The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales Read online

  “It was just blue funk, I guess—he couldn’t bear the thought of being in the same tower with nettle-hurling wobblies running around loose.”

  “But one of those wobblies hurled a nettle at me, John,” Vera said. “And at you. You’ve one in your shoulder now.”

  Carstairs nodded and held up his hand. “I said most of the nettles, Vera. When I examined the wobblies a half-hour ago I couldn’t find a nettle in them. I knew then that I had him, and I could see the noose tightening about his neck. The fact that he must have overlooked three nettles deep in the pouch of the tallest wobbly won’t influence the jury much. Three nettles! One for you, one for me, and this one for evidence of—”

  Before he could finish Bowles dived for the window. There was a splintering crash as his gigantic bulk tore a hole in the pane and vanished.

  Carstairs crossed the room in a flying leap. For the barest fraction of a second he paused to hurl the casement open and clamp on his oxygen mask. Mona Clayton screamed, and Vera grasped her arms from behind and held on tight.

  Cursing himself for a sissy, Carstairs tore out into the lunar night. His reluctance to tear his face to ribbons had proved a costly mistake. Bowles was thirty feet away, and running along the edge of the platform toward a weaving spiral of light.

  Instantly Carstairs had a vision of himself descending once again into the foothills on the thrumming strut of a vacuum plane. It was an appalling vision and it chilled his heart like ice. It also stopped him in his tracks.

  He hurled the nettle with surprising ease, his body twisting a little like a pitcher in a game called baseball. Bowles shrieked. Spinning about on his toes, he tottered for an instant at the edge of the platform and then plunged downward, his body revolving as he fell toward peaks which looked like stalactites in reverse, each one of which seemed capable of impaling him and rotating him in screaming agony to the end of time.

  Carstairs turned away, shaken, and a little sick.

  * * * *

  “Darling,” Vera said, eternities later, “you’ll have to operate on both of us. There is still one nettle in my shoulder and one in yours. You can’t just pluck them out.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Carstairs grunted, reaching for a bottle of antiseptic and a cotton pad. “But next time you bump into a wobbly in the dark, try talking to it. It will quiet right down.”

  “You mean my voice would calm it down?” exclaimed Vera Dorn, her eyes glowing. “John, how sweet of you.”

  Carstairs smiled, dabbing at her shoulder. “When you pay a woman a compliment, she always stays put for a minute. I’ve never known it to fail.”

  “Then you didn’t mean that—about my voice?”

  “Oh, certainly, but I wanted to get you to hold still.”

  The silence in the big, rectangular turret was broken by the sound of a slap.

  THE CRITTERS

  Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1945.

  “Inertia is what saves us, young fellow,” Traubel said. “Malignancy, human or otherwise, wilts under its own weight.”

  He was sitting on a jagged granite outcropping on the crest of his land, his sagging shoulders and straddle-legged posture giving him the aspect of a dejected steeplechase rider about to come a cropper. But suddenly as he spoke his shoulders straightened, and the rusty garden rake in his gnarled, blue-veined hands began to vibrate like a whip.

  Morley watched a rapt possessiveness creep into the steel-gray eyes and found himself wondering how a man so gaunt and ill-colored could have turned the sloping mountainside into a garden plot so riotously ablaze with color that it dazzled his vision.

  On the sloping acres below were russet patches, and emerald patches, and a solid acre of pumpkins gleaming in the sunlight opposite a field of waving corn.

  And suddenly the old man was nodding, his eyes sweeping all of the wide green acres he’d refused to yield up to the alien hordes. His acres were green because he’d gone right on plowing and seeding and hoeing. Not all of Joel Traubel’s neighbors had been as brave.

  “Perhaps ‘brave’ isn’t the right word,” Morley thought aloud. “Perhaps ‘foolhardy’ would be a better word.”

  “Come again, young fellow?”

  Morley took off the glasses he’d found by rummaging through the charred debris of an optical display case—he’d tried on sixty pairs—and his stare seemed to take on an added sharpness before he returned them to his nose.

  He wasn’t a “young fellow” but a lean, haggard-faced man of forty-two, with his years etched as indelibly into his face as the whorls on the shell of a mossback.

  But then—Traubel had been on Earth. A man as virile as Traubel still would naturally lie a little about his age.

  He’d lop off a few years as a sop to his vanity and a few out of sheer cussedness, but the way the old man’s memory kept harking back to the closing years of the twentieth century was a dead giveaway.

  The winding procession of armed Venusians in the blue-lit defile far below would have checked the loquacity of an ordinary man in midstream. But Traubel just kept talking about his young manhood, and his mental processes were not those of a hunted man, but of an imaginative lad with a well-ordered, well-regulated life looming ahead of him through the hazy mountain vista up which he’d been climbing for forty years.

  “Didn’t catch what you said, young fellow. Funny thing, no one thought it would be like this when the first spaceship landed on Venus, and Fleming and Pregenzer were massacred. We just didn’t realize we’d supplied the malignant critters with a blueprint. They couldn’t build spaceships before they’d seen one, naturally. But when we plunked a ship down in the pea soup right before their nostril slits—”

  “I wouldn’t want the job,” Morley said.

  “Come again, young man?”

  “Oh, I mean—the job of splitting the hair that separates an imitative from a constructive faculty.”

  Traubel nodded. “They built thousands of ships as alike as peas in a pod,” he reminisced grimly. “And now there’s a blight on the Earth and all the people have to look forward to is the time when they’ll be buried together. If they’re married, that is.

  “Funny thing about that. The cities have been leveled and all the folks I see are just marking time. But it’s the green fields turning black I feel the worst about. A city you can toss away without an awful lot of grief, but the earth of a man’s own plowing under his feet, the smell of fresh-turned earth when it’s been raining up and down the mountainside—”

  “So you’ve stayed on,” Morley said, jerking his bronze-haired head at the fertile acres beneath, “year after year, minding your own business, wresting a living from the land.”

  “That’s right, young fellow. Up and down the Earth you young fellows go with your bellies pulled in, hiding in caves from dawn to dusk, picking up scraps of food like turkey buzzards.”

  The old man bent and scooped up a handful of dirt. “Scavenger beetles,” he amended, his nostrils wrinkling as he picked out a fat white grub, and crushed it between his thumb and forefinger. “No offense, son, but that’s what you are. There are a few cracked mirrors left. Did you ever try standing off and taking a long, sober look at yourself? I’ll wager those black leather boots you’re wearing came from—”

  Traubel checked himself. “Oh, well, where they came from is no business of mine. But I wouldn’t want to die with a dead man’s boots on, son.”

  “I have died,” Morley said. “I died yesterday; today and tomorrow I’ll die again. A man is dead when he’s caught like a fly in a web, and he’s dead—and he dies. They kill swiftly, erratically, for no reason at all. They kill for the sheer pleasure of killing. It’s like…well, you see a grub…no a mosquito…and suddenly, there’s a little red smudge on your thumb. You don’t hate the mosquito—”

&nbs
p; “No, they don’t hate us,” the old man agreed. “That’s what I’ve been trying to make you see. You wouldn’t go out of your way to kill a mosquito. You or I wouldn’t and they’re no different from us in that respect. My land’s so high up on the mountain they just don’t bother to turn aside and bother me.”

  “Not in forty years, old man?”

  “Not more than four times in forty years,” Traubel said. “And each time I made myself scarce. Just hiding in a cave for one day, even if it means crouching over a decaying carcass, doesn’t harm a man when he knows he’ll have his own land to come back to.”

  Traubel laughed harshly. “They set my fields ablaze, but a burning harvest now and then sweetens the labors of a man. You plow and you sow again, bringing a greenness out of the ash layer.”

  “It’s like living on the edge of a volcano,” Morley said.

  “The law of averages is on my side,” Traubel reminded him. “Four times in forty years is a pretty good batting average, as we used to say when we could move about freely enough to play games. Baseball—”

  “You can flip a coin, and it comes heads fifty times,” Morley reminded him. “Perhaps you’ve just been trading on your luck.”

  “Maybe so, young fellow, maybe so. But I just can’t picture myself inviting a gift horse to kick me in the face.”

  Three thousand feet below red sunlight glinted on the hooked beaks of marching Venusians, glinted on their scaly bodies and tentacled limbs.

  “And in the background of a man’s mind there is always a vision of the little towns, driving him on, giving him the will to remain a man—”

  “There are no more little towns,” Morley reminded him.

  “There were little towns,” the old man said, raising his rake, and scraping rust from one of the prongs. “And I wouldn’t want the job of splitting the hair that separates here and now from something I can still see and smell and touch just by stretching out a hand.”

  He nodded. The steely hardness had gone out of his eyes. His eyes looked now like a kid’s on Christmas morning, sliding down the banisters with his head aureoled in a golden haze.

  “A rake resting against a barn door, pigs—if you like pigs—all splashed with mud down one side, and pumpkins and wood smoke in October. Even the swill trough smells sweet, and you and the missus, you put on your Sunday best and go chugging into town in a converted jeep roadster, and the missus says…shucks, it’s all so close in my mind I just have to stretch out a hand.

  “Come tomorrow, the missus will have been gone exactly fourteen years,” he added, thoughtfully.

  “I don’t know whether I’ve been standing here a long time or a short time talking like an idiot,” Morley heard himself saying. “Tell me, did you feel the same way when you and your wife were facing this together? Did you feel like a man who has gone out with his last penny and doesn’t know whether to gamble it or not?”

  Traubel turned and looked at him sharply. “You’re not alone, young fellow? You weren’t just passing by—alone?”

  “No.” Morley shook his head. “We…we passed your hut-house on the way up. We thought you mightn’t mind if we put up with you for—” He hesitated. “I guess you’d call it a spell.”

  “Home burned down with the wheat,” Traubel said, raking some dry leaves toward the outcropping. “Four times right down to the soil. The big trees had to be felled, and dragged up from the valley. My path almost crossed theirs.”

  He raked through the leaves, and uncovered a chestnut bur.

  “If you saw a mosquito groaning beneath a log, would you crush it? They saw me, all right, following a winding trail up through the timber line. But shucks, crushing a mosquito carrying a log would take a kind of special double effort. Inertia—”

  He wouldn’t have thought of mosquitoes if I hadn’t put the idea into his head Morley thought. Aloud he said: “Is it all right, then—if we stay on for a spell? You know that queer old notion about a house? A house isn’t a home until it’s really been lived in. You give something to the house and the house gives something back to you. It’s sort of partnership, if you know what I mean—a symbiosis.”

  Traubel said: “Young man, I don’t quite see—”

  “She’s going to have a baby,” Morley said.

  Traubel was silent for a full minute. Then he said: “Oh!” Then after a pause: “Hut’s above the timber line, high enough up to be as safe as the rock we’re sitting on. You’d better get back to her, son.”

  Morley reached out and gripped the old man’s arm, a curious wetness glistening on his cheekbones.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it son. If you don’t mind I’ll just sit here a moment longer where I can see all of my land spread out beneath me like a chessboard. Sort of makes me feel good to know I can still move the pieces around. That wheat field down below reminds me of a queen with cornsilk hair arguing with a bishop decked out in cabbage leaves.

  “You’ve played chess, son? The hut’s my castle. You set out a lot of pawns to protect your rook or castle, and—”

  Morley left him nodding in the gathering dusk, and went on down the mountainside, his trouser legs sticking out from the back of his boots.

  Halfway down the mountain—exactly halfway as Morley’s accurate eye measured the distance—he halted in his stride and his hand went under his coat to emerge with a small, flat object that caught and held the sunlight.

  The object measured roughly four inches by seven and its general appearance was somewhat like that of the flattish, large-lensed cameras which had been so popular in the middle years of the twentieth century.

  In all of the crumbling yellow optical catalogues which Morley had thumbed through such immense, metal-embedded “eyes” were euphemistically listed as “candid cameras”!

  Did that mean that they caught men and women in their unguarded moments, and presented a more accurate picture of humanity’s frailties than the more primitive visual recording installments of an earlier period?

  With fingers that trembled a little he loosened his shoulder pack, and a small metal tripod fell to the ground. He screwed the camera-like object on the tripod with a grim urgency in his stare.

  Almost he wished that the object were a camera.

  Perhaps his belief in himself was no more than a fantastic nightmare which had mushroomed in his brain.

  No—he really didn’t believe that. He had a natural bent for improving things, and the camera-like object had taken shape so inevitably that he could not doubt his ability to bring the invention to full fruition in another two years. Two years? God, he’d settle for seven months—six—Morley wiped the sweat from his face. His hands were trembling so that they seemed all thumbs. He had all the needed, delicate parts now, but freedom from fear, freedom from strain, the opportunity to work unmolested in a small, hastily improvised laboratory might well spell the difference between success and failure.

  A mountain laboratory? Well, he’d know in a moment whether he could achieve effective results by training the instrument straight down the mountain at a marching column.

  Oh, it wasn’t a vain hope, for he was the only man left on Earth with a surgical technique worth developing.

  There was a brackish taste in Morley’s mouth. Deep therapy was what it amounted to, but, if it couldn’t be adapted to the peculiar structure of Venusian brains, humanity would do better to stick to hand-blasters. What he desperately needed now was more time—time to work on the skillful interlocking of high-frequency wave transmission with the destructive intracranial vibrations set up by the controlled use of subsonics.

  In the last years of the twentieth century beam surgery could make babbling infants of men, but not even a cyclotron beam of alpha particles could destroy the brains of Venusians. Convulsive idiocy in humans, yes. The forebrain
and cortex destroyed, nothing left but the thalamus—all in the last six years of the twentieth century!

  Morley had watched a few experiments go wrong. Himself a fifteen-year-old kid, his uncle a surgeon, and letting the beam get out of control because with all the great accumulation of knowledge and experience at his disposal that grand old man couldn’t control the trembling of his hands.

  Well, he, Morley, could control the trembling but—the transmitter just wasn’t powerful enough. When he trained it on the Venusians there was a brief pause like the petit mal of human epilepsy. For the barest fraction of a second the beam worked, but—For an instant there stirred within Morley a foreboding born of years of acute fear and blind sensation. Then—he heard something click beneath his fingers.

  Instantly he slammed the dread in his mind back against a mental wall—held it there.

  Two thousand feet below a moving shadow stopped. The sunlight seemed to deepen, and monstrously between walls of blueness there spread the penumbra of a beast with many beaked heads that had ceased utterly to weave about.

  A dislodged stone rasped against Morley’s heel and went bounding down the slope like a startled hare.

  Bounding, zigzagging—If a man didn’t smoke, it could be because—he had no matches. If a man didn’t breathe, it could be because the air about him had become thick, viscid.

  Ten minutes later Morley was standing very still, a thin trickle of blood running down his chin.

  Ten full minutes, he thought wildly. The whole blasted column sent mindless. It halted and then—moved on without remembering. I’ve got them, I’ve got them—in the palm of my hand! Give me seven months—a mountain laboratory—I’ll settle for four!

  “He asked me if I played chess,” Morley said, when he’d scrubbed the dirt from his hands and dried them with a towel.