean night, without even a coat on. It was colder than hell, too. And after I got out there, there just wasn’t any place to go. Except back in the ship, and I wasn’t going there.”

  “They didn’t come out after me—didn’t bother to. They knew that within three hours—four at the outside—I’d be unconscious from insufficient oxygen. If the cold, or something else, didn’t get me first.”

  “Maybe there was some way out, but I didn’t see one. I just sat down on a stone about a hundred yards from the ship and tried to think of something I could do. But—”

  I didn’t go anywhere with the “but—” and there was a moment’s silence, and then Charlie said, “Well?”

  And Blake said, “What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I couldn’t think of a thing to do. I just sat there.”

  “Till morning?”

  “No. I lost consciousness before morning. I came to while it was still dark, in the ship.”

  Blake was looking at me with a puzzled frown. He said, “The hell. You mean—”

  And then Charlie let out a sudden yip and dived headfirst out of the bunk he’d been lying on, and grabbed the gun out of my hand. I’d just finished cleanin
g it and slipped the cartridge-clip back in.

  And then, with it in his hand, he stood there staring at me as though he’d never seen me before.

  Blake said, “Sit down, Charlie. Don’t you know when you’re being ribbed? But—uh—better keep the gun, just the same.”

  Charlie kept the gun all right, and turned it around to point at me. He said, “I’m making a damn fool out of myself all right, but—Hank, roll up your sleeves.”

  I grinned and stood up. I said, “Don’t forget my ankles, too.”

  But there was something dead serious in his face, and I didn’t push him too far. Blake said, “He could even have it on him somewhere else, with adhesive tape. I mean on the million-to-one chance that he wasn’t kidding.”

  Charlie nodded without turning to look at Blake. He said, “Hank, I hate to ask it, but—”

  I sighed, and then chuckled. I said, “Well, I was just going to take a shower anyway.”

  It was hot in the ship, and I was wearing only shoes and a pair of coveralls. Paying no attention to Blake and Charlie, I slipped them off and stepped through the oil-silk curtains of the little shower cubicle. And turned on the water.

  Over the sound of the shower, I could hear Blake laughing and Charlie cursing softly to himself.

  And when I came out of the shower, drying myself, even Charlie was grinning. Blake said, “And I thought that yarn Charlie just told was a dilly. This trip is backwards; we’ll end up having to tell each other the truth.”

  There was a sharp rapping on the hull beside the airlock, and Charlie Dean went to open it. He growled, “If you tell Zeb and Ray what chumps you made out of us, I’ll beat your damn ears in. You and your earring gods…”

  Portion of telepathic report of No. 67843, on Asteroid—J-864A to No. 5463, on Terra:

  As planned, I tested credulity of terrestrial minds by telling them the true story of what happened on Ganymede.

  Found them capable of acceptance thereof.

  This proves that our idea of embedding ourselves within the flesh of these terrestrial creatures was an excellent one and is essential to the success of our plan. True, this is less simple than our method on Ganymede, but we must continue to perform the operation upon each terrestrial being as we take him over. Bracelets or other appendages would arouse suspicion.

 

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