Antigrav : Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters

by Philip Strick

  Dusting his lapel, Dr Grobe said, ‘I don’t quite follow. Semaphore signals?’

  ‘One cockroach is stupid. But a few thousand of them in good communication could make up a fair brain. Our tinkerer probably hastened that along by intensive breeding and group learning problems, killing off the failures ... it would take ten years at the outside.’

  ‘Really? And how long would the conquest of man take? How would the little insects fare against the armies of the world?’

  ‘They never need to try. Armies are run by governments, and governments are run, for all practical purposes, by small panels of experts. Think tanks like the Orinoco Institute. And—this just occurred to me—for all practical purposes, you run the Institute.’

  For once, Dr Grobe did not look surprised. ‘Oh, so I’m in on the plot, am I?’

  ‘We’re all so crazy, we really depend on you. You can ensure that we work for the good of the cockroaches, or else you can get rid of us—send us away, or encourage our suicides.’

  ‘Why should I do that?’

  ‘Because you are afraid of them.’

  ‘Not at all.’ But his hand twitched, and a little cigar ash fell on his immaculate trousers. I felt my point was proved.

  ‘Damn. I’ll have to sponge that. Excuse me.’

  He stepped into his private washroom and closed the door. My feeling of triumph suddenly faded. Maybe I was finally cracking. What evidence did I really have?

  On the other hand, Dr Grobe was taking a long time in there. I stole over to the washroom door and listened.

  ‘. . . verge of suicide . . .,’ he murmured. ‘.. . yes . . . give up the idea, but. .. yes, that’s just what I. ..’

  I threw back the door on a traditional spy scene. In the half-darkness, Dr G was hunched over the medicine cabinet, speaking into a microphone. He wore earphones.

  ‘Hank, don’t be a foo—’

  I hit him, not hard, and he sat down on the edge of the tub. He looked resigned.

  ‘So this is my imagined conspiracy, is it? Where do these wires lead?’

  They led inside the medicine cabinet, to a tiny apparatus. A dozen brown ellipses had clustered around it, like a family around the TV.

  ‘Let me explain,’ he said.

  ‘Explanations are unnecessary, Doctor. I just want to get out of here, unless your six-legged friends can stop me.’

  ‘They might. So could I. I could order the guards to shoot you. I could have you put away with your crazy friends. I Could even have you tried for murder, just now.’

  ‘Murder?’ I followed his gaze back into the office. From under the desk, a pair of feet. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Hel Rasmussen. Poisoned himself a few minutes before you came in. Believe me, it wasn’t pleasant, seeing the poor fellow holding a bottle of cynanide to his armpit. He left a note blaming you, in a way.’

  ‘Me!’

  ‘You were the last straw. This afternoon, he saw you take an axe and deliberately cut down one of those beautiful maple trees in the yard. Destruction of beauty—it was too much for him.’

  Trees again. I went to the office window and looked out at the floodlit landscape. One of the maples was missing.

  Dr Grobe and I sat down again at our respective interview stations, while I thought this over. Blenheim and his mask came into it, I was sure of that. But why?

  Dr Grobe fished his lifeless cigar from the ashtray. ‘The point is, I can stop you from making any trouble for me. So you may as well hear me out.’ He scratched a match on the sole of Hel’s shoe and relit the cigar.

  ‘All right, Oddpork. You win. What happens now?’

  ‘Nothing much. Nothing at all. If my profession has any meaning, it’s to keep things from happening.’ He blew out the match. ‘I’m selling ordinary life. Happiness, as you must now see, lies in developing a pleasant, comfortable and productive routine—and then sticking to it. No unpleasant surprises. No shocks. Psychiatry has always aimed for that, and now it is within our grasp. The cockroach conspiracy hasn’t taken over the world, but it has taken over the Institute—and it’s our salvation.

  ‘You see, Hank, our bargain isn’t one-sided. We give them a little shelter, a few scraps of food. But they give us something far more important: real organization. The life of pure routine.’

  I snorted. ‘Like hurrying after trains? Or wearing ourselves out on assembly-line work? Or maybe grinding our lives away in boring offices? Punching time-clocks and marching in formation?’

  ‘None of the above, thank you. Cockroaches never hurry to anything but dinner. They wouldn’t march in formation except for fun. They are free—yet they are part of a highly organized society. And this can be ours.’

  ‘If we’re not all put in detention camps.’

  ‘Listen, those camps are only a stage. So what if a few million grumblers get sterilized and shut away for a year or two? Think of the billions of happy, decent citizens, enjoying a freedom they have earned. Someday, every man will live exactly as he pleases—and his pleasure will lie in serving his fellow men.’

  Put like that, it was persuasive. Another half-hour of this and I was all but convinced.

  ‘Sleep on it, eh Hank? Let me know tomorrow what you think.’ His large hand on my shoulder guided me to the door.

  ‘You may be right,’ I said, smiling back at him. I meant it, too. Even though the last thing I saw, as the door closed, was a stream of glistening brown that came from under the washroom door and disappeared under the desk.

  I sat up in my own office most of the night, staring out at the maple stump. There was no way out: Either I worked for Periplaneta americana and''gradually turned into a kind of

  moral cockroach myself, or I was killed. And there were certain advantages to either choice.

  I was about to turn on the video-recorder to leave a suicide note, when I noticed the cassette was already recorded. I ran it back and played it.

  Blenheim came on, wearing my face and my usual suit.

  ‘They think I’m you, Hank, dictating some notes. Right now you’re really at my house, reading a dull book in the library. So dull, in fact, that it’s guaranteed to put you into a light trance. When I’m safely back, Edna will come in and wake you.

  ‘She’s not as loony as she seems. The black eye is inked for her telescope, and the funny cap with lines on it, that looks like marcelled hair, that’s a weathermap. I won’t explain why she’s doing astronomy—you’ll understand in time.

  ‘On the other hand, she’s got a fixation that the stars are nothing but the shiny backs of cockroaches, treading around the heavenly spheres. It makes a kind of sense when you think of it: Periplaneta means around the world, and America being the home of the Star-Spangled Banner.

  ‘Speaking of national anthems, Mexico’s is La Cucaracha—another cockroach reference. They seem to be taking over this message!

  ‘The gang and I have been thinking about bugs a lot lately. Of course Pawlie has always thought about them, but the rest of us ...’ I missed the next part. So Pawlie was at the madhouse? And they hadn’t told me?

  ‘. . . when I started work on the famous glass pancakes. I discovered a peculiar feature of glass discs, such as those found on clock faces.

  ‘Say, you can do us a favour. I’m coming around at dawn with the gang, to show you a gadget or two. We haven’t got all the bugs out of them yet, but—will you go into Dr Grobe’s office at dawn, and check the time on his clock? But first, smash the glass on his window, will you? Thanks. I’ll compensate him for it later.

  ‘Then go outside the building, but on no account stand between the maple stump and the broken window. The best place to wait is on the little bluff to the North, where you’ll have a good view of the demonstration. We’ll meet you there.

  ‘Right now you see our ideas darkly, as through a pancake, I guess. But soon you’ll understand. You see, we’re a kind of cockroach ourselves. I mean, living on scraps of sanity. We have to speak in parables and work in silly ways b
ecause they can’t. They live in a comfortable kind of world where elephants have their feet cut off to make umbrella stands. We have to make good use of the three-legged elephants.

  ‘Don’t bother destroying this cassette. It won’t mean a thing to any right-living insect.’

  It didn’t mean much to me, not yet. Cockroaches in the stars? Clocks? There were questions I had to ask, at the rendezvous.

  There was one question I’d already asked that needed an answer. Pawlie had been messing about in her lab, when I asked her to marry me. Two years ago, was it? Or three?

  ‘But you don’t like cockroaches,’ she said.

  ‘No, and I’ll never ask a cockroach for its claw in marriage.’ I looked over her shoulder into the glass case. ‘What’s so interesting about these?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, they’re not laboratory animals. I caught them myself in the basement here at the Institute. See? Those roundish ones are the nymphs—sexless adolescents. Cute, aren’t they?’

  I had to admit they were. A little. ‘They look like the fat black exclamation points in comic strips,’ I observed.

  ‘They’re certainly healthy, all of them. I’ve never seen any like them. I—that’s funny.’ She went and fetched a book, and looked from some illustration to the specimens under glass.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Look, I’m going to be dissecting the rest of the afternoon. Meet you for dinner. Bye.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question, Pawlie.’

  ‘Bye.’

  That was the last I saw of her. Later, Dr Grobe put it about that she’d been found, hopelessly insane. Still later, George Hoad cut his throat.

  The floodlights went off, and I could see dawn greyness and mist. I took a can of beans and went for a stroll outside.

  One of the guards nodded a wary greeting. They and their cats were always jumpiest at this time of day.

  ‘Everything all right, officer?’

  ‘Yeah. Call me crazy, but I think I just heard an elephant.’

  When he and his puma were out of sight, I heaved the can of beans through Dr Grobe’s lighted window.

  ‘What the hell?’ he shouted. I slipped back to my office, waited a few minutes, then went to see him.

  A slender ray came through the broken window and struck the clock on the opposite wall. Grobe sat transfixed, staring at it with more surprise than ever. And no wonder, for the clock had become a parrot.

  ‘Relax, Oddpork,’ I said. ‘It’s only some funny kind of hologram in the clock face, worked by a laser from the lawn. You look like a comic villain, sitting there with that cigar stub in your face.’

  The cigar stub moved. Looking closer, I saw it was made up of the packed tails of a few cockroaches, trying to force themselves between his closed lips. More ran up from his spotless collar and joined them, and others made for his nostrils. One approached the queue at the mouth, found another stuck there, and had a nibble at its kicking hind leg.

  ‘Get away! Get away!’ I gave Grobe a shake to dislodge them, and his mouth fell open. A brown flood of kicking bodies tumbled out and down, over his well-cut lapels.

  I had stopped shuddering by the time I joined the others on the bluff. Pawlie and Blenheim were missing. Edna stopped scanning the horizon with her brass telescope long enough to introduce me to the pretty twins, Alice and Celia. They sat in the grass beside a tangled heap of revolvers, polishing their patent-leather tap shoes.

  The unbiquitous Rastus was wiping off his burnt cork makeup. I asked him why.

  ‘Don’t need it anymore. Last night it was my camouflage. I was out in the woods, cutting a path through the electric fence. Quite a wide path, as you’ll understand.’

  He continued removing the black until I recognized the late George Hoad.

  ‘George! But you cut your throat, remember? Mopping up blood—’

  ‘Hank, that was your blood. It was you cut your throat in the Gents, after Pawlie vanished. Remember?’

  I did, giddily. ‘What happened to you, then?’

  ‘Your suicide attempt helped me make up my mind; I quit the Institute next day. You were still in the hospital.’

  Still giddy, I turned to watch Joe Feeney operating the curious laser I’d seen in the library. Making parrots out of clocks.

  ‘I understand now,’ I said. ‘But what’s the watermelon for?’ ‘Cheap cooling device.’

  ‘And the “flag”?’ I indicated the shawl-stick arrangement.

  ‘To rally round. I stuck it in the melon because they were using the umbrella stand for—’ .

  ‘Look!’ Edna cried. ‘The attack begins!’ She handed me a second telescope.

  All I saw below was the lone figure of Blenheim in his diving suit, shuffling slowly up from the river mist to face seven guards and two pumas. He seemed to be juggling croquet balls.

  ‘Why don’t we help him?’ I shouted. ‘Don’t just sit here shining shoes and idling.’

  The twins giggled. ‘We’ve already helped some,’ said Alice, nodding at the pile of weapons. ‘We made friends with the guards.’

  I got the point when those below pulled their guns on Blenheim. As each man drew, he looked at his gun and then threw it away.

  ‘What a waste,’ Celia sighed. ‘Those guns are made from just about the best chocolate you can get.’

  Blenheim played his parlour trick on the nearest guard: one juggled ball flew high, the guard looked up, and a second ball clipped him on the upturned chin.

  Now the puma guards went into action.

  ‘I can’t look,’ I said, my eye glued to the telescope. One of the animals stopped to sniff" at a sticky revolver, but the other headed straight for his quarry. He leapt up, trying to fasten his claws into the stranger’s big brass head.

  Out of the river mist came a terrible cry, and then a terrible sight: a hobbling grey hulk that resolved into a charging elephant. Charging diagonally, so it looked even larger.

  The pumas left the scene. One fled in our direction until Alice snatched up a pistol and fired it in the air. At that sound, the guards decided to look for jobs elsewhere. After all, as Pawlie said later, you couldn’t expect a man to face a juggling diver and a mad elephant with a wooden leg, with nothing but a chocolate ‘38, not on those wages.

  Pawlie was riding on the neck of the elephant. When he came to a wobbling stop I saw that one of Jumbo’s forelegs was a section of tree with the bark still on it. And in the bark, a heart with PS + HL, carved years before.

  I felt the triumph was all over—especially since Pawlie kept nodding her head yes at me—until George said:

  ‘Come on, gang. Let’s set it up.’

  Jumbo had been pulling a wooden sledge, bearing the Paris kiosk. Now he went off to break his fast on water and grass, while the rest of us set the thing upright. Even before we had fuelled it with whatever was in the fertilizer bags, I guessed that it was a rocket.

  After some adjustments, the little door was let down, and a sweet, breakfast pancake odour came forth. Joe Feeney opened a flask of dark liquid and poured it in the entrance. The smell grew stronger.

  ‘Maple sap,’ he explained. ‘From Jumbo’s wooden leg. Mixed with honey. And there’s oatmeal inside. A farewell breakfast.’

  I looked in the little door and saw the inside of the ship was made like a metal honeycomb, plenty of climbing room for our masters.

  Pawlie came from the building with a few cockroaches in a jar, and let them taste our wares. Then, all at once, it was a sale opening at any big department store. We all stood back and let the great brown wave surge forward and break over the little rocket. Some of them, nymphs especially, scurried all the way up to the nose cone and back down again in their excitement. It all looked so jolly that I tried not to think about their previous meals.

  Edna glanced at her watch. ‘Ten minutes more,’ she said. ‘Or they’ll hit the sun.’

  I objected that we’d never get all of them loaded in ten minutes.

  ‘No,�
� said Pawlie, ‘But we’ll get the best and strongest. The shrews can keep the rest in control.’

  Edna closed the door, and the twins did a vigorous tap-dance on the unfortunate stragglers. A few minutes later, a million members of the finest organization on earth were on their way to the stars.

  ‘To join their little friends,’ said Edna.

  Pawlie and I touched hands, as Blenheim opened his faceplate.

  ‘I’ve been making this study,’ he said, ‘of spontaneous combustion in giraffes . . .’

  Planting Time

  Pete Adams and Charles Nightingale

  Randy Richmond was bored, excessively, intolerably, and what felt like eternally, bored. He was so bored, in fact, that he no longer wondered what kind of programme the hypnoconditioner had pumped into him back at Sector XI13 before he got fired off into space again. Whatever it was, it had as usual made no impression at all.

  The hypnoconditioner was supposed to alter the time-sense, to relax the intellect into a placid exploration of the more charming byways of spatial mathematics or of any other fashionable problem that currently had the planet-bound research teams stumped. As a result, you were expected to end your trip across the stars not only as fresh as if it had begun that same morning but also in an inspired state approaching the level of genius. Giant mental leaps for mankind had been predicted from this treatment, but Randy had yet to hear of a single plus-light traveller emerging from the experience with anything but ideas of the most fundamental nature, inventive as some of these were reputed to have been.

  He supposed that somebody somewhere must at last have noticed that plus-light travel seemed to act more as a physical than a mental stimulus, because the more recent Spacegoer’s Companions had begun to develop remarkably sophisticated accessories. Computers had always been essential furniture in space, of course, but the new cmp DiRAC-deriv. Mk iv Astg. multi-media computers could provide every imaginable form of entertainment and several unimaginable ones when the pilot ran out of steam. You didn’t need to ginger them up with a surreptitious screwdriver like the old models. They were a lot of fun.

  Yet even they had their limitations, and after nine months in plus-light with his current Companion, its voluptuous frame enfolding the tiny cabin like an insanely plastic eiderdown, Randy found himself sighing for a reality the computer could never provide. Headed for a particularly obscure K-class star located at the end of the galaxy’s spiral arm, he still had to face another nine months of confinement. Books, films, tapes and artworks had been exhausted of their potency, and Randy was reduced to watching the Companion’s animated reversioning of Beardsley’s ‘Under the Hill’ illustrations, one of the Classical Favourites videotapes. It was evident from the increasingly bizarre departures from the original that the computer shared the pilot’s suspicion that his passions might never rise again.