She smiled but didn’t answer. I dropped deeper into my mental state to spare her further embarrassment, and thought about her. From the corner of my eye I noted the bewitching breasts jutting up through her dress, the lean ripeness of her body and its more apparent compliment, the lovely face.
No wonder her husband was madly in love with her, no wonder he desired to possess that body, and no wonder he nearly went mad when that beautiful wife disappeared from him, “blanked-out” her loveliness.
Blanked-out!
I sat up, stunned. What a sucker I had been!
Marie Jackson, a Brigham agent—like hell! She knew no more about Brigham than I did, had no other memory of him than my own. Of course she didn’t, she knew no more of him than she had read in my own mind. From the time I had dropped my barrier in that alley and let Brigham’s name slip through she had been using my own thoughts to deceive me! Had even tried to make me forget the one startling, paramount difference between us: she could vanish at will! I could not.
I had been right the first time. Marie was an alien.
"Jehosophat!” I said suddenly, pulling away from her. “Your husband!”
"Where?” She jumped.
"Not here— I didn’t mean that,” I said hastily, "but I forgot to call him back. I’m supposed to report on you, and we certainly don’t want him to come walking in here. I’ll call now.”
“Must you, now!” she asked softly with words, and sending along with them a suggestive undertone of thought.
“I don’t want to, believe me. I want to stay right here with you until hell freezes over.” I carefully hid the lie and forced myself to return an intimate thought. "The sooner we get him out of the way, the sooner you and I—” and I let the suggestion hang there.
She smiled lazily. I got out of the booth and signalled the waiter for another round of drinks. She said, "Please don’t be too long.”
"Count on me,” I replied. I looked again at her striking features and once more envied Arthur Jackson in his ignorance.
She winked and I walked over to the telephone booths. As soon as I was out of her line of sight I closed off from her my flow of thought and got the devil out of there, out the back way and down the street as fast as my feet would carry me. People stared at me as I ran. Marie was deadly. I wanted to get as much distance between us as was possible.
I ran until I found an empty cab and jumped in. "Get moving fast!” I snapped at the driver. I gave him the address of Arthur Jackson’s home, hoping the man had given up the street search for us and returned there.
Marie Jackson—the thing I had been set to catch, had very neatly caught me.
I wanted to warn Jackson first because his danger was immediate, and because I did owe him a certain loyalty ... he was a human being. And when I reported to Brigham I would not tell him how I had been taken in, would not tell him she had pretended to be another searcher like myself, that she had hoodwinked me with a feigned fright and pretended fear of me. She had lied to me, tricked me with word and thought, cleverly followed my conversational line on my search with insertions of her own which sounded as if she, too, had known Brigham. I didn’t want him to know I had fallen flat on my face.
By using some sort of tremendous mental power which an earthborn telepath—myself—did not have and could not guess at, she had vanished from sight. She was from the outside, from up there where humans hoped to be someday.
The cab pulled up in front of Arthur Jackson’s house. The lighted windows in one of the rooms told me where he was.
I dashed across the lawn and stopped in mid-flight, astonished. That which came spilling across the wide yard with the light told me something else. Marie was ahead of me.
“You want to kill me!” came the mental image of his accusation.
“You are a fool,” she snapped. “This job is ended.”
I hastily circled the house, searching the windows, and found a set of screened kitchen-windows open to the night. I crawled up through one of them, and lowered myself to the kitchen floor without a sound, and started quietly through the darkness of the house toward the lighted room. My mind caught a sense of urgency from Marie. I paused, sought out ahead of me and found she was working on a metallic object. She was not expecting me yet.
Her husband was frightened, and confused as to her presence and her purposes, and in his ignorant fear he was babbling furiously without pausing to organize his words. I listened to them for only a second and turned my attention back to his wife. Marie was extremely busy on something and I could pick up only bits of her concentrated thought. She was hurriedly attempting to take a fix upon some object which had moved, or to arrange a fix upon it. The fragments of concentration were very vague.
I crept closer to the lighted doorway, moved along until Arthur Jackson came into view. He was seated in a chair, held there by invisible bonds, staring at her and talking. I listened to him again.
“... kill me, you found out what you wanted to know and you’re going to kill me, you found out about the project and you’re going to radio your friends, you’re a spy but don’t think I haven’t been wise to you because I have, and I hired a man to follow you, so if you kill me now....”
He went on and on but I had lost interest in what he was saying. He had said radio. Radio—the machine in the suitcase, which earlier that day I had glimpsed in his mind, the thing on which his wife was now working. Marie Jackson was setting up a fix to find a position which had moved, and her husband thought it was a radio.
I remembered his earlier words, his telling me that he discovered her reading a schematic. I knew then what she was doing, what she was working on. With that key to her vague mental pattern, I could assemble the spillage that came my way and see what she was doing.
He thought it was a radio, thought she was using it to relay information on the hydrogen bomb back to her countrymen in Europe. He was only partly right. Marie Jackson was setting up a fix on her home planet, a body which had moved in space since she last used the instrument. The machine was the only kind of a communicator which was capable of piercing the Heaviside Layer, a combination telepathic-electronic transmitter which broadcasted on a tight beam to a fixed position. It was a transmitter which employed an electrically stepped-up mental force to hurl a message across space to another planet.
She suddenly ceased working. I froze against the wall, waiting to see if she had discovered me but no thought from her indicated that. Instead she put out a feeler toward the street, splayed the mental search beam over a wide area seeking my presence. Satisfied that I had not yet approached the house, she dropped it.
The work on the transmitter was finished. Jackson was still babbling.
In a flaring instant of anger she silenced him, hurled a mental force which paralyzed his tongue, and the man fell dumb, choking. I carefully followed that, and noticed that she had also paralyzed his legs. That was why he had never left the chair since I had come into the house. Marie walked around a table nearer to him.
“Arthur,” she said aloud, slowly, so that he would understand, “you’re a fool! The man you hired to follow me is a fool!”
I remained motionless in the darkness, against the wall. I listened to her words with my ears, but my mind was reaching out to that instrument, examining it, studying the manner of its operation, looking for the inlet which received the mental thought and amplified it.
"I have little choice in the matter,” she was saying. “If I allow you to continue your work on that unit you call a ‘hydrogen bomb’ I will be hastening the death of my own world. You do not know it but your military forces are as far advanced on space rockets as you are on this ‘bomb’ unit. Do you see what that means?
“Do you see what little choice I have? Arthur Jackson, we cannot allow your race to get off this planet for you are much too dangerous, too deadly! You are not yet fit to leave your planet for you would only spread your blackness to mine, to the other worlds. And so you must stay here until your race has c
onquered its own murderous habits.
“I am sorry, Arthur Jackson, but you must die, and any other man who follows in your place must die—until the time comes when your race can be trusted. The only other alternative is to eliminate this planet completely—to bring about an accident in your experimental laboratories, to cause this ‘hydrogen bomb’ weapon to turn upon its makers. Surely you do not want that, nor do we. But your work must be stopped, and to stop that it is necessary to stop you—”
She stopped then in mid-sentence and whirled in alarm. Behind her the transmitter had flared into life.
In two short seconds it was over and she was too late. I had found the input channel, found the way to activate the mechanism. It was that which had caused her alarm. As she whirled to stare at it, I stepped through the doorway.
Using her own words, coldly, without emotion, I thought into the transmitter: “The job is ended.”
The lost two seconds were her undoing. Once before on that evening she had betrayed a fatal weakness, revealed her inability to make split-second decisions and act on them. Marie had spent too many years on Earth and had grown careless of her training. She made the second mistake I knew she would make.
She started for the machine instead of hurling a contradictory thought into it, instead of jamming the transmission of my message by forcing one of her own. I dived for the table where the transmitter lay.
She reached it first, bent over it, and I chopped my hand down on the back of her neck.
I swear to God I didn’t know that would kill her.
It wouldn’t have killed a human—there was not that much force behind it. I had forgotten—or perhaps the fact never so much as occurred to me—that she wasn’t human.
Marie Jackson was dead, and in her death she was changed. The mental image she had built around herself to walk Earth unnoticed was fading as fast as her mind died. The guise of a woman she had long ago assumed was slipping away and I did not like what was left. I stepped over the body, turned to her husband in the chair.
Arthur Jackson was dead, strangled to death on his own paralyzed tongue. I stood there a moment looking at him, wondering if he had lived long enough to see what his “wife” really looked like.
And then I walked out of the room, into the little entrance hall which contained a telephone. Standing there in the semi-darkness, I dialed the Western Union number.
“I want to send a night letter,” I said to the clerk, and gave him Brigham’s name and the post box number in Washington.
“And the message, sir?”
“Just say: the job is ended.”
The End
*************************************
The Tourist Trade,
by Wilson Tucker
Worlds Beyond Jan. 1951 {as by "Bob Tucker"}
Short Story - 3390 words
There were four of them, Judy told her parents—
no, five, counting the woman stuck in the wall. . . .
Judy had climbed to her place at the breakfast table that morning and announced the presence of a ghost in her room the previous night, a good-looking man ghost who had courteously asked if she were having a nice time.
And Judy's mother, being a sensible, sane American citizen, said nonsense, child, there is no such thing as a ghost.
"Well, then," Judy demanded, "who was the man in my bedroom last night, huh?"
Mother looked up from the toast, startled.
"A man, baby?"
"Yes, Mama. A good-looking man, gooder-looking even than Daddy, and he had on a brown uniform-like, only it wasn't a soldier's uniform of course but just a uniform."
"A man—with a uniform?"
"Yes, Mama. A nice man, you know."
"No," Mama contradicted, "I don't know. Are you sure you saw a man in your room last night?"
"Sure, Mama. He was a ghost, a man ghost."
"Oh, Judy! Those ghosts again. I've asked you time and again to stop that! There is no such thing as a ghost."
"Well, maybe not, Mama, but this man come riding in right through my wall on a sort of motor scooter, and he stood up and made a speech like that man said at the museum, and he asked me if I was having a nice time."
"All that? Judy!"
"Yes, Mama. And I told him yes and he said, That's nice, and he sat down again and rode the scooter right across my room and went right through my other wall."
"Judy, stop it! You were dreaming."
"Yes, Mama. The motor scooter didn't make any noise, though, and he had a uniform on."
"All right, baby. Forget it, darling."
Judy didn't forget it; she filed the matter away in whatever storage cabinet children have for accumulating knowledge and experiences temporarily unclassifiable. She filed the matter away, somewhat, until that evening and a new bedtime. Scarcely fifteen minutes after climbing the stairs to bed, she was back down again.
Daddy was hunched in a chair reading a whodunit, fighting off the interfering noise of the radio. Mama was listening to the radio and haphazardly working on a jigsaw puzzle. Judy paused in the doorway of the living room, her pajamas still unmussed, a robe trailing in one hand.
"Now what do you want, baby? You should have been asleep ten minutes ago."
"That man ghost is back again."
"Now, Judy! Don't start that again."
"Well, Mama, he is, and on top of that he's got some people with him this time, and they're all riding in—"
"Judy!"
"Yes, Mama?"
"Up to bed."
"Yes, Mama." The girl turned and slowly climbed the steps. The last of her trailing footsteps sounded on the stairs and presently the bedroom door slammed in its characteristic manner. Her mother sighed and looked across the room for help.
"Donald, you've got to do something. That child has ghosts on her mind; all I hear is ghosts, ghosts, ghosts. I'm worried about it. Do you think she's been listening to the radio too much?"
Donald wearily raised his eyes from the book. "All kids go through that. Forget about it. She's just imaginative, that's all."
"But such an imagination! It isn't healthy."
"Oh, bosh. Keep it up and she'll grow up to be an actress, or a writer or something. Listen—" He paused as the sound of Judy's bedroom door opening came to them. The approaching footsteps padded slowly down the stairs.
Judy paused timidly in the doorway, glancing from one parent to the other.
"It's getting late, Judy." Daddy spoke up. "Those ghosts again?"
"Yes, Daddy."
"Won't let you sleep, I suppose?"
"No, Daddy."
"How many of them, do you think?"
Judy beamed. "Four of them—no, five I guess, counting the woman stuck in the wall, only she's kinda fuzzy and you can't see her very good. And the man in the uniform."
"Oh, a uniform, eh? And what's he doing?"
"He's showing my room to the rest of them and he drives the scooter everybody rides in and he's telling them about my furniture and my dolls and things. Daddy, he don't like it very much."
"Now, really!" Louise broke in.
"Wait a minute, Louise, I'll handle this." He turned his attention to his daughter. "He didn't like your furniture, eh, Judy? How do you know that?"
"I could tell by the way he talked, Daddy. He said it was Millerya or something, and he waved his hand and looked down his nose like you do when you don't like something. Like it wasn't much good, you know."
"Sure I know. Millerya, huh? Well, that's too bad. We like it, and if he doesn't, he can just lump it, isn't that what you say? What are they going to do next?"
"He wanted to know if there was anybody living in the house besides me."
"Oh, he did, eh? Well, you should have told him we were down here."
"I did, Daddy. And the man in the uniform said for me to come down and tell you they were here."
"I see." He nodded wisely and prepared to wrap it up. "Well, I hate to disappoint your ghost, Judy, but neither you
r mother nor I feels like climbing the stairs to meet him right now. Will you tell him that for me?"
"Sure thing, Daddy."
"All right. Good night, Judy."
Judy climbed the stairs at a brisk trot and the bedroom door slammed in its usual fashion. It was opened again and Judy trotted back down just as briskly. She put her head into the living room.
"Daddy?"
"Uh—what?" He came up from the depths of the book.
"The ghost says you had better come up there or else."
"Indeed! Or else what?"
"Or else he'll report you."
Donald slammed the book to the floor. Judy jumped in alarm.
"Well, Daddy, he did. He did!" the girl cried. "Judy—you get right back up those stairs and tell that ghost I'm not coming up to meet him. Not until he plays Yankee Doodle on the saxophone. Get that?"
"Yes, Daddy."
"All right then, get moving. And good night!"
"Good night, Daddy." The young feet retraced the path up the stairs and the young hands gave the bedroom door a thumping slam. After that the silence from the second floor was a welcome thing.
"There," Donald said in triumph. "I told you I'd handle her. Tact. That's all it takes, tact." He dropped into the overstuffed chair and sought his place in the mystery novel.
From Judy's bedroom came the loud, blaring sound of a saxophone tearing through Yankee Doodle.
Donald jumped from the chair and hurled the book across the room, narrowly missing a vase. Removing his belt from his trousers in one angry jerk, he sped for the stairs and bounded upward, two steps at a time. His wife shut her eyes and tried to shut her ears after the bedroom door opened and slammed shut again. The blaring of the saxophone ceased. Nervously, she twiddled a piece of the jigsaw puzzle in her fingers and waited for the blows to fall.
Instead, Donald came down the steps and paused in the doorway.
"Louise—"
Time Exposures Page 5