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

  The woman on the bunk raised her face and stared at her husband across the rafter-hung hut, the hair above her brow a tumbled mass of gold.

  For an instant she seemed almost pretty, despite her wind-coarsened skin and the harsh lines which hunger and deprivation had etched into her flesh.

  “Do you really think he’s just been lucky, Jim? Or is it something we—” she hesitated, as though visualizing the begrimed, misery-laden millions who trudged the waste places of the Earth—“is it some hidden power he has which we could use too, if he’d tell us about it?”

  Morley sat down on the edge of his bunk, and leaned forward, hands on knees. “I don’t know,” he said. “It may be he’s caught up in what used to be called an infinity cycle of lucky runs.”

  “An infinity cycle?”

  Morley nodded. “I told him a flipped coin can fall the same way fifty times in succession. But that’s not remarkable. It happens so often it doesn’t even do violence to the law of averages. What I didn’t tell him—perhaps I didn’t need to—was that a flipped coin can come heads fifty million times. In a cycle of luck which begins and ends in infinity—”

  Morley rose and adjusted the wick on a grimy oil lamp, his hands trembling.

  “The opponents of extrasensory perception used to claim that we’re all at the receiving end of dozens of such cycles, where all the lucky runs just happen to come together in the little segment of space-time we’ve been caught out in. For all we know Traubel may be at the receiving end of a cycle that has ‘luck-with-Venusians’ stamped all over it.”

  Arline Morley half-rose, her eyes bright with a dawning hope. “Then if that’s true, Jim, he’ll be safe here. Your son and mine!—safe in a green mountain land that’s protected by something no power on Earth can break!”

  Morley’s face was grim. “No, I…I don’t think so. The introduction of an extraneous factor would invalidate the probability factor. Just our being here would…well, we’ve jarred the hand that does the flipping. Our presence here may bring down the thunder!”

  “But that’s just a theory, isn’t it? It can’t be proved.”

  Morley said, “Just a wild guess, of course. I didn’t mean to sound so dogmatic. There’s probably no such thing as an infinity cycle of lucky runs anyway. Traubel claims it’s just inertia which keeps the critters—he calls them critters—from climbing the mountain and laying waste to his land. Just inertia.”

  “Maybe he’s right,” Arline said. “Remember how the others were all cut down? Then remember how it stopped, an instant before it reached us, and—went off down the road.”

  White-lipped, Morley nodded.

  “The road was a shambles. We had to stumble over their bodies to get to the cave, the bodies of men and women cut in two by—”

  “Stop that!” Morley’s palms were sweating. “Stop it, you hear?”

  “Twisted, crushed,” Arline said tonelessly. “Limbs torn off—”

  She began to sway from side to side, her nostrils quivering. “Our son will never know a safer world. We won’t be his real parents. He’ll be cradled in the lap of terror and when he cries—Death will suckle him. If he doesn’t cry, if he’s born dry-eyed, so much the worse for him. Tears are a coward’s refuge, but we have to be cowards or—go mad. He’ll curse the day he was born!” Morley started to move toward her across the hut.

  Before he’d advanced a foot his scalp began to tingle, and he felt a coldness start up his spine.

  For an instant he stood utterly motionless, staring at his wife. Then terror began to tug at his wrists, tug at his mouth. For perhaps a full minute it was an ambiguous sort of terror. He thought at first his wife’s features were distorted because his own were.

  He’d lost control over his features, especially his lips. He couldn’t stop the twitching of his lips. But mercifully for a moment he was permitted to believe that the terror which he felt had simply communicated itself to his wife. Then he saw that it was much more than that. She was feeling it, too. Her palms were pressed to her temples and she was staring past him at the slowly opening door of the hut.

  The pattern never varied. It was always the same—a coldness, a fullness, a tightness, holding the muscles rigid, paralyzing the will to resist.

  The nearness of a Venusian did something to the human brain that could not be explained by any of the known laws of nature. There were unknown laws, patterns dimly suspected to exist and laws which had almost been grasped and dragged out into the light.

  But compared to that power, whatever it was, telepathy was like a tiny wax candle sputtering in the glow of a billion candle power light.

  It was a power which could flatten a human body in a split second of time, flatten it as though by a blow from a gigantic mace. It was a power which no ordinary human weapon could withstand, or ever hope to withstand. It could twist, maim, tear, rend, crush. It could move slantwise like a buzzsaw across a column of men; it could rip holes in the earth, it could pile up the dead in stiffening rows like cordwood—Morley tried vainly to moisten his lips. The patient, his mind seemed to be saying, should be kept in a dark room and nutrient enemata administered. That, according to an old medical book he’d read once, was the prescribed treatment for—rabies. Never a recorded cure, in all the history of rabies, but the patient had to be fed, the agony had to be prolonged, in order to exhaust all the nonexistent possibilities of a cure.

  The compact little energy weapon in Morley’s clasp had never destroyed a Venusian. It never could destroy a Venusian. It was as useless as a “cure” for rabies.

  But instinctively his hand had traveled under his begrimed oversuit, grasped the weapon, and drawn it forth. He knew he’d be caught up, mauled, twisted before he could blast. And if he were caught up with his work uncompleted, there could be no cure for a disease which had blotted out the sunlight for the entire human race. No cure—no cure—worse than rabies. Slam! An opening door closes, a leaf is torn from a book and perhaps there is a breath-taking instant when a man does what he can—Goodbye, he thought. Goodbye darling, goodbye James Morley, Jr. Why did a man instinctively assume that his first-born would be a boy?

  Morley suddenly saw that the door had swung so wide there was no longer a barrier between his straining eyes and the night without.

  The form looming in the doorway conveyed an illusion of having laboriously impressed itself upon the sky. It was faintly rimmed with light, and the stars which glimmered on both sides of it seemed to be rushing together, as though its bulk had torn a rent in the warp-and-woof stuff of the physical universe.

  Even in broad daylight the bulk of the Venusian would have blotted out the natural brilliant green of the mountainside up which it had come. Now it seemed to blot out more than the mountainside, seemed to catch at the starlight and distort the sky itself, so that the light-threaded firmament above and behind it reminded Morley of a collapsing shroud.

  There was an awful instant when time seemed to miss a beat. Morley felt his fingers tighten on the blaster, felt his scalp tighten all over his head.

  Then as in a dream from which he had been rudely awakened by something to which he could not give a name, he heard a ghostly faint fluttering behind him, and a voice said: “Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”

  Slowly Morley turned his head. As he did so the fluttering was resumed, and the door of the clock banged shut on a feathered mite!

  Morley had noticed the clock hanging on the wall, but now he seemed to be staring at it through the wide, stationary eyes of a madman. A magical clock! Morley had heard of such things, gadgets which dated back to the middle years of the nineteenth century.

  He had noticed this one in particular because weighted bellows under glass had always held a peculiar fascination for him. By the push of a wire given to the body of a bird it could be bent forward, the wings and tail raised,
the beak opened.

  The bulkiness in the doorway must have shared Morley’s interest in the clock, for it crossed the hut so rapidly that a light-rimmed after-image appeared to hover in its wake.

  There was a moment of silence while it stared at the clock, all of its malignancy humped together in a towering, overwhelming wave that could be felt in every part of the room.

  Then, slowly, methodically, the Venusian began to dismantle the clock.

  There was a metallic clatter, a ripping sound, and something that looked like the intestines of a robot gleamed for an instant between its scaly hands. Then the door behind which the cuckoo had taken refuge was lifted out on a dangling filament, its neck distended, its white breast feathers flecked with grease.

  The Venusian departed without uttering a sound. It simply swung about, re-crossed the room, and went clumping out into the night, half the clock dangling from the amorphous limb-like structure which jutted from its breast.

  After what seemed like an eternity the back door of the hut opened a crack and a familiar voice said: “I forgot to tell you, son, that I have a few solitary visitors. Now and again one of the critters will leave the line of march and come clumping up the mountainside. If you saw a mosquito across the room, and your thumb began to itch you’d cross the room on a sudden impulse, maybe, and smash it.”

  The door opened wider, and a rusty garden rake clattered against the jamb.

  “But you wouldn’t have to cross the room, son. You’d almost as soon as not, and if when you’re raising your thumb a hand reaches out from the wall and says: ‘Clasp me,’ or the wallpaper turns from green to pink your interest shifts and there’s time for inertia to set in. You become interested in the wallpaper, and the mosquito just doesn’t get crushed.”

  The rake made a rasping sound on the floor. “Pawns. That clock was a pawn, and I’ve set other pawns out on the mountainside to protect my rook just in case one of the critters turns aside and starts up. I’ve been playing a game with them for more than thirty years now, son. It isn’t often one of them gets as far as the hut.”

  A low chuckle came from the doorway. “Interested? You bet it was interested. A cuckoo clock is about the rarest mechanical gadget on Earth. Not many of ’em left, not one Venusian in fifty thousand has seen one—no, make that fifty million. And they do like to imitate things; they like to pull gadgets apart. There’s just that little interval between impulse and inertia which has to be bridged.”

  “Good Lord!” Morley choked.

  “It came in through the front door, didn’t it? You came in through this door, I guess, or you’d have heard the birdie too. ‘Cuckoo, cuckoo’—because just coming in through the front door activates the clock. You see, son, there’s a photo-electric beam in the front door, and the poisonous critter brought the birdie out the instant it stepped into my parlor.”

  Morley wiped the sweat from his face. He had all the needed, delicate parts, and 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.

  Might? Would. And he wouldn’t have to settle for four months now. He’d have all the time he needed to perfect the instrument.

  The door made a rasping sound as it was thrown wide.

  Traubel stumbled a little as he crossed the hut. He crossed to the wash-stand, poured out some water and started fumbling around for a cake of soap on the cluttered shelf where he kept his shaving kit, a few necessary drugs, and a dog-eared calendar dating back to the late years of the twentieth century.

  “I’m glad you and the missus are going to stay for a spell, son,” he said. “You’ve no idea how lonely it gets up here when the crickets stop chirping, and the nights start getting longer. You see, son, I’ve been stone blind now going on eighteen years.”

  FILCH

  Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1945.

  All Griscom had to show for his eighteen months on Rigel’s third planet was a haunted stare, and a storeroom littered with rubbish. He felt walled in, beaten down, and spiritually suffocated. He felt angry and resentful and victimized. He felt like a stooge and a zany. He couldn’t even—well, it was hard to put into words, but when he eavesdropped on his own subconscious he couldn’t be sure the code numerals were the ones he’d put there.

  Not that he was in any danger of cracking up physically. So far he’d maintained his footing despite a physical environment which was all wet in patches. Everything he touched was either streaked with damp, or drier than the rasp of pumice on a revolving metal cylinder. Everything—for all seven of the Rigel sun planets were drymoist and had a checkerboard quilt sort of atmosphere.

  There were patches of damp green rot on the metal-sheeted walls of the company buildings, and when he walked his shoes spurted dust and a haziness swirled up about him. But so far he’d squared off, and taken the arid tundra and night-heavy clouds in his stride. He hadn’t even beefed to the home office.

  He wasn’t beefing now. Having pulled off his boots, he sat squinting through a haze of tobacco smoke at a much younger man than himself, his long face a sickly brown study.

  “You smoke shag?” the youth asked, wrinkling his nose.

  The gaunt skeleton that was Griscom turned slightly, and ladled up a spoonful of the unsavory stew which was dawdling to a boil on the small magneto-grill at his elbow.

  “Yeah,” he grunted. “It’s about the only thing out here I like. The coarser the better.”

  Griscom sniffed at the stew as he spoke, blew upon it, and forced himself to take a sip. He shuddered as the spoon caressed his palate, a hot resentment in his stare. Then it occurred to him that a schizoid would have felt no such repugnance and relief swept into his eyes.

  He laughed harshly. “I’m afraid smoking is becoming an obsession with me. Strong tobacco is a powerful disinfectant, you know.”

  The youth smiled nervously. “I still think—”

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Griscom interposed, with a wry grimace. “I should have gone native. When in Rome do as the Romans do, eh? Well, we’re not in Rome, and you’ll find out what going native means quickly enough. When you do, there’s one thing I can promise you. It won’t smell like shag, or anything you’ve ever met.”

  The young man—his name was Richard Bosworth—seemed bewildered. “But, sir, I thought—”

  “You thought, because I O.K.’d your ideas on a sidereal communication disk, I’d stay on and be your father-confessor? No, my dear chap—no. I played a scurvy trick on you. In theory your ideas are appealing, even brilliant, but if I had to be here when they really take hold of you—”

  He shrugged, and knocked the dottle from his pipe.

  “I’m sorry if my record misled you. When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ll know that the greatest human gifts have about as much relation to a man’s integrity as the color of his hair. And I’m just a shrewd company haggler. I tell you, I’m fed up, and—you’d better get spruced up. We’ve a redhead here who hopes I’ll stay on. When she sees you I can fade out with better grace.”

  Bosworth stroked his chin, which was covered with a three days growth of stubble. “Yeah, I guess I could do with a shave and a tubbing. In space you sort of neglect—”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to look your worst,” Griscom assured him. “Besides, the natives can’t grow hair, and beards don’t set well with them. They’re just human enough to resent what they can’t imitate.”

  The redhead was an unbelievable phenomenon so far from the Solar System, her eyes especially. It had taken Bosworth a full hour to recover from the shock of Griscom’s ultimatum. Now, moving about the storeroom, he could hear her fast, staccato breathing, and felt suddenly rudderless again.

  In a clash of masculine wills there was alw
ays a rapier-like give and take to give a man a feeling of confidence. But how could he defend himself against the scorn of a frail, trembling girl who regarded him as a pariah?

  He knew she was following his every movement with the same dark eyes she had used to drill holes in his self-assurance. Griscom had delivered a body blow to his chances of taking refuge behind a barrier of reticence by the informality of his introduction.

  “Joan, this is Dick Bosworth. You know why he’s here, so it shouldn’t come as too great a shock to you.”

  Horror and loathing had flared in Joan Mallory’s stare, and she had looked away quickly.

  If only she’d kept her gaze averted he might have endured the mounting tension, the feeling that she resented having him near her, and would have screamed if he touched her.

  It came suddenly, in a vehement whisper so laden with scorn it completely unnerved him.

  “I’d rather a struvebeast clawed out my throat,” she said bending over a miserable shard of something that looked like a bullet-riddled tea kettle. “Jim never would, and I’ve always respected him for it.”

  Anger is a strange emotion. Bosworth had never known just how strange till he felt it take complete possession of his vocal cords, and heard himself saying in a voice which he scarcely recognized as his own: “If you expect to trade with an alien race, you’ve got to find out what makes them tick. You’ve got to get as close as possible to bedrock by living as they do. What if their inner springs do vibrate to nonhuman rhythms? So do the springs inside a clock, but you can get a clock to cooperate if you understand the winding mechanism.

  “You may get a little greasy, but you can pretty well master the mechanism of a clock if you keep taking it apart and putting it together again. Any clock—and the same goes for the psychology of an alien race. The reason Griscom found himself tricked and out-guessed at every turn was because he adopted a superior, standoffish attitude. Griscom’s a great proctor, but these Rigel System planetarians are so totally unlike—”