Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  “It’s very simple,” Brownson assured him, “once you understand the basic fact that we’re all basically altruists—you and I and every other human being on Earth.”

  “All altruists, eh?” the colonel repeated doubtfully.

  “Not, of course, always consciously. But each of us seems to know instinctively that he or she is also, to some extent, an irrational and therefore potentially dangerous animal. The race is developing mentally and emotionally, but it hasn’t developed as far as would be desirable as yet.”

  “That, at any rate, seems to be a fact,” the colonel conceded.

  “So there is a conflict between our altruism and our irrationality. To solve it, we—each of us—limit ourselves. We do not let our understanding and abilities develop beyond the point at which we can trust ourselves not to use them against humanity. Once you accept that, everything else is self-explanatory.”

  Now how could Brownson hope to defend such a statement, the colonel protested after an astonished pause, after taking a look at history? Or, for that matter, at some of the more outstanding public personalities in their immediate environment?

  But the assistant to the Minister of Statistics waved the objection aside.

  “Growth isn’t always a comfortable process,” he said. “Even the Hunger Years and our present social structure might be regarded as forcing factors. The men who appear primarily responsible for this stage of mankind’s development may not consciously look on themselves as altruists, but basically, as I said, that is the only standard by which we do judge our activities—and ourselves! Now, as for you—”

  “Yes?” said the colonel. “As for me?”

  “Well, you’re a rather remarkable man, Colonel Magrumssen. You certainly gave every indication of being prepared to expand your understanding to a very unusual degree—which was why,” John Brownson added, somewhat apologetically, “I first directed your attention to the possible implications of Normal Loss. Afterward, you appear to have fooled much more careful judges of human nature than I am. Though, of course,” he concluded, “you may not really have fooled them. It’s not always easy to follow their reasoning.”

  “Since you’re being so informative,” the colonel said bluntly, “I’d like to know just who and what those people are.”

  “They’re obviously people who can and do trust themselves very far,” Brownson said evasively. “A class or two above me, I’m afraid. I don’t know much about them otherwise, and I’d just as soon not. You’re a bolder man than I am, Colonel. In particular, I don’t know anything about the specific group with which you became acquainted.”

  “We didn’t stay acquainted very long.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t,” Brownson agreed, studying him curiously. “Still, it was an unusual achievement.”

  THE colonel said nothing for a moment. He was experiencing again a hot resentment and what he realized might be a rather childish degree of hurt, and also the feeling that something splendidly worthwhile had become irretrievably lost to him through a single mistake. But, for some reason, the feeling was much less disturbing now.

  “The way it seemed to me,” he said finally, “was that they were willing to accept me as an equal—whatever class they’re in—until I fired Watterly. That wasn’t it, then?”

  “No, it wasn’t. They were merely acknowledging that you had accepted yourself as being in that class, at least temporarily. That seems to be the only real requirement.”

  “If I knew instinctively that I couldn’t meet that requirement, on a completely altruistic basis,” the colonel said carefully, “why did I accept myself as being in their class even temporarily?” John Brownson glanced reluctantly at the gun on the desk. For a moment, the colonel was puzzled. Then he grinned apologetically.

  “Well, yes, that might explain it,” he admitted. “I believe I’ve had it in mind for some time.

  Life had begun to look pretty uninteresting.” He poked frowningly at the gun. “So it was just a matter of satisfying my curiosity—first?”

  “I wouldn’t know what your exact motive was,” Brownson said cautiously. “But I presume it went beyond simple curiosity.”

  “Well, supposing now,” said the colonel, tapping the gun, “that on considering what you’ve told me, I decided to change my mind.”

  Brownson smiled. “If you change your decision, you’ll do it for good and sufficient reasons. I’d be very happy—and, incidentally, there’s no need to blame yourself for Watterly. Watterly knew he couldn’t trust himself in any position above Civilian General Duty. If you hadn’t had him sent back there, he would have found someone else to do it. Selfjudgment works at all levels.”

  “I wasn’t worrying much about Watterly,” the colonel said. He reflected a moment. “What actually induced you to come here to talk to me?”

  “Well,” said Brownson carefully, “there was one who expressed an opinion about you so strongly that it couldn’t be ignored. I was sent to make sure you had the fullest possible understanding of what you were doing.”

  The colonel stared. “Who expressed an opinion about me?”

  “Your Miss Eaton.”

  “MISS Eaton?” The colonel almost laughed. For a moment, he’d had a wild, irrational hope that Four had showed concern about him. But Four hardly would have been obliged to go to John Brownson for help.

  “Miss Eaton,” Brownson smiled wryly, “has a wider range of understanding than most, but not enough courage to do anything about what she knows. The bravest thing she ever did was to speak to you as she did tonight. After that, she didn’t know what else to do, so—well, she prayed. At any rate, it seemed to be a prayer to her.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes, for you.”

  “Think of that!” said the colonel, astonished. “That was why you came?”

  “That’s it.”

  The colonel thought about Miss Eaton for a moment, and then of what a completely fascinating, interesting world it was—if one could only become really aware of it. It seemed unreasonable that people should be going through life in blind, uneasy dissatisfaction, never quite realizing what was going on around and behind them . . .

  Of course, a good percentage of them might drop dead in sheer fright if they ever got a sudden inkling of what was there. For one thing, quiet power enough to extinguish nine-tenths of the human life on Earth between one second and the next.

  And the thought of that power and various perhaps not too rational manipulations of it, he reflected truthfully, might have been the really fascinating part of it all to him.

  “Well, thank you, Brownson,” he said.

  There was no answer.

  WHEN the colonel looked up, the chair on the other side of the desk was empty. Brownson seemed to have realized that he’d done the best he could. The others, being wiser, would have known all along there was nothing to be done. His self-judgment stood.

  “Damn saints!” the colonel said, grinning. The trouble was that he still liked them.

  Trying not to think of Four again, he picked up the gun and then a final thought came to him. He laid it down long enough to write neatly and clearly behind REASONS GIVEN on the resignation form: IF IT WERE A SNAKE, IT WOULD BITE YOU!

  A slim hand moved the gun away and a light voice laughed at the inscrutable message he had written. Then his own hand was taken and he smiled back at Four, while the room stayed substantial and he did not.

  It was remarkable how easily and completely one could retreat from the world, clear to the point of invisibility. There had always been people like that, people who could lose themselves in a crowd or be totally unnoticeable at a party. They just hadn’t carried their self-effacement far enough. Probably the pressure of reality hadn’t been as savage as it was now, to compel both extremes of assertion and withdrawal.

  Normal Loss would rise an infinitesimal amount, the colonel thought with amusement—he’d have to live, too. The world wouldn’t know why, of course.

  The devil with
this world. He had his own to go to, and a woman of his own to go with.

  “You didn’t really think I was going to kill myself, did you?” he asked Four, feeling the need to make her understand and respect him. “It was only a trick to get your attention.”

  “As if you had to,” she laughed tenderly.

  1953

  WE DON’T WANY ANY TROUBLE

  What chance can you possibly have of whipping an enemy who insists on joining your side?

  “WELL, that wasn’t a very long interview, was it?” asked the professor’s wife. She’d discovered the professor looking out of the living room window when she’d come home from shopping just now. “I wasn’t counting on having dinner before nine,” she said, setting her bundles down on the couch. “I’ll get at it right away.”

  “No hurry about dinner,” the professor replied without turning his head. “I didn’t expect we’d be through there before eight myself.”

  He had clasped his hands on his back and was swaying slowly, backward and forward on his feet, staring out at the street. It was a favorite pose of his, and she never had discovered whether it indicated deep thought or just daydreaming. At the moment, she suspected uncomfortably it was very deep thought, indeed. She took off her hat.

  “I suppose you could call it an interview,” she said uneasily. “I mean you actually talked with it, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, we talked with it,” he nodded. “Some of the others did, anyway.”

  “Imagine talking with something like that! It really is from another world, Clive?” She laughed uneasily, watching the back of his head with frightened eyes. “But, of course, you can’t violate the security rules, can you? You can’t tell me anything about it at all . . .”

  HE shrugged, turning around.

  “There’ll be a newscast at six o’clock. In ten minutes. Wherever there’s a radio or television set on Earth, everybody will hear what we found out in that interview. Perhaps not quite everything, but almost everything.”

  “Oh?” she said in a surprised, small voice. She looked at him in silence for a moment, her eyes growing more frightened. “Why would they do a thing like that?”

  “Well,” said the professor, “it seemed like the right thing to do. The best thing, at any rate. There may be some panic, of course.” He turned back to the window and gazed out on the street, as if something there were holding his attention. He looked thoughtful and abstracted, she decided. But then a better word came to her, and it was “resigned.”

  “Clive,” she said, almost desperately, “what happened?”

  He frowned absently at her and walked to the radio. It began to make faint, humming noises as the professor adjusted dials unhurriedly. The humming didn’t vary much.

  “They’ve cleared the networks, I imagine,” he remarked.

  The sentence went on repeating itself in his wife’s mind, with no particular significance at first. But then a meaning came into it and grew and swelled swiftly, until she felt her head would burst with it. They’ve cleared the networks. All over the world this evening, they’ve cleared the networks. Until the newscast comes on at six o’clock . . .

  “As to what happened,” she heard her husband’s voice saying, “that’s a little difficult to understand or explain. Even now. It was certainly amazing—” He interrupted himself. “Do you remember Milt Caldwell, dear?”

  “Milt Caldwell?” She searched her mind blankly. “No,” she said, shaking her head.

  “A rather well-known anthropologist,” the professor informed her, with an air of faint reproach. “Milt got himself lost in the approximate center of the Australian deserts some two years ago. Only we have been told he didn’t get lost. They picked him up—”

  “They?” she said. “You mean there’s more than one?”

  “Well, there would be more than one, wouldn’t there?” he asked reasonably. “That explains, at any rate, how they learned to speak English. It made it seem a little more reasonable, anyhow,” he added, “when it told us that. Seven minutes to six . . .”

  “What?” she said faintly.

  “Seven minutes to six,” the professor repeated. “Sit down, dear. I believe I can tell you, in seven minutes, approximately what occurred . . .”

  THE Visitor from Outside sat in its cage, its large gray hands slackly clasping the bars. Its attitudes and motions, the professor had noted in the two minutes since he had entered the room with the other men, approximated those of a rather heavily built ape. Reporters had called it “the Toad from Mars,” on the basis of the first descriptions they’d had of it—the flabby shape and loose, warty skin made that a vaguely adequate identification. The round, horny head almost could have been that of a lizard.

  With a zoologist’s fascination in a completely new genus, the professor catalogued these contradicting physical details in his mind. Yet something somewhat like this might have been evolved on Earth, if Earth had chosen to let the big amphibians of its Carboniferous Period go on evolving.

  That this creature used human speech was the only almost-impossible feature.

  It had spoken as they came in. “What do you wish to know?” it asked. The horny, toothed jaws moved, and a broad yellow tongue became momentarily visible, forming the words. It was a throaty, deliberate “human” voice.

  For a period of several seconds, the human beings seemed to be shocked into silence by it, though they had known the creature had this ability. Hesitantly, then the questioning began.

  The professor remained near the back of the room, watching. For a while, the questions and replies he heard seemed to carry no meaning to him. Abruptly he realized that his thoughts were fogged over with a heavy, cold, physical dread of this alien animal. He told himself that under such circumstances fear was not an entirely irrational emotion, and his understanding of it seemed to lighten its effects a little.

  But the scene remained unreal to him, like a badly lit stage on which the creature in its glittering steel cage stood out in sharp focus, while the humans were shadow-shapes stirring restlessly against a darkened background.

  “This won’t do!” he addressed himself, almost querulously, through the fear. “I’m here to observe, to conclude, to report—I was selected as a man they could trust to think and act rationally!”

  He turned his attention deliberately away from the cage and what it contained, and directed it on the other human beings, to most of whom he had been introduced only a few minutes before. A young, alert-looking Intelligence major who was in some way in charge of this investigation; a sleepy-eyed general; a very pretty Wac captain acting as stenographer, whom the major had introduced as his fiancee. The handful of other scientists looked for the most part like brisk business executives, while the two Important Personages representing the Government looked like elderly professors.

  He almost smiled. They were real enough. This was a human world. He returned his attention again to the solitary intruder in it.

  “WHY shouldn’t I object?” W the impossible voice was saying with a note of lazy good-humor. “You’ve caged me like—a wild animal! And you haven’t even informed me of the nature of the charges against me. Trespassing, perhaps—eh?”

  The wide mouth seemed to grin as the thing turned its head, looking them over one by one with bright black eyes. The grin was meaningless; it was the way the lipless jaws set when the mouth was closed. But it gave expression to the pleased malice the professor sensed in the voice and words.

  The voice simply did not go with that squat animal shape.

  Fear surged up in him again. He found himself shaking.

  If it looks at me now, he realized in sudden panic, I might start to scream!

  One of the men nearest the cage was saying something in low, even tones. The Wac captain flipped over a page of her shorthand pad and went on writing, her blonde head tilted to one side. She was a little pale, but intent on her work. He had a moment of bitter envy for their courage and self-control. But they’re insensitive, he
tried to tell himself; they don’t know Nature and the laws of Nature. They can’t feel as I do how wrong all this is!

  Then the black eyes swung around and looked at him.

  Instantly, his mind stretched taut with blank, wordless terror. He did not move, but afterward he knew he did not faint only because he would have looked ridiculous before the others, and particularly in the presence of a young woman. He heard the young Intelligence officer speaking sharply; the eyes left him unhurriedly, and it was all over.

  “YOU indicate,” the creature’s voice was addressing the major, “that you can force me to reveal matters I do not choose to reveal at this time. However, you are mistaken. For one thing, a body of this type does not react to any of your drugs.”

  “It will react to pain!” the major said, his voice thin and angry.

  Amazed by the words, the professor realized for the first time that he was not the only one in whom this being’s presence had aroused primitive, irrational fears. The other men had stirred restlessly at the major’s threat, but they made no protest.

  The thing remained silent for a moment, looking at the major.

  “This body will react to pain,” it said then, “only when I choose to let it feel pain. Some you here know the effectiveness of hypnotic blocks against pain. My methods are not those of hypnosis, but they are considerably more effective. I repeat, then, that for me there is no pain, unless I choose to experience it.”

  “Do you choose to experience the destruction of your body’s tissues?” the major inquired, a little shrilly.

  The Wac captain looked up at him quickly from the chair where she sat, but the professor could not see her expression. Nobody else moved.

  The thing, still staring at the major, almost shrugged.

  “And do you choose to experience death?” the major cried, his face flushed with excitement.

  In a flash of insight, the professor understood why no one was interfering. Each in his own way, they had felt what he was feeling: that here was something so outrageously strange and new that no amount of experience, no rank, could guide a human being in determining how to deal with it. The major was dealing with it—in however awkward a fashion. With no other solution to offer, they were, for the moment, unable or unwilling to stop him.