by Anthology
“Will it?” the major shouted, shaking. “Will it now?”
The professor jerked violently at the quick successive reports of a gun in the young officer’s hand. Then there was a struggling knot of figures around the major, and another man’s voice was shouting hoarsely, “You fool! You damned hysterical fool!”
The Wac captain had dropped her notebook and clasped her hands to her face. For an instant the professor heard her crying, “Jack! Jack! Stop—don’t——”
But he was looking at the thing that had fallen on its back in the cage, with the top of its skull shot away and a dark-brown liquid staining the cage floor about its shoulders.
What he felt was an irrational satisfaction, a warm glow of pride in the major’s action. It was as if he had killed the thing himself.
For that moment, he was happy.
Because he stood far back in the room, he saw what happened then before the others did.
One of the Personages and two of the scientists were moving excitedly about the cage, staring down at the thing. The others had grouped around the chair into which they had forced the major. Under the babble of confused, angry voices, he could sense the undercurrent of almost joyful relief he felt himself.
The Wac captain stood up and began to take off her clothes.
She did it quickly and quietly. It was at this moment, the professor thought, staring at her in renewed terror, that the height of insanity appeared to have been achieved in this room. He wished fervently that he could keep that sense of insanity wrapped around him forevermore, like a protective cloak. It was a terrible thing to be rational! With oddly detached curiosity, he also wondered what would happen in a few seconds when the others discovered what he already knew.
The babbling voices of the group that had overpowered the major went suddenly still. The three men at the cage turned startled faces toward the stillness. The girl straightened up and stood smiling at them.
The major began screaming her name.
There was another brief struggling confusion about the chair in which they were holding him. The screaming grew muffled as if somebody had clapped a hand over his mouth.
“I warned you,” the professor heard the girl say clearly, “that there was no death. Not for us.”
Somebody shouted something at her, like a despairing question. Rigid with fear, his own blood a swirling roar in his ears, the professor did not understand the words. But he understood her reply.
“It could have been any of you, of course,” she nodded. “But I just happened to like this body.”
After that, there was one more shot.
The professor turned off the radio. For a time, he continued to gaze out the window.
“Well, they know it now!” he said. “The world knows it now. Whether they believe it or not—— At any rate . . .”
His voice trailed off. The living room had darkened and he had a notion to switch on the lights, but decided against it. The evening gloom provided an illusion of security.
He looked down at the pale oval of his wife’s face, almost featureless in the shadows.
“It won’t be too bad,” he explained, “if not too many of them come. Of course, we don’t know how many there are of them, actually. Billions, perhaps. But if none of our people try to make trouble—the aliens simply don’t want any trouble.”
He paused a moment. The death of the young Intelligence major had not been mentioned in the broadcast. Considering the issues involved, it was not, of course, a very important event and officially would be recorded as a suicide. In actual fact, the major had succeeded in wresting a gun from one of the men holding him. Another man had shot him promptly without waiting to see what he intended to do with it.
At all costs now, every rational human being must try to prevent trouble with the Visitors from Outside.
He felt his face twitch suddenly into an uncontrollable grimace of horror.
“But there’s no way of being absolutely sure, of course,” he heard his voice tell the silently gathering night about him, “that they won’t decide they just happen to like our kind of bodies.”
We Don’t Want Any Trouble by James H. Schmitz. Copyright, 1953, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Scott Meredith.
JACK WILLIAMSON
This is, as near as makes no difference, the silver anniversary of Jack Williamson’s first appearance in a science-fiction magazine. In a quarter century, the field has changed radically and often; to change with it, and to stay consistently at the top of its favorite writers, takes work, flexibility—and a great deal of creative talent, with all of which Jack Williamson is more than adequately supplied. His novels now number a dozen; his short stories must be in the hundreds; and his fans are countless—attracted by the lure of novels like Dragon’s Island and The Humanoids, and short stories like——
The Peddler’s Nose
The peddler came to Earth, across the empty immensities of space, after whisky. He knew the planet was under quarantine, but his blunders had left him at the mercy of his thirst. Ultimately, the root of that merciless thirst was his nose.
He was a thin, tiny man, and his crooked nose enormous. The handicap could have been corrected, but he was born on a frontier world where the difficult dilemmas of freedom and responsibility had not yet been solved, and he was allowed to grow up twisted with the knowledge of his ugliness.
Damned by genetic accident, he spent his life in flight from salvation. By the time his deformity had made a petty criminal of him, he had come to defend it as the most tender part of himself. When he was ordered to a clinic for the removal of his social maladjustments and the excess nasal tissue that lay beneath them, he escaped rehabilitation and drifted out to the fringes of civilization, where the law was less efficient.
Never bold, he settled at last into the shabby occupation of vending cheap novelty toys. Even that humble calling had its risks. He had been forced to make his pitch without a vendor’s license, on the last world behind, and he had to leave it in such haste that he had no time to buy his usual supplies.
His nerves were not so good as they had been. Aboard the flier, he had to gulp down three stiff drinks before his hands were steady enough to set the automatic pilot. And the raw alcohol seemed to hit him more swiftly than common, so that his vision began to blur and double before he had finished the adjustments.
In his frightened befuddlement, he mistook an 8 for a 3, and overlooked a decimal point, and turned the planet selector dial one space too far. His intended goal had been another frontier world, a few light-years away, where immigration was still unrestricted and the pioneers still hardy enough to let their children buy his toys. His errors, however, made Earth his destination.
The robot pilot warned him instantly. Although the flier had been battered and abused by several generations of outlaws bolder than himself, it had saved him many times from destruction, and it was still a sturdy, spaceworthy neutrionic craft. A gong crashed. A red light flickered above the competent mechanism, and it spoke to him sternly:
“Caution! Do not take off. Destination dialed is far beyond normal operating range. Caution! Check charts and dials for possible error. Caution!”
He was normally cautious enough, but those three drinks had magnified his panic. Already too far gone to understand the warning, he stabbed a shaky finger at the button that canceled it. Before he could find the take-off lever, however, the signals rang and flashed again.
“Caution!” rapped that hard mechanical voice. “Do not take off. Destination dialed is under quarantine. All contact prohibited——”
Impatiently, too drunk to think of anything except escape, he pulled the take-off lever. The signals stopped, and the flier took him to Earth, across a distance in light-centuries that might have staggered a sober man.
Human civilization was an expanding globe, spreading out through the galaxy at almost half the speed of light, as the colonists hopped from star to star; and that
long flight took him from what was then the outside of it, back toward the half-forgotten center.
The voyage wasn’t long to him, however, and the flier required no more attention. It caught the invisible winds of radiant neutrinos that rise out of the novae to blow forever through the galaxies, and it was swept away at such a speed that time was slowed almost to a stop for everything aboard, through the working of relativity.
The peddler drank and slept and dreamed uneasy dreams of men with scalpels who wanted to remove his nose. He woke and slept and drank again, until his inadequate supplies were gone.
As originally built, the flier would have identified itself to the destination port authority, waited for orders, and obeyed them automatically. Previous owners had changed the operating circuits, however, so that it slipped down dark toward the night side of Earth, with all signals dead except a gong to arouse its master.
The peddler awoke unhappy. Even the dimmed lights in his untidy little cabin seemed intolerably bright, and the gong was bursting his head. He shuffled hastily to stop it and then stumbled through the flier in search of something to drink.
There should have been another bottle cached somewhere, against such emergencies, behind his berth or in his portable sales case or perhaps in the empty medical cabinet—he had long ago bartered its contents for whisky.
But the caches had all been raided before. Muttering bitterly, shaken with a thirst that refused to wait, he staggered back to the cockpit and touched a dial to find out where he was.
Sol Three—he had never heard of that. He shook his throbbing head, and squinted at the hooded screen to read his position. The co-ordinates took his breath. He was two thousand light-years from the last world he remembered, somewhere near the dead center of civilization.
He felt shocked for an instant at the vastness of his blunder. Yet there was no harm done. That was the unique advantage of his nomadic existence. No matter how many outraged citizens wanted to remodel his nose and extirpate his thirst, the flier had always carried him safely beyond their reach, across space and trackless time.
He leaned hopefully to read the screen again. Sol Three was a minor member of an undistinguished planetary system, it told him, with nothing to interest either tourist or trader. The inhabitants were human, but their culture was primitive. Although long settled, the planet was historically unimportant. A footnote caught his eye:
The planet was once believed to have been the site of Atlantis, the half legendary cradle of civilization, from which the interstellar migrations began. Although the comparative biology of the indigenous fauna supports this idea, no actual historical proof has yet been found, and the low cultural level of the present inhabitants leaves it open to question——
He wasn’t concerned with the elaborate quarrels of the historians. All he wanted was a drink. Just one stiff jolt, to cut the foul taste out of his mouth and sweep the pain from his head and quiet his trembling limbs. Even this planet couldn’t be too backward, he thought, to distill alcohol.
Thirstily, he touched the landing key.
The gong rang instantly, painful as a hammer on his head. The red light flickered, and the loud recorded voice of the automatic pilot rang grimly:
“Warning! Do not attempt to land. This planet is quarantined, under the Covenants of Non-Contact. All communication is absolutely prohibited, and violators will be subject to full rehabilitation. Warning——”
Cringing from the voice and the gong, he stabbed frantically at the cancellation button. Because primitive worlds offered the easiest market for his goods, he had run into the Covenants before. He knew they were intended to prevent the damaging clash of peoples at discrepant levels of social evolution, but he was not interested in theories of cultural impact.
What he wanted was a drink, and he should find it here. Although he had never heard of Sol Three, he knew his trade and he was well enough equipped. One quick stand ought to bring the price of what he needed for the long flight back to the frontier worlds where he felt at home. Even if something aroused the quarantine officials, their threat of full rehabilitation was unlikely to pursue him quite that far.
He pushed the landing key. The flier slipped down silently, before dawn, to the dark slope of a wooded hill three miles from a feeble energy source that should be a small settlement. He inflated the covering membrane that gave the craft the look of an innocent boulder, and started walking toward the settlement with his sales equipment.
The cool air had a refreshing scent of things growing. The feel of the grass was good underfoot, and the voices of small wild creatures made an elusive music. No wilderness had ever seemed so friendly. He thought this planet had really been the birthplace of mankind, and he felt happy for a moment with a mystical sense of return.
But he hadn’t come for communion with the mother world, and that brief elation slipped away as he began to worry about meeting some primitive taboo against the use of alcohol.
Frowning with anxiety, he came to an empty road at the foot of the hill and tramped along it with an apprehensive haste toward a rude concrete bridge across a shallow stream. The sun was rising now, not much different from any other star. It showed him a wide green valley where a herd of black-and-white domestic animals grazed peacefully and a man in blue drove a crude traction plow.
The peddler paused for a moment, feeling a puzzled contempt for the stupid yokels who lived their small lives rooted here, as ignorant of the great world outside as their fat cattle were. If envy lay beneath his scorn, he didn’t know it.
The sunlight had begun to hurt his eyes and his thirst shook him again with a dry paroxysm. He limped grimly on. Beyond the bridge, he found crude two-dimensional signs set up along the road. He had no equipment to read their silent legends, but even the flat pictures of sealed bottles and dew-wet glasses spoke to him with a maddening eloquence.
At the summit of a gentle hill, he came upon a wooden hut enveloped in a thin but tantalizing fragrance of alcohol. The sign above the door convinced him that it was a public place, and a faded poster on the wall showed a plump native girl upping a drink seductively.
He tried the door eagerly, but it was locked. The teasing odor tempted him to break in, but he shrank from the impulse fearfully. Running the quarantine was crime enough. He didn’t want to be rehabilitated, and he thought the place would surely open by the time he could supply himself with the local medium of exchange.
Already perspiring, he went on down the hill toward the village. It lay along a bend of the quiet stream he had passed; a scattered group of rude brick and stucco family huts standing in a grove of trees. It looked so different from the brawl and glitter of the raw pioneer cities he had known that he halted uncertainly.
He wasn’t used to dealing with such simple races. But then his novelties would certainly be new to their children, and the occasional discarded cans and bottles beside the road assured him that alcohol was abundant. That was really all that mattered. Fie mopped his face and swung the sales case to his left hand and staggered on again.
“Mornin’ to you, mister.”
Startled by that unexpected hail, he darted to the side of the road. A clumsy primitive vehicle had come up behind him. It was driven by some kind of crude heat engine, which gave off a faint reek of burning petroleum. A large man sat at the control wheel, watching him with a disturbing curiosity.
“Lookin’ for somebody in Chatsworth?”
The man spoke a harsh-sounding tongue he had never heard before, but the psionic translator, a tiny device no more conspicuous than the native’s hearing aid, brought the meaning to him instantly.
“Mornin’ to you, mister.” He lifted his arm a little, murmuring toward the microphone hidden in his sleeve, and his translated reply came from the tiny speaker under his clothing, uttered in a nasal drawl that matched the native’s.
“Thanks,” he said, “but I’m just passing through.”
“Then hop in.” The native leaned to open the door of the vehicle. �
��I’ll give you a lift out to my place, a mile across the town.”
Fie got in gratefully, but in a moment he was sorry for his eagerness.
“Welcome to Chats worth,” the grinning yokel went on. “Population three hundred and four, in the richest little valley in the state. Guess I’ve got the right to make you welcome.” The tall man chuckled. “I’m Jud Hankins. The constable.”
Now sweat broke out on the peddler’s dusty face. His head throbbed unbearably, and his gnarled old hands began trembling so violently that he had to grip the handle of his case to keep the officer from noticing his agitation.
In a moment, however, he saw that this unfortunate chance encounter with the law had not yet been disastrous. Jud Hankins was unlikely to be concerned with enforcing the Covenants—if he ever knew that they existed.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Hankins,” the peddler answered hastily, grateful that the translator failed to reproduce the apprehensive tremor in his voice. “My name’s Gray.”
He noticed the constable looking at his sales case.
“A fertile valley, indeed!” he said hurriedly. “Do you produce grain for the distilling industry?”
“Mostly for hogs.” The constable glanced at the case again “You a salesman, Mr. Gray?”
Uneasily he said he was.
“What’s your line, if you don’t mind?”
“Toys,” he said. “Novelty toys.”
“I was just afraid you had fireworks.” The constable seemed faintly relieved. “I thought I ought to warn you.”
“Fireworks?” The peddler repeated the term in a puzzled voice, because the translation had not been entirely clear.
“The Fourth will soon be coming up, you know,” the constable explained. “We’ve got to protect the children.” He grinned proudly. “I’ve four fine little rascals of my own.”