The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories

by Fredric Brown

  And Caquer closed his eyes, deliberately, and felt the man’s face with his hand—and it still felt like the face of Willem Deem looked, and the wart was there to the touch as well as to the sense of sight.

  Two men had run out of the check-in building and were coming across the field toward him. Rod caught the expression on their faces and then thought of the little speedster only a few paces from him. He had to get out of Sector Three City, to tell somebody what was happening before it was too late.

  If only they’d been lying about the outgoing power beam being shut off. He leaped across the body of the man he had struck and into the door of the speedster, jerked at the controls. But the ship did not respond, and—no, they hadn’t been lying about the power beam.

  No use staying here for a fight that could not possibly decide anything. He went out the door of the speedster, on the other side, away from the men coming toward him, and ran for the fence.

  It was electrically charged, that fence. Not enough to kill a man, but plenty to hold him stuck to it until men with rubber gloves cut the wire and took him off. But if the power beam was off, probably the current in the fence was off, too.

  It was too high to jump, so he took the chance. And the current was off. He scrambled over it safely and his pursuers stopped and went back to take care of the fallen man beside the speedster.

  Caquer slowed down to a walk, but he kept on going. He didn’t know where, but he had somehow to keep moving. After a while he found that his steps were taking him toward the edge of town, on the northern side, toward Callisto City.

  He was in a small park near the north border when the significance, and the futility, of his direction came to him. And he found, at the same time, that his muscles were sore and tired, that he had a raging headache, that he could not keep on going unless he had a worthwhile and possible goal.

  He sank down on a park bench and for a while held his head in his hands. No answer came.

  After a while he looked up and saw something that fascinated him. A child’s pinwheel on a stick, stuck in the grass of the park, spinning in the wind. Now fast, now slow, as the breeze varied.

  It was going in circles, like his mind was. How could a man’s mind go other than in circles when he could not tell what was reality and what was illusion? Going in circles, like a Vargas Wheel.

  Circles.

  But there ought to be some way. A man with a Vargas Wheel was not completely invincible, else how had the council finally succeeded in destroying the few that had been made? True, possessors of the wheels would have cancelled each other out to some extent, but there must have been a last wheel, in someone’s hands. Owned by someone who wanted to control the destiny of the solar system.

  But they had stopped the wheel.

  It could be stopped, then. But how? How, when one could not see it? Rather, when the sight of it put a man so completely under its control that he no longer, after the first glimpse, knew that it was there. Because, on sight, it had captured his mind.

  He must stop the wheel. That was the only answer. But how?

  That pinwheel there could be the Vargas Wheel, for all he could tell, set to create the illusion that it was a child’s toy. Or its possessor, wearing the helmet, might be standing on the path in front of him at this moment, watching him. The possessor of the wheel might be invisible because Caquer’s mind was told not to see.

  But if the man was there, he’d be really there, and should Rod slash out with his sword, the menace would be ended, wouldn’t it? Of course.

  But how to find a wheel that one could not see? That one could not see because—

  And then, still staring at the pinwheel, Caquer saw a chance, something that might work, a slender chance!

  He looked quickly at his wrist watch and saw that it was half past nine, which was one half-hour before the demonstration in the square. And the wheel and its owner would be there, surely.

  His aching muscles forgotten, Lieutenant Rod Caquer started to run back toward the center of town. The streets were deserted. Everyone had gone to the square, of course. They had been told to come.

  He was winded after a few blocks, and had to slow down to a rapid walk, but there would be time for him to get there before it was over, even if he missed the start.

  Yes, he could get there all right. And then, if his idea worked…

  It was almost ten when he passed the building where his own office was situated, and kept on going. He turned in a few doors beyond. The elevator operator was gone, but Caquer ran the elevator up and a minute later he had used his picklock on a door and was in Perry Peters’ laboratory.

  Peters was gone, of course, but the goggles were there, the special goggles with the trick windshield-wiper effect that made them usable in radite mining.

  Rod Caquer slipped them over his eyes, put the motive-power battery into his pocket, and touched the button on the side. They worked. He could see dimly as the wipers flashed back and forth. But a minute later they stopped.

  Of course. Peters had said that the shafts heated and expanded after a minute’s operation. Well, that might not matter. A minute might be long enough, and the metal would have cooled by the time he reached the square.

  But he would have to be able to vary the speed. Among the litter of stuff on the workbench, he found a small rheostat and spliced it in one of the wires that ran from the battery to the goggles.

  That was the best he could do. No time to try it out. He slid the goggles up onto his forehead and ran out into the hall, took the elevator down to street level. And a moment later he was running toward the public square, two blocks away.

  He reached the fringe of the crowd gathered in the square looking up at the two balconies of the Regency building. On the lower one were several people he recognized; Dr. Skidder, Walther Johnson. Even Lieutenant Borgesen was there.

  On the higher balcony, Regent Barr Maxon was alone, and was speaking to the crowd below. His sonorous voice rolled out phrases extolling the might of empire. Only a little distance away, in the crowd, Caquer caught sight of the gray hair of Professor Gordon, and Jane Gordon’s golden head beside it. He wondered if they were under the spell, too. Of course they were deluded also or they would not be there. He realized it would be useless to speak to them, to tell them what he was trying to do.

  Lieutenant Caquer slid the goggles down over his eyes, blinded momentarily because the wiper arms were in the wrong position. But his fingers found the rheostat, set at zero, and began to move it slowly around the dial toward maximum.

  And then, as the wipers began their frantic dance and accelerated, he could see dimly. Through the arc-shaped lenses, he looked around him. On the lower balcony he saw nothing unusual, but on the upper balcony the figure of Regent Maxon suddenly blurred.

  There was a man standing there on the upper balcony wearing a strange-looking helmet with wires and atop the helmet was a three-inch wheel of mirrors and prisms.

  A wheel that stood still, because of the stroboscopic effect of the mechanized goggles. For an instant, the speed of those wiper arms was synchronized with the spinning of the wheel, so that each successive glimpse of the wheel showed it in the same position, and to Caquer’s eyes the wheel stood still, and he could see it.

  Then the goggles jammed.

  But he did not need them any more now.

  He knew that Barr Maxon, or whoever stood up there on the balcony, was the wearer of the wheel.

  Silently, and attracting as little attention as possible, Caquer sprinted around the fringe of the crowd and reached the side door of the Regency building.

  There was a guard on duty there.

  “Sorry, sir, but no one’s allowed—”

  Then he tried to duck, too late. The flat of Police Lieutenant Rod Caquer’s shortsword thudded against his head.

  The inside of the building seemed deserted. Caquer ran up the three flights of stairs that would take him to the level of the higher balcony, and down the hall toward the balcony doo
r.

  He burst through it, and Regent Maxon turned. Maxon now no longer wore the helmet on his head. Caquer had lost the goggles, but whether he could see it or not, Caquer knew the helmet and the wheel were still in place and working, and that this was his one chance.

  Maxon turned and saw Lieutenant Caquer’s face, and his drawn sword.

  Then, abruptly, Maxon’s figure vanished. It seemed to Caquer—although he knew that it was not—that the figure before him was that of Jane Gordon. Jane, looking at him pleadingly, and spoke in melting tones.

  “Rod, don’t—” she began to say.

  But it was not Jane, he knew. A thought, in self-preservation, had been directed at him by the manipulator of the Vargas Wheel.

  Caquer raised his sword, and he brought it down hard.

  Glass shattered and there was the ring of metal on metal as his sword cut through and split the helmet.

  Of course it was not Jane now—just a dead man lying there with blood oozing out of the split in a strange and complicated but utterly shattered helmet. A helmet that could now be seen by everyone there, and by Lieutenant Caquer himself.

  Just as everyone, including Caquer himself, could recognize the man who had worn it.

  He was a small, wiry man, and there was an unsightly wart on the side of his nose.

  Yes, it was Willem Deem. And this time, Rod Caquer knew it was Willem Deem…

  * * * *

  “I thought,” Jane Gordon said, “that you were going to leave for Callisto City without saying goodbye to us.”

  Rod Caquer threw his hat in the general direction of a hook.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “I’m not even sure I’m going to take the promotion to a job as police coordinator there. I have a week to decide, and I’ll be around town at least that long. How you been doing, Icicle?”

  “Fine, Rod. Sit down. Father will be home soon, and I know he has a lot of things to ask you. Why, we haven’t seen you since the big mass meeting.”

  Funny how dumb a smart man can be, at times.

  But then again, he had proposed so often and been refused, that it was not all his fault.

  He just looked at her.

  “Rod, all the story never came out in the newscasts,” she said. “I know you’ll have to tell it all over again for my father, but while we’re waiting for him, won’t you give me some information?”

  Rod grinned.

  “Nothing to it, really, Icicle,” he said. “Willem Deem got hold of a Blackdex book, and found out how to make a Vargas Wheel. So he made one, and it gave him ideas.”

  “His first idea was to kill Barr Maxon and take over as Regent, setting the helmet so he would appear to be Maxon. He put Maxon’s body in his own shop, and then had a lot of fun with his own murder. He had a warped sense of humor, and got a kick out of chasing us in circles.”

  “But just how did he do all the rest?” asked the girl.

  “He was there as Brager, and pretended to discover his own body. He gave one description of the method of death, and caused Skidder and me and the clearance men to see the body of Maxon each a different way. No wonder we nearly went nuts.”

  “But Brager remembered being there too,” she objected.

  “Brager was in the hospital at the time, but Deem saw him afterward and impressed on his mind the memory pattern of having discovered Deems body,” explained Caquer. “So naturally, Brager thought he had been there.”

  “Then he killed Maxon’s confidential secretary, because being so close to the Regent, the secretary must have suspected something was wrong even though he couldn’t guess what. That was the second corpse of Willem Deem, who was beginning to enjoy himself in earnest when he pulled that on us.”

  “And of course he never sent to Callisto City for a special investigator at all. He just had fun with me, by making me seem to meet one and having the guy turn out to be Willem Deem again. I nearly did go nuts then, I guess.”

  “But why, Rod, weren’t you as deep in as the others? I mean on the business of conquering Callisto and all of that?” she inquired. “You were free of that part of the hypnosis.”

  Caquer shrugged.

  “Maybe it was because I missed Skidder’s talk on the televis,” he suggested.

  “Of course it wasn’t Skidder at all, it was Deem in another guise and wearing the helmet. And maybe he deliberately left me out, because he was having a psychopathic kind of fun out of my trying to investigate the murders of two Willem Deems. It’s hard to figure. Perhaps I was slightly cracked from the strain, and it might have been that for that reason I was partially resistant to the group hypnosis.”

  “You think he really intended to try to rule all of Callisto, Rod?” asked the girl.

  “We’ll never know, for sure, just how far he wanted, or expected to go later. At first, he was just experimenting with the powers of hypnosis, through the wheel. That first night, he sent people out of their houses into the streets, and then sent them back and made them forget it. Just a test, undoubtedly.” Caquer paused and frowned thoughtfully.

  “He was undoubtedly psychopathic, though, and we don’t dare even guess what all his plans were,” he continued. “You understand how the goggles worked to neutralize the wheel, don’t you, Icicle?”

  “I think so. That was brilliant, Rod. It’s like when you take a moving picture of a turning wheel, isn’t it? If the camera synchronizes with the turning of the wheel, so that each successive picture shows it after a complete revolution, then it looks like it’s standing still when you show the movie.”

  Caquer nodded.

  “That’s it exactly,” he said. “Just luck I had access to those goggles, though. For a second I could see a man wearing a helmet up there on the balcony—but that was all I had to know.”

  “But Rod, when you rushed out on the balcony, you didn’t have the goggles on any more. Couldn’t he have stopped you, by hypnosis?”

  “Well, he didn’t. I guess there wasn’t time for him to take over control of me. He did flash an illusion at me. It wasn’t either Barr Maxon or Willem Deem I saw standing there at the last minute. It was you, Jane.”

  “I?”

  “Yep, you. I guess he knew I’m in love with you, and that’s the first thing flashed into his mind—that I wouldn’t dare use the sword if I thought it was you standing there. But it wasn’t you, in spite of the evidence of my eyes, so I swung it.”

  He shuddered slightly, remembering the will power he had needed to bring that sword down.

  “The worst of it was that I saw you standing there like I’ve always wanted to see you—with your arms out toward me, and looking at me as though you loved me.”

  “Like this, Rod?”

  And this time he was not too dumb to get the idea.

  CARTOONIST

  (in collaboration with Mack Reynolds)

  There were six letters in Bill Garrigan’s box, but he could tell from a quick glance at the envelopes that not one of them was a check. Would-be gags from would-be gagmen. And, nine chances out of ten, not a yak in the lot.

  He carried them back to the adobe hut he called his studio before bothering to open them. He tossed his disreputable hat onto the two-burner kerosene stove. He sat down and twisted his legs around the legs of the kitchen chair before the rickety table which doubled as a place to eat and his drawing board.

  It had been a long time since the last sale and he hoped, even though he didn’t dare expect, that there’d be a really salable gag in this lot. Miracles do happen.

  He tore open the first envelope. Six gags from some guy up in Oregon, sent to him on the usual basis; if he liked any of them he’d draw them up and if they sold the guy got a percentage. Bill Garrigan looked at the first one. It read:

  GUY AND GAL DRIVE UP TO RESTAURANT. SlGN ON CAR READS “HERMAN THE FIRE EATER.” THROUGH WINDOWS OF RESTAURANT PEOPLE EATING BY CANDLE LIGHT.

  GUY! “OH, BOY, THIS LOOKS LIKE A GOOD PLACE TO EAT!”

  Bill Garrigan groaned and looked at
the next card. And the next. And the next. He opened the next envelope. And the next.

  This was getting really bad. Cartooning is a tough racket to make a living in, even when you live in a little town in the Southwest where living doesn’t cost you much. And once you start slipping—well, the thing was a vicious circle. As your stuff was seen less and less often in the big markets, the best gagmen started sending their material elsewhere. You wound up with the leftovers, which, of course, put the skids under you that much worse.

  He pulled the last gag from the final envelope. It read:

  SCENE ON SOME OTHER PLANET. EMPEROR OF SNOOK, A HIDEOUS MONSTER, IS TALKING TO SOME OF HIS SCIENTISTS.

  EMPEROR: “YES, I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU’VE DEVISED A METHOD OF VISITING EARTH, BUT WHO WOULD WANT TO WITH ALL THOSE HORRIBLE HUMANS LIVING THERE?”

  Bill Garrigan scratched the end of his nose thoughtfully. It had possibilities. After all, the science-fiction market was growing like mad. And if he could draw these extra-terrestrial creatures hideous enough to bring out the gag—

  He reached for a pencil and a piece of paper and started to sketch out a rough. The first version of the Emperor and his scientists didn’t look quite ugly enough. He crumpled up the paper and reached for another piece.

  Let’s see. He could give each one of the monsters three heads, each head with six protruding, goggling eyes. Half-a-dozen stubby arms. Hmmm, not bad. Very long torsos, very short legs. Four apiece, front ones bending one way, back ones the other. Splay feet. Now how about the face, outside of the six eyes? Leave ’em blank below the eyes. A mouth, a big one, in the middle of the chest. That way a monster wouldn’t get to arguing with himself as to which head should do the eating.

  He added a few quick lines for the background; he looked upon his work and it was good. Maybe too good; maybe editors would think their readers too squeamish to look upon such terrible monstrosities. And yet, unless he made them as horrible as he could, the gag would be lost.

  In fact, maybe he could make them even a little more hideous. He tried, and found that he could.

  He worked on the rough until he was sure he’d got as much as could be drawn out of the gag, found an envelope and addressed it to his best market—or what had been his best market up to several months ago when he’d started slipping. He’d made his last sale there fully two months ago. But maybe they’d take this one; Rod Corey, the editor, liked his cartoons a bit on the bizarre side.