by Fritz Leiber
Shevlin shut his eyes, ground his teeth together and thought back seventy-two hours.
Papenek climbing into bed, after first bouncing up and down in the middle of the bed to make sure it would sustain his weight. Papenek drawing up the sheets, demanding a heating pad, and telling Elsie to get out.
“Your husband will see that I’m made comfortable. If there’s anything I detest it’s a woman standing in the doorway wringing her hands while I’m getting into bed. Get out! GET OUT!”
Elsie slamming the door, screaming back through the door: “Roger, there’s some chloroform in the medicine cabinet! If you don’t come out smelling of chloroform, you can start looking around for another wife!”
Papenek down in the cellar, very wide awake, bending over the machinery.
Hour after hour after hour. His lean and competent little hands working feverishly away in the glow which came from the tube as he stepped it up and down at ten-second intervals. Papenek using both his hands and the beam, turning occasionally to nod at Shevlin, gloating over this progress and making statements which filled Shevlin with steadily mounting dread.
Papenek saying: “Of course we’ll go back immediately to your age and find the man and destroy him. If the secret leaked out, you First Atomic Age primitives might construct dozens of time machines and destroy our world completely. You almost destroyed your own world, so how can you be trusted with such knowledge?”
“But when you’ve found him—” Shevlin shuddered. “When you’ve done that you’ll return to your age?”
“No, I can’t promise you that. It may be necessary for us to police your world for a while. In fact, you may be sure we shan’t allow anything to exist in the past which could possibly injure us here in the future. Even a minor infection should be cleansed at the source. Otherwise it will spread and fester.”
Papenek was smacking his lips now, and rising from the table. “My work is so exacting I need a great deal of food to ward off fatigue,” he said. “But you certainly don’t need an egg apiece. Next time scramble one and divide it. You want the eggs to last, don’t you?”
“If they were filled with cyanide, I’d want them to last,” Elsie mumbled under her breath. “I’d even settle for roach poison.”
“The little man who came for dinner,” Shevlin whispered, “is eating us out of house and home. Perhaps we could sprinkle arsenic on the wall paper.”
“Be careful, Shevlin,” Papenek warned. “I shouldn’t care to really step up the beam, but—I must warn you! Remarks like that disturb me because I know you mean them.”
Shevlin’s features darkened. “All right,” he said, loudly. “I’ll consider myself warned. Now what?”
“Back to work,” Papenek said. “Success is almost within my grasp now, Shevlin. It might even come this morning.”
He turned abruptly and went hobbling from the room.
Elsie waited until she heard him descending the cellar stairs before she took her husband’s cold hands in her feverish ones and said, anxiously: “Roger, if it should come this morning, are we prepared for it?”
“About as prepared as the dodo was when the early Dutch navigators peppered his hide with a blunderbuss and blasted his nest right out from under him,” Shevlin said.
He stood up as he spoke, pulling his hands free and shoving his chair back.
“That all-purpose tube he’s toting doesn’t merely alter electronic orbits. It controls atomic chain reactions in a way we’ve never dreamed they could be controlled. You might say it makes monkeys out of atoms.”
Elsie nodded. “They’ll overrun our age, Roger. They’ll regulate, remold everything and everyone. They’ll give us lessons in cooking, eating, mating and—dying. They’ll complain, they’ll be petulant. They’ll be capricious and fretful. Sour little spinsters armed with glowing darning needles they are, male and female. I haven’t seen the females, but—”
“We’ve seen Papenek. He’s been our guest.”
“Yes, we’ve seen Papenek.”
A moment later Shevlin was descending the cellar stair. He moved cautiously, because he hoped to surprise Papenek in one of his unguarded moments and perhaps learn just how close to success he really was. Shevlin knew that not too much reliance could be placed on Papenek’s words, but Papenek’s expression would be a dead giveaway if he could be surprised in the very act of making a connection bright with promise.
It wouldn’t have to be the final connection. It could be the one before the last or the one before that. What it boiled down to was that if Papenek was about to succeed the mounting tension would show up in his features.
Shevlin was halfway down the stairs when he saw Papenek kneeling in shadows a little to the left of the beam cast by the tube, which was lying on a circular metal stand about twenty feet from the base of the stairs.
Shevlin’s breath caught in his throat. It was the first time Papenek had ever turned his back on the tube or allowed it to stray so far from his person.
It was Shevlin’s chance, and he knew it.
According to present ideas of motion a moving body can’t be in two places at the same time. But almost Shevlin seemed to be crossing the cellar floor while his feet were still clattering on the stairs.
Probably it was simply a case of unbelievably speeded up reflexes. At any rate, he had the tube and was clasping it firmly when Papenek turned.
For perhaps five seconds Papenek’s expression remained completely blank. Then, slowly, his mouth tightened and a purplish flush suffused his features.
“Put it down,” he said.
Shevlin shook his head. “No. Remember what you said about an infection? It should be cleansed, you said, at the source.”
For an instant Shevlin had feared that the tube might be completely smooth, precluding any attempt to step up its energies. But that fear, he now perceived, had been ill-grounded. The part he was clasping was slightly flattened, and he could detect beneath his thumb a double row of tiny protuberances, like musical stops on a child’s toy flute.
“I’m afraid you don’t realize just what the potential of that tube is,” Papenek warned. “It could destroy the earth.”
Shevlin was suddenly aware that his knees were shaking. He’d suddenly remembered that the ancients had believed that a flute could go completely bad, piping shrill mysterious music that could bring down the keystone of matter itself, could topple the very universe into an abyss.
Perhaps it was just thinking about that guess which further unnerved Shevlin, causing him to tighten his clasp on the tube. Or perhaps he’d been exerting too much pressure from the first. At any rate, there was a dull flare, and—total darkness came sweeping across the cellar like a moving wall, obliterating everything in its path.
Then out of the darkness came a voice, filled with utter hate.
“You’ve inverted the beam, Shevlin. Steady pressure, evenly applied, will do that. I can’t see in the dark, but my directional organs will enable me to find you.”
There was a sudden, metallic clatter.
“W-what are you doing?” Shevlin asked.
“Looking for a sharp, cutting instrument,” Papenek replied, with startling candor. “With all these tools you’d think…ah, this will do very nicely. Before I kill you, Shevlin, there’s something you may as well know.
“I can send the house back now, to your age or any age. You know that straining blade unit at the base of the central shaft—the one I was reassembling yesterday? Well, you just swing the blade completely around the neutral pole of the magnetic wave arrester and groove it into the third notch from the top. The third notch will carry the house completely back to your age.”
Shevlin felt a sudden prickling at the base of his scalp. Under the guise of talking to him Papenek had moved very close to him in the darkness. He could hear the li
ttle man’s harsh breathing, the shuffling scrape of his unshod feet.
Shevlin clenched his jaw. He’d often wondered just how much self-control he’d have if someone in a position to kill him was a murderer by choice or necessity. Now he knew.
He didn’t have any self-control. But there were forms of fear which could paralyze—“I’ve got him, Pop! I’VE GOT HIM!”
The voice tore out of the darkness, exuberant, lusty, springy with confidence. It swelled into a mouthing of syllables that ran together as syllables are prone to do in the mouth of a nine-year-old almost beside himself with the joy of battle.
“I tripped him up, Pop! Pop, quick—turn on the lights!”
Mentally Shevlin poured himself a stiff one, swallowed it and went staggering blindly around the cellar in search of a dangling light bulb that continually seemed to elude his grasp.
He was still making frantic clutches at the air when the entire cellar blazed with light.
For an instant Shevlin thought that he’d collided with the bulb and jarred it on. Then he saw that by some distortion of pressure he’d energized the tube again, causing it to brim with more than its wonted share of light.
Papenek, armed with a very long and wicked-looking drill, was trying to get up. But Junior was sitting on Papenek’s chest, swinging his legs and digging his thumbs into the little man’s eye sockets, so remorselessly as almost to justify what Papenek had said about the savagery of children.
“You murderous little savage,” Papenek shrieked. “Let me up, you hear? You primitive little—”
“Enough of that!” Shevlin said, clasping the tube very firmly and aiming it at Papenek’s bulging brow. “One more word out of you and I’ll step up the beam so high you’ll be just a little wisp of smoke drifting off into limbo. Perhaps less than that.”
Papenek quieted down.
“That’s better,” Shevlin said.
Very deliberately he unfastened his wrist watch and handed it to his son.
“What goes, Pop?”
Shevlin looked at his son. “Junior, just how long have you been down here?” he asked.
“Since before breakfast, Pop,” Junior said. “I’ve been spying on him ever since he started dismantling that straining blade unit yesterday afternoon. I was hiding in the coal bin, so I didn’t miss a thing. Y’know, Pop, there’s a make-or-break ignition factor involved that’s only partly magnetomotive. A regular manual pinion shift movement it is, Pop.”
“Hm-m-m,” Shevlin said. “Are you sure you can handle it, Junior. You didn’t seem like a prodigy to me when you tripped him three days ago for no reason at all. Not a prodigy born a year after the New Mexico experiment, at any rate.”
“Ah, that was just a gag, Pop. Betty Lou dared me. Besides, I wanted him to think that all I had inside my head was an elaborate arrangement of knocking tubes.”
Shevlin nodded at Papenek. “Remarkable boy in some respects. I.Q. of 270. It disturbs my wife more than it does me. Maturity will bring emotional balance, and we’ll need a few young mutant geniuses to handle the difficult tasks ahead. He can see in the dark too. Dark sight is common enough in Eskimos, but before 1945 extremely rare in Caucasoids. It’s more effective than directional organs, don’t you think?”
Papenek seemed to be having trouble with his face. It kept darkening and whitening in patches, and—his jaw had begun to twitch.
“If the house returns as fast as it came, we should be back in time for lunch,” Shevlin said. “Give me five minutes, Junior. Then notch in the thingamajig and let the straining blade…aw, shucks, I don’t have to tell you how to handle a machine. The Los Alamos radiations took care of that.”
“Just leave everything to me, Pop. I won’t even get grease on my hands.”
Shevlin flourished the tube a trifle menacingly.
“Start moving, Papenek,” he said.
Up the cellar stairs Papenek stumbled, his face a twitching mask. Down the lower hallway into the living room, and then out through the living room to the front porch. The permeable patch was just wide enough to enable Shevlin to pass through in Papenek’s wake. He had to stoop a little, but he didn’t mind because he knew that another ten seconds would see the last of Papenek.
Out on the porch he spoke sharply. “All right, jump!” he ordered. “Get on with you! Right out into the mist, little man!”
Papenek jumped from the porch.
Shevlin waited until he’d disappeared in the mist before he turned and went striding back into the house.
It was curious, but he’d grown quite fond of the house just in the last fifteen minutes. No—it went back further than that. The house, too, had gone through a lot, and like a faithful old collie dog that has shared man’s trials and tribulations—He was suddenly aware that Elsie was standing in the living room door, her face distraught.
“Roger, I’ve searched everywhere for Junior,” she said. “Do you suppose—”
Shevlin smiled and crossed to her side in three long strides.
“Don’t worry,” he said, kissing her. “Junior’s at the helm and everything’s under control. In just about five seconds now—”
There was a sudden, dazzling flash of light.
A STONE AND A SPEAR, by Raymond F. Jones
Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1950.
From Frederick to Baltimore, the rolling Maryland countryside lay under a fresh blanket of green. Wholly unaware of the summer glory, Dr. Curtis Johnson drove swiftly on the undulating highway, stirring clouds of dust and dried grasses.
Beside him, his wife, Louise, held her blowing hair away from her face and laughed into the warm air. “Dr. Dell isn’t going to run away. Besides, you said we could call this a weekend vacation as well as a business trip.”
Curt glanced at the speedometer and eased the pressure on the pedal. He grinned. “Wool-gathering again.”
“What about?”
“I was just wondering who said it first—one of the fellows at Detrick, or that lieutenant at Bikini, or—”
“Said what? What are you talking about?”
“That crack about the weapons after the next war. He—whoever it was—said there may be some doubt about what the weapons of the next war will be like, but there is absolutely no doubt about the weapons of World War IV. It will be fought with stones and spears. I guess any one of us could have said it.”
Louise’s smile grew tight and thin. “Don’t any of you ever think of anything but the next war—any of you?”
“How can we? We’re fighting it right now.”
“You make it sound so hopeless.”
“That’s what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we didn’t have to stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more than a futile gesture.”
“I just can’t understand him, Curt. I think he’s right in a way, but what brought him to that viewpoint?”
“Hard to tell,” Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. “After the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly pacifist and walked out of Detrick.”
“It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world’s foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a truck farm!” Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to visit him.
* * * *
For nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and othe
r research centers throughout the country.
“I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,” said Louise.
“Nobody claims to have figured him out. They laugh a little at him now. They eat his gifts willingly enough, but consider him slightly off his rocker. He still has all his biological talents, though. I’ve never seen or tasted vegetables like the ones he grows.”
“And the brass at Detrick doesn’t think he’s gone soft in the head, either,” she added much too innocently. “So they ordered you to take advantage of his invitation and try to persuade him to come back.”
Curt turned his head so sharply that Louise laughed.
“No, I didn’t read any secret, hush-hush papers,” she said. “But it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, the way you rushed right over to General Hansen after you got the invitation?”
“It is hush-hush, top-secret stuff,” said Curt, his eyes once more on the road. “The Army doesn’t want it to leak, but they need Dell, need him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They wanted to send me before. Dell’s invitation was the break we needed. I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games. There’s more to it than you know.”
The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back and drank in the beauty of it.
“Hush-hush, top secret stuff,” she said. “Grown men playing children’s games.”
“Pretty deadly games for children, darling.”
* * * *
In the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell’s truck farm.
His sign was visible for a half mile:
YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Eat the Best
EAT DELL’S VEGETABLES
“Dr. Hamon Dell, world’s foremost biochemist—and truck farmer,” Curt muttered as he swung the car off the highway.
