by Hank Davis
The children hadn’t noticed yet, but their ears were stirring. Their ears sensed heat rather than sound; and unless they were listening to some heat source, they usually remained folded like silver flowers against the children’s heads. Now they uncurled, flowers blooming, showing black centers; now they twitched and turned, seeking. One turned and saw it.
A point of white light high in the east, slowly setting.
The children talked to each other in coded pulses of heat, opening and closing their mouths to show the warm interiors.
Hey!
What is it?
Let’s go see!
They hopped off across the limonite sand, forgetting the Overlord game, racing to meet the falling thing.
It was down when they got there and still shouting-hot. The probe was big, as big as a dwelling, a fat cylinder with a rounded roof above and a great hot mouth beneath. Black and white paint in a checkerboard pattern gave it the look of a giant’s toy. It rested on three comically splayed metal legs with wide, circular feet.
The children began rubbing against the metal skin, flashing pulses of contentment as they absorbed the heat.
The probe trembled. Motion inside. The children jumped back, stood looking at each other, each ready to run if the others did. None wanted to be first. Suddenly it was too late. One whole curved wall of the probe dropped outward and thudded to the sand.
A child crawled out from underneath, rubbing his head and flashing heat from his mouth: words he shouldn’t have learned yet. The wound in his scalp steamed briefly before the edges pulled shut.
The small, intense white sun, halfway down the sky, cast opaque black shadow across the opening in the probe. In the shadow something stirred.
The children watched, awed.
ABEL paused in the opening, then rolled out, using the slab of reentry shielding as a ramp. ABEL was a cluster of plastic and metal widgetry mounted on a low platform slung between six balloon tires. When it reached the sand it hesitated as if uncertain, then rolled out onto Mars, jerkily, feeling its way.
The child who’d been bumped by the ramp hopped over to lick the moving thing. ABEL stopped at once. The child shied back.
Suddenly an adult stood among them.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
Nothing, one answered.
Just playing, said another.
WELL, BE CAREFUL WITH IT. The adult looked like the twin of any of the six children. The roof of his mouth was warmer than theirs—but the authority in his voice was due to more than mere loudness. SOMEONE MAY HAVE GONE TO GREAT TROUBLE TO BUILD THIS OBJECT.
Yes sir.
Somewhat subdued, the children gathered around the Automated Biological Laboratory. They watched a door open in the side of the drum-shaped container that made up half of ABEL’s body. A gun inside the door fired a weighted line high into the air.
That thing almost hit me.
Serves you right.
The line, coated with sand and dust, came slithering back into ABEL’s side. One of the children licked it and found it covered with something sticky and tasteless.
Two children climbed onto the slow-moving platform, then up onto the cylinder. They stood up and waved their arms, balancing precariously on flat triangular feet. ABEL swerved toward a clump of black grass, and both children toppled to the sand. One picked himself up and ran to climb on again.
The adult watched it all dubiously.
A second adult appeared beside him.
YOU ARE LATE. WE HAD AN APPOINTMENT TO XAT BNORNEN CHIP. HAD YOU FORGOTTEN?
I HAD. THE CHILDREN HAVE FOUND SOMETHING.
SO THEY HAVE. WHAT IS IT DOING?
IT WAS TAKING SOIL SAMPLES AND PERHAPS TRYING TO COLLECT SPORES. NOW IT SHOWS AN INTEREST IN GRASS. I WONDER HOW ACCURATE ITS INSTRUMENTS ARE.
IF IT WERE SENTIENT IT WOULD SHOW INTEREST IN THE CHILDREN.
PERHAPS.
ABEL stopped. A box at the front lifted on a telescoping leg and began a slow pan of the landscape. From the low dark line of the Mare Acidalium highlands on the northeastern horizon, it swung around until its lens faced straight backward at the empty orange desert of Tracus Albus. At this point the lens was eye to eye with the hitchhiking child. The child flapped his ears, made idiot faces, shouted nonsense words, and flicked at the lens with his long tongue.
THAT SHOULD GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT.
WHO WOULD YOU SAY SENT IT?
EARTH, I WOULD THINK. NOTICE THE SILICATE DISC IN THE CAMERA, TRANSPARENT TO THE FREQUENCIES OF LIGHT MOST LIKELY TO PENETRATE THAT PLANET’S THICK ATMOSPHERE.
AGREEMENT.
The gun fired again, into the black grass, and the line began to reel back. Another box retracted its curved lid. The hitchhiker peered into it, while the other children watched admiringly from below.
One of the adults shouted, GET BACK, YOU YOUNG PLANT-BRAIN!
The child turned to flap his ears at him. At that moment ABEL flashed a tight ruby beam of laser light just past his ear. For an instant it showed, an infinite length of neon tubing against the navy blue sky.
The child scrambled down and ran for his life.
EARTH IS NOT IN THAT DIRECTION, an adult observed.
YET THE BEAM MUST HAVE BEEN A MESSAGE. SOMETHING IN ORBIT, PERHAPS?
The adults looked skyward. Presently their eyes adjusted.
ON THE INNER MOON. DO YOU SEE IT?
YES. QUITE LARGE . . . AND WHAT ARE THOSE MIDGES IN MOTION ABOUT IT? THAT IS NO AUTOMATED PROBE, BUT A VEHICLE. I THINK WE MUST EXPECT VISITORS SOON.
WE SHOULD HAVE INFORMED THEM OF OUR PRESENCE LONG AGO. A LARGE RADIO-FREQUENCY LASER WOULD HAVE DONE IT.
WHY SHOULD WE DO ALL THE WORK WHEN THEY HAVE ALL THE METALS, THE SUNLIGHT, THE RESOURCES?
Having finished with the clump of grass, ABEL lurched into motion and rolled toward a dark line of eroded ring wall. The children swarmed after it. The lab fired off another sticky string, let it fall, and started to reel it back. A child picked it up and pulled. Lab and martian engaged in a tug of war which ended when the string broke. Another child poked a long, fragile finger into the cavity and withdrew it covered with something wet. Before it could boil away, he put the finger in his mouth. He sent out a pulse of pleasure and stuck his tongue in the hole, into the broth intended for growing Martian microorganisms.
STOP THAT! THAT IS NOT YOUR PROPERTY!
The adult voice was ignored. The child left his tongue in the broth, running alongside the lab to keep up. Presently the others discovered that if they stood in front of ABEL it would change course to crawl around the “obstruction.”
PERHAPS THE ALIENS WILL BE SATISFIED TO RETURN HOME WITH THE INFORMATION GATHERED BY THE PROBE.
NONSENSE. THE CAMERAS HAVE SEEN THE CHILDREN. NOW THEY KNOW THAT WE EXIST.
WOULD THEY RISK THEIR LIVES TO LAND, MERELY BECAUSE THEY HAVE SEEN DITHTA? DITHTA IS A HOMELY CHILD, EVEN TO MY OWN EYE, AND I AM PERHAPS HIS PARENT.
LOOK WHAT THEY ARE DOING NOW.
By moving to left and right of the lab, by forming moving “obstructions,” the children were steering ABEL toward a cliff. One still rode high on top, pretending to steer by kicking the metal flanks.
WE MUST STOP THEM. THEY WILL BREAK IT.
YES . . . DO YOU REALLY EXPECT THAT THE ALIENS WILL LAND A MANNED VEHICLE?
IT IS THE OBVIOUS NEXT STEP.
WE MUST HOPE THAT THE CHILDREN WILL NOT GET HOLD OF IT.
RANDOM SAMPLE
by T. P. Caravan
Larry Niven’s Martian children may have been a disaster in progress, but I’m sure that the human children of Earth could give them a run for their money . . . at least, for a time.
***
T. P. Caravan was the alias under which Charles C. Munoz, according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, wrote 17 short stories for a number of science fiction magazines beginning with “Happy Solution” in the January 1952 Other Worlds Science Stories, and apparently ending with “Blind Date” in the April 1965 Magazin
e of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the same magazine where “Random Sample” appeared in the April 1953 issue. Other stories appeared in Science Stories and Universe, like Other Worlds, magazines edited by the, ah, flamboyant Ray Palmer, of Shaver Mystery fame and Bea Mahaffey (mention of whose considerable pulchritude recently threw the PC goose steppers of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America into a demented frenzy). His “Evil Old Professor” series of stories in Other Worlds showed his gift for humor, though there are too few of the stories to collect in a book, and the later stories lacked the ingenuity of the initial installment. And that, alas, is all I can say about Mr. Munoz/Caravan. He has no listing in either the Clute-Nicholls or Gunn SF encyclopedias, and an online search only turned up mentions of stories published. I would like to know more about the creator of the Evil Old Professor, and of the starkly unsentimental narrator of the brief tale which follows.
If you don’t give me another piece of candy I’ll cry. You’d be surprised how loud I can cry. Mother wouldn’t like that.
Thank you. I just love candy.
I’m very polite for my age; everybody says so. I can get more candy that way. Old ladies are best. I’m also a very intelligent little girl, but I suppose you found that out from your tests. They gave me the same kind of tests, but they didn’t give me any candy, so I was bad and didn’t answer anything right.
Thank you. I’ll take two this time. Do you have any hard candies? The heat’s melted these chocolates a little.
My father says to get all I can out of you, because all you Viennese head-thumpers are quacks. He says you cost an awful lot of money. He says only an old fraud would have a beard like a billy goat. He says . . .
Are you getting angry?
All right, then, if you give me just one more piece of candy, I’ll tell you all about it.
Merci. That’s French, you know.
My brother Johnny and I were out in the back yard, stomping ants, when the space ship came down. It’s fun sometimes watching ants, they run around so hopefully going about their business, carrying little bits of twigs and things in their mouths, and they don’e even seem to know you’re there until your foot just about touches them. Then they run away, waving their feelers before they squish. But the big red ants are the really good ones. You can jump right spang on them and they don’t even seem to notice it. I guess they sink into the ground a little ways, because if you pound one between two rocks he squishes without any trouble. They taste funny. Once Johnny saw a red one fighting a black one and they kept right on fighting until he burned them both up with his magnifying glass.
Will you buy me a magnifying glass if I tell you about it? I’d just love to have a magnifying glass. I bet the ant thinks the sun is spread out over the whole sky. I bet he thinks the whole world is burning up. I bet it hurts. I bet I could burn up more ants than Johnny can, even though I’m a whole year younger. He’s ten.
Please, can I have a magnifying glass? Please? Please? Can I? Can I? I’ll cry.
When can I have it?
Thank you.
It was his birthday so I let him take the ones near the ant hill. I’m really very generous at times. You let them get almost down the hole before you jump on them. That’s the most fun. I was watching one I’d pulled the legs off, waiting to see if the others would eat it, when Johnny yelled for me to come quick and I went running over. He showed me one ant carrying another on its back, trying to get it down into the ant hill before we squished it. We were just about to stomp on its little head when we heard the noise in the sky. It was the kind of skreeky sound I make when I pull my fingernail along the blackboard in school and make old Miss Cooper get the shivers. I hate Miss Cooper. She doesn’t give me any candy—thank you—and I never answer any questions for her.
We looked up and saw the rocket ship coming down for a landing in the woods. It didn’t look like a ship to me, but that’s what Johnny says it was. It looked like a big washing machine to me. Father says it was a hallucination—I like big words—but he didn’t even see it, so how could he know?
Sometimes I hate Father. Are you writing that down? Was that the right thing to say? Can I have some more candy?
Thank you.
This is very good, even if it is melted. I should think you could afford to have your office air conditioned, then the candy wouldn’t melt at all. If you were smart you’d think of these things.
What happened? I’ve told it over and over but nobody believes me. Isn’t that sad? I don’t think I’ll tell anybody else about it.
The whole box? For me? Thank you. I just love chocolates.
Your beard isn’t really much like a billy goat’s.
We saw it come down in the woods and we ran over to the place. Nobody else was there. The grass and underbrush was burning a little but they were putting it out, and when they saw us they stopped still and made little noises to each other. I held up my hand and I said, “I’m queen here. You must all bow down.” And Johnny held up his hand and said, “I’m king.” He never thinks of anything for himself.
I hate them. They didn’t bow down to me. One of them picked up a squirrel that had been burned a little when they landed, and he was petting it and putting something on the burned place, ahd he didn’t pay any attention to me. I hated him most of all, so I went over and kicked him. He was smaller than Johnny, so Johnny kicked him too. I kicked him first, though, and he was just my size.
What did they look like? They didn’t look like old billy goats.
They took us inside their space ship, and they started to give us some tests like the one you gave me. They were very simple tests, but I didn’t like them so I got them all wrong. Johnny got them all wrong too, because I told him I’d scratch his eyes out if he didn’t. I remember some of them. They drew little triangles with boxes on two of the sides and then they gave me the pen and waited to see what I’d do. I fooled them. I took the pen and threw ink all over them. It wasn’t a pen, exactly, but it was like one. Then they held up one little block, then two, then three, then four. They did this a few times, and then they held up one block, then two. Then they waited for me to pick up three. I picked up all the blocks and hit them over the head with them. I had a lot of fun. I was very bad.
They got Johnny off in a corner, and before you could say “boo!” he was telling them about all the people he’d killed in the war. He wasn’t really in the war, of course, but he likes to pretend he was. He likes television best when they kill lots of people. I don’t think they really knew what he was talking about, but they looked as if they did. He’s a very good actor.
I suppose they thought we were grownups; they were pretty much the same size we are. Anyway, they paid a lot of attention to him, so I went over and punched him a couple of times. I’m afraid we broke up the insides of their space ship a little.
They looked pretty mad. I guess they were disgusted with Johnny, a lot of people are. I always try tomake a good impression on strangers, even when they don’t give me any candy, so I took some of them outside and showed them how to stomp ants. It was very funny. One of them got sick. Johnny and I were still jumping up and down, stomping ants, when they took off. I hated them. They were nasty; they didn’t bow down to me.
That’s all. Nothing else happened.
Father says not to take up too much of your expensive old time. He says no honest man could afford a penthouse for his office. You have a very nice view, don’t you? You can see all over the city from here.
My, isn’t it hot? I wish I had a refrigerator to keep my candy in.
Look there. Look at the fires springing up across the river. Aren’t they pretty? Look. Look. And some on this side.
Take me away from here. It’s too hot.
Look at the sun. Look at it. It’s spreading out over the whole sky. It’s burning up the city. Billy goat, help me! Save me! I’m sorry I was bad.
NO LOVE IN ALL
OF DWINGELOO
by Tony Daniel
The aliens
called geists weren’t malevolent—but they were very good at business. They had an unsettling way of communicating, and might be able to show someone their future. And that was not necessarily a good thing . . .
***
Tony Daniel is the author of seven science fiction books, the latest of which is Guardian of Night, as well as an award-winning short story collection, The Robot’s Twilight Companion. He also collaborated with David Drake on the novel The Heretic, and its sequel, The Savior, new novels in the popular military science fiction series, The General. His story “Life on the Moon,” was a Hugo finalist and also won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award. Daniel’s short fiction has been much anthologized and has been collected in multiple year’s best anthologies. Daniel has also co-written screen plays for SyFy Channel horror movies, and during the early 2000s was the writer and director of numerous audio dramas for critically-acclaimed SCIFI.COM’s Seeing Ear Theater. Born in Alabama, Daniel has lived in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Seattle, Prague, and New York City. He is now an editor at Baen Books and lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina with his wife and two children.
Africa was burning when the first geists appeared on Kokopelli Station. The aliens could have picked a better time in human history to contact us. The cable lift from Nairobi was, without clearance, shooting up to us double runs, a few thousand souls crammed into wagons meant to hold only a few hundred. I was placed in charge of shuffling the refugees over to other cables. All of them had some degree of old-fashioned radiation poisoning. Many of them were seething with retroflux, and an epidemic of the plague on a space station would be horrific. Most of the others were hungry, and would have gutted the station if they got loose (and who could blame them?). As for the others, the Broker Guild’s unofficial insurrection front was recruiting, and refugees were prime targets.
So the transfer was very exciting, and demanded all of my attention, and when the first reports of the geists started coming in, they didn’t particularly register with me. I believe there was a bit of fanfare for them at the very beginning, but I was entirely preoccupied, and missed it. There was the problem of where in the world to send the African refugees. The St. Louis lift was restricted to visiting traders down Earthside, and they had to live in quarantine in East St. Louis and Cahokia. Buenos Aires agreed to several shipments, but the Eugenistas had control of the seaboard, and, after seeing some Link of the New Mandate Barrios in Rio, I was wondering just what they intended to do with several thousand Africans. Nevertheless, the diplomatic situation demanded that I send some their way, poor souls.
