(3/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume III: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  But there were no casual visitors at the White House on the seventh of September. Certain Senators, even, were denied admittance. The President was seeing only the members of the Cabinet and some few others.

  It is given to a Secret Service operative, in his time, to play many parts. But even a versatile actor might pause at impersonating a President. Robert Delamater was acting the role with never a fumble. He sat, this new Robert Delamater, so startlingly like the Chief Executive, in the chair by a flat top desk. And he worked diligently at a mass of correspondence.

  Secretaries came and went; files were brought. Occasionally he replied to a telephone call--or perhaps called someone. It would be hard to say which happened, for no telephone bells rang.

  On the desk was a schedule that Delamater consulted. So much time for correspondence--so many minutes for a conference with this or that official, men who were warned to play up to this new Chief Executive as if the life of their real President were at stake.

  * * * * *

  To any observer the busy routine of the morning must have passed with never a break. And there was an observer, as Delamater knew. He had wondered if the mystic ray might carry electrons that would prove its presence. And now he knew.

  The Chief of the U. S. Secret Service had come for a consultation with the President. And whatever lingering doubts may have stifled his reluctant imagination were dispelled when the figure at the desk opened a drawer.

  "Notice this," he told the Chief as he appeared to search for a paper in the desk. "An electroscope; I put it in here last night. It is discharging. The ray has been on since nine-thirty. No current to electrocute me--just a penetrating ray."

  He returned the paper to the drawer and closed it.

  "So that is that," he said, and picked up a document to which he called the visitor's attention.

  "Just acting," he explained. "The audience may be critical; we must try to give them a good show! And now give me a report. What are you doing? Has anything else turned up? I am counting on you to stand by and see that that electrician is on his toes at twelve o'clock."

  "Stand by is right," the Chief agreed; "that's about all we can do. I have twenty men in and about the grounds--there will be as many more later on. And I know now just how little use we are to you, Del."

  "Your expression!" warned Delamater. "Remember you are talking to the President. Very official and all that."

  "Right! But now tell me what is the game, Del. If that devil fails to knock you out here where you are safe, he will get you when you leave the room."

  "Perhaps," agreed the pseudo-executive, "and again, perhaps not. He won't get me here; I am sure of that. They have this part of the room insulated. The phone wire is cut--my conversations there are all faked.

  "There is only one spot in this room where that current can pass. A heavy cable is grounded outside in wet earth. It comes to a copper plate on this desk; you can't see it--it is under those papers."

  * * * * *

  "And if the current comes--" began the visitor.

  "When it comes," the other corrected, "it will jump to that plate and go off harmlessly--I hope."

  "And then what? How does that let you out?"

  "Then we will see," said the presidential figure. "And you've been here long enough, Chief. Send in the President's secretary as you go out."

  "He arose to place a friendly, patronizing hand on the other's shoulder.

  "Good-by," he said, "and watch that electrician at twelve. He is to throw the big switch when I call."

  "Good luck," said the big man huskily. "We've got to hand it to you, Del; you're--"

  "Good-by!" The figure of the Chief Executive turned abruptly to his desk.

  There was more careful acting--another conference--some dictating. The clock on the desk gave the time as eleven fifty-five. The man before the flat topped desk verified it by a surreptitious glance at his watch. He dismissed the secretary and busied himself with some personal writing.

  Eleven fifty-nine--and he pushed paper and pen aside. The movement disturbed some other papers, neatly stacked. They were dislodged, and where they had lain was a disk of dull copper.

  "Ready," the man called softly. "Don't stand too near that line." The first boom of noonday bells came faintly to the room.

  The President--to all but the other actors in the morning's drama--leaned far back in his chair. The room was suddenly deathly still. The faint ticking of the desk clock was loud and rasping. There was heavy breathing audible in the room beyond. The last noonday chime had died away....

  The man at the desk was waiting--waiting. And he thought he was prepared, nerves steeled, for the expected. But he jerked back, to fall with the overturned chair upon the soft, thick-padded rug, at the ripping, crackling hiss that tore through the silent room.

  * * * * *

  From a point above the desk a blue arc flamed and wavered. Its unseen terminal moved erratically in the air, but the other end of the deadly flame held steady upon a glowing, copper disc.

  Delamater, prone on the floor, saw the wavering point that marked the end of the invisible carrier of the current--saw it drift aside till the blue arc was broken. It returned, and the arc crashed again into blinding flame. Then, as abruptly, the blue menace vanished.

  The man on the floor waited, waited, and tried to hold fast to some sense of time.

  Then: "Contact!" he shouted. "The switch! Close the switch!"

  "Closed!" came the answer from a distant room. There was a shouted warning to unseen men: "Stand back there--back--there's twenty thousand volts on that line--"

  Again the silence....

  "Would it work? Would it?" Delamater's mind was full of delirious, half-thought hopes. That fiend in some far-off room had cut the current meant as a death-bolt to the Nation's' head. He would leave the ray on--look along it to gloat over his easy victory. His generator must be insulated: would he touch it with his hand, now that his own current was off?--make of himself a conductor?

  In the air overhead formed a terrible arc.

  From the floor, Delamater saw it rip crashingly into life as twenty thousand volts bridged the gap of a foot or less to the invisible ray. It hissed tremendously in the stillness....

  And Delamater suddenly buried his face in his hands. For in his mind he was seeing a rigid, searing body, and in his nostrils, acrid, distinct, was the smell of burning flesh.

  "Don't be a fool," he told himself fiercely. "Don't be a fool! Imagination!"

  The light was out.

  "Switch off!" a voice was calling. There was a rush of swift feet from the distant doors; friendly hands were under him--lifting him--as the room, for Robert Delamater, President-in-name of the United States, turned whirlingly, dizzily black....

  * * * * *

  Robert Delamater, U. S. Secret Service operative, entered the office of his Chief. Two days of enforced idleness and quiet had been all he could stand. He laid a folded newspaper before the smiling, welcoming man.

  "That's it, I suppose," he said, and pointed to a short notice.

  "X-ray Operator Killed," was the caption. "Found Dead in Office in Watts Building." He had read the brief item many times.

  "That's what we let the reporters have," said the Chief.

  "Was he"--the operative hesitated for a moment--"pretty well fried?"

  "Quite!"

  "And the machine?"

  "Broken glass and melted metal. He smashed it as he fell."

  "The Eye of Allah," mused Delamater. "Poor devil--poor, crazy devil. Well, we gambled--and we won. How about the rest of the bet? Do I get the Mint?"

  "Hell, no!" said the Chief. "Do you expect to win all the time? They want to know why it took us so long to get him.

  "Now, there's a little matter out in Ohio, Del, that we'll have to get after--"

  * * *

  Contents

  TREE, SPARE THAT WOODMAN

  By DAVE DRYFOOS

  The single thing to fear was fear--ghastly, w
alking fear!

  Stiff with shock, Naomi Heckscher stood just inside the door to Cappy's one-room cabin, where she'd happened to be when her husband discovered the old man's body.

  Her nearest neighbor--old Cappy--dead. After all his wire-pulling to get into the First Group, and his slaving to make a farm on this alien planet, dead in bed!

  Naomi's mind circled frantically, contrasting her happy anticipations with this shocking actuality. She'd come to call on a friend, she reminded herself, a beloved friend--round, white-haired, rosy-cheeked; lonely because he'd recently become a widower. To her little boy, Cappy was a combination Grandpa and Santa Claus; to herself, a sort of newly met Old Beau.

  Her mouth had been set for a sip of his home brew, her eyes had pictured the delight he'd take in and give to her little boy.

  She'd walked over with son and husband, expecting nothing more shocking than an ostentatiously stolen kiss. She'd found a corpse. And to have let Cappy die alone, in this strange world ...

  She and Ted could at least have been with him, if they'd known.

  But they'd been laughing and singing in their own cabin only a mile away, celebrating Richard's fifth birthday. She'd been annoyed when Cappy failed to show up with the present he'd promised Richard. Annoyed--while the old man pulled a blanket over his head, turned his round face to the wall, and died.

  Watching compassionately, Naomi was suddenly struck by the matter-of-fact way Ted examined the body. Ted wasn't surprised.

  "Why did you tell Richard to stay outside, just now?" she demanded. "How did you know what we'd find here? And why didn't you tell me, so I could keep Richard at home?"

  She saw Ted start, scalded by the splash of her self-directed anger, saw him try to convert his wince into a shrug.

  "You insisted on coming," he reminded her gently. "I couldn't have kept you home without--without saying too much, worrying you--with the Earth-ship still a year away. Besides, I didn't know for sure, till we saw the tree-things around the cabin."

  The tree-things. The trees-that-were-not. Gnarled blue trunks, half-hidden by yellow leaf-needles stretching twenty feet into the sky. Something like the hoary mountain hemlocks she and Ted had been forever photographing on their Sierra honeymoon, seven life-long years ago.

  Three of those tree-things had swayed over Cappy's spring for a far longer time than Man had occupied this dreadful planet. Until just now ...

  The three of them had topped the rise that hid Cappy's farm from their own. Richard was running ahead like a happily inquisitive puppy. Suddenly he'd stopped, pointing with a finger she distinctly recalled as needing thorough soapy scrubbing.

  "Look, Mommie!" he'd said. "Cappy's trees have moved. They're around the cabin, now."

  He'd been interested, not surprised. In the past year, Mazda had become Richard's home; only Earth could surprise him.

  But, Ted, come to think of it, had seemed withdrawn, his face a careful blank. And she?

  "Very pretty," she'd said, and stuffed the tag-end of fear back into the jammed, untidy mental pigeon-hole she used for all unpleasant thoughts. "Don't run too far ahead, dear."

  But now she had to know what Ted knew.

  "Tell me!" she said.

  "These tree-things--"

  "There've been other deaths! How many?"

  "Sixteen. But I didn't want to tell you. Orders were to leave women and children home when we had that last Meeting, remember."

  "What did they say at the Meeting? Out with it, Ted!"

  "That--that the tree-things think!"

  "But that's ridiculous!"

  "Well, unfortunately, no. Look, I'm not trying to tell you that terrestrial trees think, too, nor even that they have a nervous system. They don't. But--well, on Earth, if you've ever touched a lighted match to the leaf of a sensitive plant like the mimosa, say--and I have--you've been struck by the speed with which other leaves close up and droop. I mean, sure, we know that the leaves droop because certain cells exude water and nearby leaves feel the heat of the match. But the others don't, yet they droop, too. Nobody knows how it works ..."

  "But that's just defensive!"

  "Sure. But that's just on Earth!"

  "All right, dear. I won't argue any more. But I still don't understand. Go on about the Meeting."

  "Well, they said these tree-things both create and respond to the patterned electrical impulses of the mind. It's something like the way a doctor creates fantasies by applying a mild electric current to the right places on a patient's brain. In the year we've been here, the trees--or some of them--have learned to read from and transmit to our minds. The range, they say, is around fifty feet. But you have to be receptive--"

  "Receptive?"

  "Fearful. That's the condition. So I didn't want to tell you because you must not let yourself become afraid, Naomi. We're clearing trees from the land, in certain areas. And it's their planet, after all. Fear is their weapon and fear can kill!"

  "You still--all you men--should have let us women know! What do you think we are? Besides, I don't really believe you. How can fear kill?"

  "Haven't you ever heard of a savage who gets in bad with his witch-doctor and is killed by magic? The savage is convinced, having seen or heard of other cases, that he can be killed. The witch-doctor sees to it he's told he will be killed. And sometimes the savage actually dies--"

  "From poison, I've always thought."

  "The poison of fear. The physical changes that accompany fear, magnified beyond belief by belief itself."

  "But how in the world could all this have affected Cappy? He wasn't a savage. And he was elderly, Ted. A bad heart, maybe. A stroke. Anything."

  "He passed his pre-flight physical only a year ago. And--well, he lived all alone. He was careful not to let you see it, but I know he worried about these three trees on his place. And I know he got back from the Meeting in a worried state of mind. Then, obviously, the trees moved--grouped themselves around his cabin within easy range. But don't be afraid of them, Naomi. So long as you're not, they can't hurt you. They're not bothering us now."

  "No. But where's Richard?"

  Naomi's eyes swept past Ted, encompassing the cabin. No Richard! He'd been left outside ...

  Glass tinkled and crashed as she flung back the cabin door. "Richard! Richard!"

  Her child was not in sight. Nor within earshot, it seemed.

  "Richard Heckscher! Where are you?" Sanity returned with the conventional primness. And it brought her answer.

  "Here I am, Mommie! Look-at!"

  He was in a tree! He was fifteen feet off the ground, high in the branches of a tree-thing, swaying--

  For an instant, dread flowed through Naomi as if in her bloodstream and something was cutting off her breath. Then, as the hands over mouth and throat withdrew, she saw they were Ted's. She let him drag her into the cabin and close the broken door.

  "Better not scare Richard," he said quietly, shoving her gently into a chair. "He might fall."

  Dumbly she caught her breath, waiting for the bawling out she'd earned.

  But Ted said, "Richard keeps us safe. So long as we fear for him, and not ourselves--"

  That was easy to do. Outside, she heard a piping call: "Look at me now, Mommie!"

  "Showing off!" she gasped. In a flashing vision, Richard was half boy, half vulture, flapping to the ground with a broken wing.

  "Here," said Ted, picking up a notebook that had been on the table. "Here's Cappy's present. A homemade picture book. Bait."

  "Let me use it!" she said. "Richard may have seen I was scared just now."

  Outside again, under the tree, she called, "Here's Cappy's present, Richard. He's gone away and left it for you."

  Would he notice how her voice had gone up half an octave, become flat and shrill?

  "I'm coming down," Richard said. "Let me down, tree."

  He seemed to be struggling. The branches were cagelike. He was caught!

  Naomi's struggle was with her voice. "How did you ever ge
t up there?" she called.

  "The tree let me up, Mommie," Richard explained solemnly, "but he won't let me down!" He whimpered a little.

  He must not become frightened! "You tell that tree you've got to come right down this instant!" she ordered.

  She leaned against the cabin for support. Ted came out and slipped his arm around her.

  "Break off a few leaves, Richard," he suggested. "That'll show your tree who's boss!"

  Standing close against her husband, Naomi tried to stop shaking. But she lacked firm support, for Ted shook, too.

  His advice to Richard was sound, though. What had been a trap became, through grudging movement of the branches, a ladder. Richard climbed down, scolding at the tree like an angry squirrel.

  * * * * *

  Naomi thought she'd succeeded in shutting her mind. But when her little boy slid down the final bit of trunk and came for his present, Naomi broke. Like a startled animal, she thrust the book into his hands, picked him up and ran. Her mind was a jelly, red and quaking.

  She stopped momentarily after running fifty yards. "Burn the trees!" she screamed over her shoulder. "Burn the cabin! Burn it all!" She ran on, Ted's answering shouts beyond her comprehension.

  Fatigue halted her. At the top of the rise between Cappy's farm and their own, pain and dizziness began flowing over her in waves. She set Richard down on the mauve soil and collapsed beside him.

  When she sat up, Richard squatted just out of reach, watching curiously. She made an effort at casualness: "Let's see what Daddy's doing back there."

  "He's doing just what you said to, Mommie!" Richard answered indignantly.

  Her men were standing together, Naomi realized. She laughed. After a moment, Richard joined her. Then he looked for his book, found it a few paces away, and brought it to her.

  "Read to me, Mommie."

  "At home," she said.

  Activity at Cappy's interested her now. Wisps of smoke were licking around the trees. A tongue of flame lapped at one while she watched. Branches writhed. The trees were too slow-moving to escape ...