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

by Various

  Tommy's jaw sagged. "Pregnant," he said.

  "Now see here," said the senator. "If you're trying to make a fool out of me to my face--"

  "Sit down and shut up," said Pete. "If there's one thing the man in the street reveres, my friend, it's motherhood. We've got several hundred thousand pregnant Grdznth just waiting for all the little Grdznth to arrive, and nobody's given them a side glance." He turned to Tommy. "Get some copywriters down here. Get a Grdznth obstetrician or two. We're going to put together a PR-blast that will twang the people's heart-strings like a billion harps."

  The color was back in Tommy's cheeks, and the senator was forgotten as a dozen intercom switches began snapping. "We'll need TV hookups, and plenty of newscast space," he said eagerly. "Maybe a few photographs--do you suppose maybe baby Grdznth are lovable?"

  "They probably look like salamanders," said Pete. "But tell the people anything you want. If we're going to get across the sanctity of Grdznth motherhood, my friend, anything goes."

  "It's genius," chortled Tommy. "Sheer genius."

  "If it sells," the senator added, dubiously.

  "It'll sell," Pete said. "The question is: for how long?"

  * * * * *

  The planning revealed the mark of genius. Nothing sudden, harsh, or crude--but slowly, in a radio comment here or a newspaper story there, the emphasis began to shift from Grdznth in general to Grdznth as mothers. A Rutgers professor found his TV discussion on "Motherhood as an Experience" suddenly shifted from 6:30 Monday evening to 10:30 Saturday night. Copy rolled by the ream from Tommy's office, refined copy, hypersensitively edited copy, finding its way into the light of day through devious channels.

  Three days later a Grdznth miscarriage threatened, and was averted. It was only a page 4 item, but it was a beginning.

  Determined movements to expel the Grdznth faltered, trembled with indecision. The Grdznth were ugly, they frightened little children, they were a trifle overbearing in their insufferable stubborn politeness--but in a civilized world you just couldn't turn expectant mothers out in the rain.

  Not even expectant Grdznth mothers.

  By the second week the blast was going at full tilt.

  In the Public Relations Bureau building, machines worked on into the night. As questionnaires came back, spot candid films and street-corner interview tapes ran through the projectors on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Tommy Heinz grew thinner and thinner, while Pete nursed sharp post-prandial stomach pains.

  "Why don't people respond?" Tommy asked plaintively on the morning the third week started. "Haven't they got any feelings? The blast is washing over them like a wave and there they sit!" He punched the private wire to Analysis for the fourth time that morning. He got a man with a hag-ridden look in his eye. "How soon?"

  "You want yesterday's rushes?"

  "What do you think I want? Any sign of a lag?"

  "Not a hint. Last night's panel drew like a magnet. The D-Date tag you suggested has them by the nose."

  "How about the President's talk?"

  The man from Analysis grinned. "He should be campaigning."

  Tommy mopped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. "Okay. Now listen: we need a special run on all response data we have for tolerance levels. Got that? How soon can we have it?"

  Analysis shook his head. "We could only make a guess with the data so far."

  "Fine," said Tommy. "Make a guess."

  "Give us three hours," said Analysis.

  "You've got thirty minutes. Get going."

  Turning back to Pete, Tommy rubbed his hands eagerly. "It's starting to sell, boy. I don't know how strong or how good, but it's starting to sell! With the tolerance levels to tell us how long we can expect this program to quiet things down, we can give Charlie a deadline to crack his differential factor, or it's the ax for Charlie." He chuckled to himself, and paced the room in an overflow of nervous energy. "I can see it now. Open shafts instead of elevators. A quick hop to Honolulu for an afternoon on the beach, and back in time for supper. A hundred miles to the gallon for the Sunday driver. When people begin seeing what the Grdznth are giving us, they'll welcome them with open arms."

  "Hmmm," said Pete.

  "Well, why won't they? The people just didn't trust us, that was all. What does the man in the street know about transmatters? Nothing. But give him one, and then try to take it away."

  "Sure, sure," said Pete. "It sounds great. Just a little bit too great."

  Tommy blinked at him. "Too great? Are you crazy?"

  "Not crazy. Just getting nervous." Pete jammed his hands into his pockets. "Do you realize where we're standing in this thing? We're out on a limb--way out. We're fighting for time--time for Charlie and his gang to crack the puzzle, time for the Grdznth girls to gestate. But what are we hearing from Charlie?"

  "Pete, Charlie can't just--"

  "That's right," said Pete. "Nothing is what we're hearing from Charlie. We've got no transmatter, no null-G, no power, nothing except a whole lot of Grdznth and more coming through just as fast as they can. I'm beginning to wonder what the Grdznth are giving us."

  "Well, they can't gestate forever."

  "Maybe not, but I still have a burning desire to talk to Charlie. Something tells me they're going to be gestating a little too long."

  They put through the call, but Charlie wasn't answering. "Sorry," the operator said. "Nobody's gotten through there for three days."

  "Three days?" cried Tommy. "What's wrong? Is he dead?"

  "Couldn't be. They burned out two more machines yesterday," said the operator. "Killed the switchboard for twenty minutes."

  "Get him on the wire," Tommy said. "That's orders."

  "Yes, sir. But first they want you in Analysis."

  Analysis was a shambles. Paper and tape piled knee-deep on the floor. The machines clattered wildly, coughing out reams of paper to be gulped up by other machines. In a corner office they found the Analysis man, pale but jubilant.

  "The Program," Tommy said. "How's it going?"

  "You can count on the people staying happy for at least another five months." Analysis hesitated an instant. "If they see some baby Grdznth at the end of it all."

  There was dead silence in the room. "Baby Grdznth," Tommy said finally.

  "That's what I said. That's what the people are buying. That's what they'd better get."

  Tommy swallowed hard. "And if it happens to be six months?"

  Analysis drew a finger across his throat.

  Tommy and Pete looked at each other, and Tommy's hands were shaking. "I think," he said, "we'd better find Charlie Karns right now."

  * * * * *

  Math Section was like a tomb. The machines were silent. In the office at the end of the room they found an unshaven Charlie gulping a cup of coffee with a very smug-looking Grdznth. The coffee pot was floating gently about six feet above the desk. So were the Grdznth and Charlie.

  "Charlie!" Tommy howled. "We've been trying to get you for hours! The operator--"

  "I know, I know." Charlie waved a hand disjointedly. "I told her to go away. I told the rest of the crew to go away, too."

  "Then you cracked the differential?"

  Charlie tipped an imaginary hat toward the Grdznth. "Spike cracked it," he said. "Spike is a sort of Grdznth genius." He tossed the coffee cup over his shoulder and it ricochetted in graceful slow motion against the far wall. "Now why don't you go away, too?"

  Tommy turned purple. "We've got five months," he said hoarsely. "Do you hear me? If they aren't going to have their babies in five months, we're dead men."

  Charlie chuckled. "Five months, he says. We figured the babies to come in about three months--right, Spike? Not that it'll make much difference to us." Charlie sank slowly down to the desk. He wasn't laughing any more. "We're never going to see any Grdznth babies. It's going to be a little too cold for that. The energy factor," he mumbled. "Nobody thought of that except in passing. Should have, though, long ago. Two completely independent universes, ob
viously two energy systems. Incompatible. We were dealing with mass, space and dimension--but the energy differential was the important one."

  "What about the energy?"

  "We're loaded with it. Super-charged. Packed to the breaking point and way beyond." Charlie scribbled frantically on the desk pad. "Look, it took energy for them to come through--immense quantities of energy. Every one that came through upset the balance, distorted our whole energy pattern. And they knew from the start that the differential was all on their side--a million of them unbalances four billion of us. All they needed to overload us completely was time for enough crossings."

  "And we gave it to them." Pete sat down slowly, his face green. "Like a rubber ball with a dent in the side. Push in one side, the other side pops out. And we're the other side. When?"

  "Any day now. Maybe any minute." Charlie spread his hands helplessly. "Oh, it won't be bad at all. Spike here was telling me. Mean temperature in only 39 below zero, lots of good clean snow, thousands of nice jagged mountain peaks. A lovely place, really. Just a little too cold for Grdznth. They thought Earth was much nicer."

  "For them," whispered Tommy.

  "For them," Charlie said.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE RETURN

  By H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

  I

  Altamont cast a quick, routine glance at the instrument panels and then looked down through the transparent nose of the helicopter at the yellow-brown river five hundred feet below. Next he scraped the last morsel from his plate and ate it.

  "What did you make this out of, Jim?" he asked. "I hope you kept notes while you were concocting it. It's good."

  "The two smoked pork chops left over from yesterday evening," Loudons said, "and that bowl of rice that's been taking up space in the refrigerator the last couple of days, together with a little egg powder and some milk. I ground the chops up and mixed them with the rice and other stuff. Then added some bacon, to make grease to fry it in."

  Altamont chuckled. That was Loudons, all right: he could take a few left-overs, mess them together, pop them in the skillet, and have a meal that would turn the chef back at the Fort green with envy. He filled his cup and offered the pot.

  "Caffchoc?" he asked.

  Loudons held his cup out to be filled, blew on it, sipped, and then hunted on the ledge under the desk for the butt of the cigar he had half-smoked the evening before.

  "Did you ever drink coffee, Monty?" the socio-psychologist asked, getting the cigar drawing to his taste.

  "Coffee? No. I've read about it, of course. We'll have to organize an expedition to Brazil, sometime, to get seeds and try raising some."

  Loudons blew a smoke ring toward the rear of the cabin.

  "A much overrated beverage," he replied. "We found some, once, when I was on that expedition into Idaho, in what must have been the stockroom of a hotel. Vacuum-packed in moisture-proof containers, and free from radioactivity. It wasn't nearly as good as caffchoc.

  "But then, I suppose, a pre-bustup coffee drinker couldn't stomach this stuff we're drinking."

  Loudons looked forward, up the river they were following. "Get anything on the radio?" he asked. "I noticed you took us up to about ten thousand, while I was shaving."

  Altamont got out his pipe and tobacco pouch, filling the former slowly and carefully.

  "Not a whisper. I tried Colony Three, in the Ozarks, and I tried to call in that tribe of workers in Louisiana. I couldn't get either."

  "Maybe if we tried to get a little more power on the set...."

  That was Loudons, too, Altamont thought. There wasn't a better man at the Fort, when it came to dealing with people. But confront him with a problem about things and he was lost.

  That was one of the reasons why he and the stocky, phlegmatic social scientist made such a good team, he thought. As far as he, himself, was concerned, people were just a mysterious, exasperatingly unpredictable order of things which were subject to no known natural laws.

  And Loudons thought the same thing about machines: he couldn't psychoanalyze them.

  Altamont gestured with his pipe toward the nuclear-electric conversion unit, between the control-cabin and the living quarters in the rear of the boxcar-sized helicopter.

  "We have enough power back there to keep this windmill in the air twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, for the next fifteen years," he said. "We just don't have enough radio. If I'd step up the power on this set any more, it'd burn out before I could say, 'Altamont calling Fort Ridgeway.'"

  "How far are we from Pittsburgh now?" Loudons wanted to know.

  Altamont looked across the cabin at the big map of the United States as they had been, the red and green and blue and yellow patchwork of vanished political divisions. The colors gleamed through the transparent overlay on which this voyage of re-discovery was plotted.

  The red line of their journey started at Fort Ridgeway, in what had been Arizona. It angled east by a little north, to Colony Three, in northern Arkansas ... sharply northeast to St. Louis and its lifeless ruins ... then to Chicago and Gary, where little bands of Stone Age reversions stalked and fought and ate each other ... Detroit, where things that had completely forgotten they were human emerged from their burrows only at night ... Cleveland, where a couple of cobalt bombs must have landed in the lake and drenched everything with radioactivity that still lingered after two centuries ... Akron, where vegetation was only beginning to break through the glassy slag ... Cincinnati, where they had last stopped....

  "How's the leg this morning, Jim?" he asked.

  "Little stiff. Doesn't hurt much, though."

  "Why, we're about fifty miles, as we follow that river, and that's relatively straight." He looked down through the transparent nose of the copter at a town, now choked with trees that grew among the tumbled walls. "I think that's Aliquippa."

  Loudons looked and shrugged, then looked again and pointed.

  "There's a bear. Just ducked into that church or movie theater or whatever. I wonder what he thinks we are."

  Altamont puffed slowly at his pipe. "I wonder if we're going to find anything at all in Pittsburgh."

  "You mean people, as distinct from those biped beasts we've found so far? I doubt it," Loudons replied, finishing his caffchoc and wiping his mustache with the back of his hand. "I think the whole eastern half of the country is nothing but forest like this, and the highest type of life is just about three cuts below Homo Neanderthalensis, almost impossible to contact, and even more impossible to educate."

  "I wasn't thinking about that. I've just about given up hope of finding anybody or even a reasonably high level of barbarism," Altamont said. "I was thinking about that cache of microfilmed books that was buried at the Carnegie Library."

  "If it was buried," Loudons qualified. "All we have is that article in that two-century-old copy of Time about how the people at the library had constructed the crypt and were beginning the microfilming. We don't know if they ever had a chance to get it finished, before the rockets started landing."

  They passed over a dam of flotsam that had banked up at a wrecked bridge and accumulated enough mass to resist the periodic floods that had kept the river usually clear. Three human figures fled across a sand-flat at one end of it and disappeared into the woods. Two of them carried spears tipped with something that sparkled in the sunlight, probably shards of glass.

  "You know, Monty, I get nightmares, sometimes, thinking about what things must be like in Europe," Loudons said.

  Five or six wild cows went crashing through the brush below. Altamont nodded when he saw them.

  "Maybe tomorrow, we'll let down and shoot a cow," he said. "I was looking in the freeze-locker and the fresh meat's getting a little low. Or a wild pig, if we find a good stand of oak trees. I could enjoy what you'd do with some acorn-fed pork."

  He looked across the table. "Finished?" he asked Loudons. "Take over, then. I'll go back and wash the dishes."


  They rose, and Loudons, favoring his left leg, moved over to the seat at the controls.

  Altamont gathered up the two cups, the stainless-steel dishes, and the knives and the forks and spoons, going up the steps over the shielded converter and ducking his head to avoid the seat in the forward top machine-gun turret. He washed and dried the dishes, noting with satisfaction that the gauge of the water tank was still reasonably high, and glanced out one of the windows. Loudons was taking the big helicopter upstairs, for a better view.

  Now and then, among the trees, there would be a glint of glassy slag, usually in a fairly small circle. That was to be expected: beside the three or four H-bombs that had fallen on the Pittsburgh area, mentioned in the transcripts of the last news to reach the Fort from the outside, the whole district had been pelted, more or less at random, with fission bombs.

  West of the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela, it would probably be worse than this.

  "Can you see Pittsburgh yet, Jim?" he called out.

  "Yes, it's a mess! Worse than Gary, worse than Akron even."

  "Monty! Come here! I think I have something!"

  Picking up the pipe he had laid down, Altamont hurried forward, dodging his six-foot length under the gun turret and swinging down from the walkway over the converter.

  "What is it?" he asked.

  "Smoke. A lot of smoke, twenty or thirty fires at the very least."

  Loudons had shifted from Forward to Hover and was peering through a pair of binoculars. "See that island, the long one? Across the river from it, on the north side, toward this end. Yes, by Einstein! And I can see cleared ground, and what I think are houses, inside a stockade...."

  II

  Murray Hughes walked around the corner of the cabin into the morning sunlight, lacing his trousers, with his hunting shirt thrown over his bare shoulders. He found, without much surprise, that his father had also slept late. Verner Hughes was just beginning to shave.