A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “Sometimes it takes people years before they realize what you’re finding out,” Burkhalter remarked. “Years of living and working with something they think of as a Baldy.”

  “Do you know what I’ve been concealing in my mind?” Quayle asked.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “You lie like a gentleman. Thanks. Well, here it is, and I’m telling you by choice, because I want to. I don’t care if you got the information out of my mind already; I just want to tell you of my own free will. My father . . . I imagine I hated him . . . was a tyrant, and I remember one time, when I was just a kid and we were in the mountains, he beat me and a lot of people were looking on. I’ve tried to forget that for a long time.

  “Now”—Quayle shrugged—“it doesn’t seem quite so important.”

  “I’m not a psychologist,” Burkhalter said. “If you want my personal reaction, I’ll just say that it doesn’t matter. You’re not a little boy any more, and the guy I’m talking to and working with is the adult Quayle.”

  “Hm-m-m. Ye-es. I suppose I knew that all along—how unimportant it was, really. It was simply having my privacy violated . . . I think I know you better now, Burkhalter. You can—walk in.”

  “We’ll work better,” Burkhalter said, grinning. “Especially with Darius.”

  Quayle said, “I’ll try not to keep any reservation in my mind. Frankly, I won’t mind telling you—the answers. Even when they’re personal.”

  “Check on that. D’you want to tackle Darius now?”

  “O.K.,” Quayle said, and his eyes no longer held suspicious wariness. “Darius I identify with my father—”

  It was smooth and successful. That afternoon they accomplished more than they had during the entire previous fortnight. Warm with satisfaction on more than one point, Burkhalter stopped off to tell Dr. Moon that matters were looking up, and then set out toward home, exchanging thoughts with a couple of Baldies, his co-workers, who were knocking off for the day. The Rockies were bloody with the western light, and the coolness of the wind was pleasant on Burkhalter’s cheeks, as he hiked homeward.

  It was fine to be accepted. It proved that it could be done. And a Baldy often needed reassurance, in a world peopled by suspicious strangers. Quayle had been a hard nut to crack, but—Burkhalter smiled.

  Ethel would be pleased. In a way, she’d had a harder time than he’d ever had. A woman would, naturally. Men were desperately anxious to keep their privacy unviolated by a woman, and as for non-Baldy women—well, it spoke highly for Ethel’s glowing personal charm that she had finally been accepted by the clubs and feminine groups of Modoc. Only Burkhalter knew Ethel’s desperate hurt at being bald, and not even her husband had ever seen her unwigged.

  His thought reached out before him into the low, double-winged house on the hillside, and interlocked with hers in a warm intimacy. It was something more than a kiss. And, as always, there was the exciting sense of expectancy, mounting and mounting till the last door swung open and they touched physically. This, he thought, is why I was born a Baldy; this is worth losing worlds for.

  At dinner that rapport spread out to embrace Al, an intangible, deeply-rooted something that made the food taste better and the water like wine. The word home, to telepaths, had a meaning that non-Baldies could not entirely comprehend, for it embraced a bond they could not know, There were small, intangible caresses.

  Green Man going down the Great Red Slide; the Shaggy Dwarfs trying to harpoon him as he goes.

  “Al,” Ethel said, “are you still working on your Green Man?”

  Then something utterly hateful and cold and deadly quivered silently in the air, like an icicle jaggedly smashing through golden, fragile glass. Burkhalter dropped his napkin and looked up, profoundly shocked. He felt Ethel’s thought shrink back, and swiftly reached out to touch and reassure her with mental contact. But across the table the little boy, his cheeks still round with the fat of babyhood, sat silent and wary, realizing he had blundered, and seeking safety in complete immobility. His mind was too weak to resist probing, he knew, and he remained perfectly still, waiting, while the echoes of a thought hung poisonously in silence.

  Burkhalter said. “Come on. Al.” He stood up. Ethel started to speak.

  “Wait, darling. Put up a barrier. Don’t listen in.” He touched her mind gently and tenderly, and then he took Al’s hand and drew the boy after him out into the yard. Al watched his father out of wide, alert eyes.

  Burkhalter sat on a bench and put Al beside him. He talked audibly at first, for clarity’s sake, and for another reason. It was distinctly unpleasant to trick the boy’s feeble guards down, but it was necessary.

  “That’s a very queer way to think of your mother,” he said. “It’s a queer way to think of me.” Obscenity is more obscene, profanity more profane, to a telepathic mind, but this had been neither one. It had been—cold and malignant.

  And this is flesh of my flesh, Burkhalter thought, looking at the boy and remembering the eight years of his growth. Is the mutation to turn into something devilish?

  Al was silent.

  Burkhalter reached into the young mind. Al tried to twist free and escape, but his father’s strong hands gripped him. Instinct, not reasoning, on the boy’s part, for minds can touch over long distances.

  He did not like to do this, for increased sensibility had gone with sensitivity, and violations are always violations. But ruthlessness was required. Burkhalter searched. Sometimes he threw key words violently at Al, and surges of memory pulsed up in response.

  In the end, sick and nauseated, Burkhalter let Al go and sat alone on the bench, watching the red light the on the snowy peaks. The whiteness was red-stained. But it was not too late. The man was a fool, had been a fool from the beginning, or he would have known the impossibility of attempting such a thing as this.

  The conditioning had only begun. Al could be reconditioned. Burkhalter’s eyes hardened. And would be. And would be. But not yet, not until the immediate furious anger had given place to sympathy and understanding.

  Not yet.

  He went into the house, spoke briefly to Ethel, and televised the dozen Baldies who worked with him in the Publishing Center. Not all of them had families, but none was missing when, half an hour later, they met in the back room of the Pagan Tavern downtown. Sam Shane had caught a fragment of Burkhalter’s knowledge, and all of them read his emotions. Welded into a sympathetic unit by their telepathic sense, they waited till Burkhalter was ready.

  Then he told them. It didn’t take long, via thought. He told them about the Japanese jewel-tree with its glittering gadgets, a shining lure. He told them of racial paranoia and propaganda. And that the most effective propaganda was sugar-coated, disguised so that the motive was hidden.

  A Green Man, hairless, heroic—symbolic of a Baldy.

  And wild, exciting adventures, the lure to catch the young fish whose plastic minds were impressionable enough to be led along the roads of dangerous madness. Adult Baldies could listen, but they did not; young telepaths had a higher threshold of mental receptivity, and adults do not read the books of their children except to reassure themselves that there is nothing harmful in the pages. And no adult would bother to listen to the Green Man mindcast. Most of them had accepted it as the original daydream of their own children.

  “I did,” Shane put in. “My girls—”

  “Trace it back,” Burkhalter said. “I did.”

  The dozen minds reached out on the higher frequency, the children’s wavelength, and something jerked away front them, startled and apprehensive.

  “He’s the one,” Shane nodded.

  They did not need to speak. They went out of the Pagan Tavern in a compact, ominous group, and crossed the street to the general store. The door was locked. Two of the men burst it open with their shoulders.

  They went through the dark store and into a back room where a man was standing beside an overturned chair. His bald skull gleamed in an overhead light. His mouth wo
rked impotently.

  His thought pleaded with them—was driven back by an implacable deadly wall.

  Burkhalter took out his dagger. Other slivers of steel glittered for a little while—

  And were quenched.

  Venning’s scream had long since stopped, but his dying thought of agony lingered within Burkhalter’s mind as he walked homeward. The wigless Baldy had not been insane, no. But he had been paranoidal.

  What he had tried to conceal, at the last, was quite shocking. A tremendous, tyrannical egotism, and a furious hatred of nontelepaths. A feeling of self-justification that was, perhaps, insane. And—we are the future! The Baldies! God made us to rule lesser men!

  Burkhalter sucked in his breath, shivering. The mutation had not been entirely successful. One group had adjusted, the Baldies who wore wigs and had become fitted to their environment. One group had been insane, and could be discounted; they were in asylums.

  But the middle group were merely paranoid. They were not insane, and they were not sane. They wore no wigs.

  Like Venning.

  And Venning had sought disciples. His attempt had been foredoomed to failure, but he had been one man.

  One Baldy—paranoid.

  There were others, many others.

  Ahead, nestled into the dark hillside, was the pale blotch that marked Burkhalter’s home. He sent his thought ahead, and it touched Ethel’s and paused very briefly to reassure her.

  Then it thrust on, and went into the sleeping mind of a little boy who, confused and miserable, had finally cried himself to sleep. There were only dreams in that mind now, a little discolored, a little stained, but they could be cleansed. And would be.

  THE END.

  STOP, THIEF!

  Fox B. Holden

  From a distant galaxy comes Crown Prince Fuj, seeking new worlds to conquer—and finds something more than he bargained for!

  AS SOON as I finish this my typewriter goes in the garage with the car and they can keep each other company for the duration. I think that reasons for such drastic action are rather evident from the photo. Do I look too much like Frankenstein?

  But to begin as far back as I dare—and am I glad I never kept a diary!—let me just say that I have lead a relatively normal, confused, chaotic, Holden-like life.

  I began fiction-writing a year ago when I was a sophomore in Middlebury College. I think Fuj was a freshman that year—I’ll never forget when he was my room-mate, though perhaps Fuj wasn’t his real name. Yes, all names and events in STOP, THIEF! are fictitious.

  This year my stuff began to bear a little fruit. But the Army hasn’t given the groove I’m in a chance to turn into my usual rut. That’s another good thing about Uncle Sam.

  But aside from being under the few minor restrictions of a buck-private, I’m as free as the wind. As free as I want to be, anyway, because I have a sweetheart—I hope. At least I’ve been trying to persuade her of that for a long time.

  I like to write this kind of material more than any other type of fiction, you know, because I like the THRILLING WONDER of it all. I was never good at science, or at straight fiction. So I combined them.

  In my twenty years of life—beard tangled with the platin again—I have also done other things, but this is a thumb-nail autobiography, not a confession. Yet I will admit having two small sisters, for as far as my writing and plotting goes, credit belongs where credit is due. I always told the folks that another year in kindergarten would have done me lots of good.

  That’s all I have time to write now. This soldier has to be on hand just in case Crown Prince Fuj got lost. —FOX B. HOLDEN

  NOTHING, probably, would have happened at all if it hadn’t been that I was angry at Professor Sanders. He said something in class that I just didn’t agree with, and so I decided not to go home for Christmas vacation, but to stay at the University and do some research to disprove the old buzzard. He said that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

  Sheer nonsense.

  I made Sanders admit that there are more ways than one to write music, to paint, and, in general, to do almost anything. But he wouldn’t admit that there were other ways of doing geometry beside the Euclidean method. Not that I am a non-conformist. I just don’t like a one-track mind.

  It was just after the third day of pretty fruitless book-worming when I met the Little fellow. I wasn’t, frankly, in any mood to meet or notice anybody, but you just don’t calmly pass up something that looks like a run-away from a side-show. Anybody’d stare. I stared.

  Cute little man. About four and a half feet tall with a funny, wrinkled face, a nose that would have turned Cyrano de Bergerac green, and feet that served him just as well as snow-shoes. Checkered-silk shirt. Khaki shorts. High-button shoes. No overcoat.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Ah—hello! I, er—I’m sorry.”

  “Can I help it if I haven’t had a chance to get any clothes like you’re wearing? Stop staring and come here a minute!”

  I walked over to him. Cautiously.

  “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “My name’s Fuj. Crown Prince Fuj is all. Just came from Krolix. What I want—”

  “From where?”

  “Krolix. That’s the name of the solar system where I live. Further than that I won’t tell. It’s a royal secret.”

  “Oh.” I began computing the reward the State Insane Asylum offered for the return of one of these. I wondered if I would get a bonus or anything. Then I wondered how much resistance he’d be able to put up. “How did you get here?”

  “Warped.”

  “You’re not kiddin’, chum.”

  “I had a confederate—in camera, you understand—at the controls of the master-machine on my planet. I was—well, projected, you might say.”

  MY LIPS formed another round O.

  “I know you distrust me. You even think I’m speaking your language. I’m using telepathy, of course. That’s how I know you not only distrust me, but you’re all confused. What’s more, if you’ll help me, I’ll help you. A deal?”

  I hate wise-guys. A lunatic or not, I decided to call his bluff. “All right, I do distrust you. But if you’re so good, tell me what I’m confused about. Go on—go ahead.”

  “You are completely baffled about the simplest concept in geometry—the straight line. You’re really quite stupid. Anybody knows that the shortest distance between two points is a warped line.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. And now, I’d like you to get me into the Physics lab.”

  “I suppose I should humor you, Fudgy, but the place is locked up during vacation. So hadn’t you better just come with me? Some place where we can talk.”

  “You know where you can get a key. Don’t lie.”

  It was about then that I began to wonder about my own mental well-being. How did he know what I was mixed up about? How did he know that I could get a key from the head-janitor? And as a matter of fact, why didn’t his mouth move when he talked?

  Mother always told me I was too impulsive. The next thing I knew, this nutty little apparition was slogging along beside me in the snow toward the gymnasium where the head-janitor usually pottered around while earning his money. Then to the Physics lab. Don’t ask me why I did it. I don’t know.

  “Now, what and who ARE you, and what nut-house do you come from?” I said as I locked the door of the big laboratory after us. “This, little chum, has gone far enough. I am in a bad mood to-day.”

  The Little fellow straightened up to his full four feet seven, and almost murdered me with a look.

  “I suppose you think I’m in a good mood! I’m almost bankrupt. In case you didn’t know, Krolix is run on a plan of government known as Autocratic Plutocracy. Everybody with money is an absolute ruler, and the person with most money rules everybody. That’s why I’m here.”

  He didn’t explain further—just worked like the devil for the next few minutes. I watched Fuj as he took a bunch of gad
gets from a large hip-pocket. He started hooking them together with fine wire. One was a translucent cone about five inches high made of some sort of plastic, I think, and he was hitching it between two long, upright rods that were about two feet tall. They were the telescoping variety. Next there was a small control-board that resembled an expensive radio console when he was through assembling it, and finally a bunch of things I can’t describe. I can’t describe them because they—they—faded!

  “How—uh, rich are you?” I asked finally.

  “Was I, you mean. You see, wealth, in Krolix, is real estate. The more planets you own the wealthier you are. Before the crash a century ago I was doing great. But I invested too many planets—bum tip-off—and you know how those things go. All I had left when the Exchange got through with me were about three good-sized worlds and a bunch of barren rocks.”

  “Oh,” I exclaimed. He looked as though he had almost finished the assembly. He messed around with all the instruments he could find in the lab, and finally looked satisfied.

  “This is going to work fine,” he said.

  “That’s good. All I want to know is what this has to do with your poverty.”

  “Well, I don’t think I should trust you. If it weren’t such a clever idea, I wouldn’t, but I’ve got to tell it to somebody. You see, I need at least one more good-sized, young planet to get back on my feet again. So I’m going to take this one.”

  “What?”

  “Sure. I’m going to warp it into Krolix. As I told you, the shortest distance between two points is a warped line.”

  “Thank the stars it isn’t straight!”

  “A dimensionally warped line has a distance, or length, of zero.”

  “Zero what?”

  “Just zero. Zero anything. When you travel the line it takes zero.”

  “Zero time?”

  “I guess so. Isn’t it a brilliant idea? Now my portable machine is all set up, so here goes.”

  REACHING out, I grabbed him by the arm and held on with all my might. “HOLD IT! You’ll throw this entire Solar System into chaos. You’ll upset the whole business, you little idiot.” I knew it was stupid even to surmise that he knew what he was talking about, but when a guy points a gun in your face you don’t stop to consider whether it’s a toy or not. You suddenly get very pessimistic on general principles.