Fantastic Vignettes

by Jerry

  He cleared away from the camp, as far as he could drive his exhausted body. With branches and rubbled underbrush he managed to build a shelter and a hidden fire. The smoke couldn’t be seen at night and he was safe. He’d bet money that the patrols would be recalled in short order just as soon as the radio shack was discovered.

  It took seven hours. In alternate fits of dozing and trying to keep awake, finally Barry was fully awakened by the thundering sound of jet engines overhead and then the night became brilliant with flares, illuminated like the day. Gunfire began, and the battle was closed.

  Barry heaped pine on the fire in his cosy shelter and watched the fleeing Soviets.

  The Madman

  Charles Recour

  IT ALL STARTED when Bureau handed me a ticket and told me to get going to Los Alamos. I grabbed the first plane out of Washington to Chicago, mildly surprised and interested in what I was going to do but in complete darkness as to what the trip was all about.

  The fantastic coincidence occurred simply because I had a two-hour lay-over in Chicago.

  I dropped into one of the innumerable bars which line the highway bordering the eastern edge of the Chicago airport. It was dim-lit, almost empty at this hour and it looked exceedingly inviting.

  The bartender hastily whipped up my Planter’s Punch—I’m fond of rum—and left me alone. Sitting on a bar stool a few feet away was a powerfully built middle-aged man. He glanced at me as I sipped my drink, and then smiled.

  I’m friendly so I smiled back. “Nippy out, isn’t it?” I said as a starter.

  “Yes, it is,” he answered agreeably. “It’s a night when even Hell wouldn’t be too warm.”

  “Not exactly,” I grinned. “Hell is a little too hot for my taste.”

  “I was quite serious,” he said soberly. “The world is so full of evil. It’s dreadful, don’t you think so?”

  “Oh it’s not so bad,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” he answered abruptly. “It’s very bad, very bad indeed. That’s why I can’t make up my mind whether I want to destroy Chicago or Denver. Both of those places are ridden with the worst in evil.”

  “Well,” I said, trying not to smile, “don’t destroy Chicago while I’m in it.”

  “Oh,” he said perfectly intently, “I wouldn’t do it now. I’d wait a while and at least try to throw some fear into the people.”

  And that was the extent of my conversation with what the newspapers later called the “Madman.”

  If I had known what was going to happen, I would have called out the police or shot the man on the spot. But I didn’t. He was simply a middle-aged harmless, obsessed person, suffering from something. I didn’t even give him a second thought on the plane to Los Alamos.

  At the atomic research center, I learned quickly.

  “Burroughs,” the Chief said, a special military craft had gotten him out before me. “Get a load of this—and don’t laugh.”

  He handed me a plain sheet of paper on which was typewritten a brief note. It went: “I shall remove some of the evil of this world as I would remove a cancer.” The signature was illegible.

  “Thompson,” the Chief said, “wrote that.”

  I did a double-take. “You mean Lewis Thompson?”

  He nodded. Then I knew. Lewis Thompson was one of the world’s foremost atomic experts.

  “But that isn’t all,” the Chief went on, “thirty pounds of ‘stuff’ is missing, enough to blow a city sky-high.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, and then I told the Chief and the rest of them about my brief Chicago experience. Well, of course it turned out from my description that it was Thompson I’d been talking with in that bar.

  Security moved fast after that one. But of course it missed the man. Chicago was ransacked for him, quietly and secretly without success.

  The rest is history of course, after my accidental miffing of my great chance. When I told them of the man’s commentary, casual though it was, on either Chicago or Denver, evacuation plans were instituted, since the sheer irrationality of the scientist was likely to make him adhere to his plan.

  And so it was. The Bureau moved fast, but almost not fast enough. Denver was cleared and emptied and so was Chicago, projects of inconceivable difficulty, that testified to by the fact that they were never really emptied completely and the casualty list for Denver, where the Madman finally blew his ‘stuff’ reached more than thirteen thousand people.

  That happened the next day. One of the Denver newspapers got a phone call. The Madman said he was going to destroy the city. Since the papers had been alerted already, they tried to track him down, but without success and within the hour, as we now all know, the northern half of the City of Denver was reduced to radioactive rubble!

  The absurd coincidence of my meeting with the Madman defies all the laws of probability, but it happened. Every time I go near Denver automatically my mind switches back to a chilly night in Chicago and I find it difficult to realize that I stood three feet away from a lunatic who even then was planning to kill tens of thousands of people and devastate a city because of his warped convictions that the world was evil-ridden.

  I’m still with Security, but sometimes I feel as if I’d be better off at a desk. And I rarely go into bars—though when I do, my gregariousness vanishes under A hell of introspection. Half of Denver is gone, I think, half of Denver . . .

  When the Earth was Young

  Omar Booth

  TO THE DAWN-PEOPLE, Gur was strange. Sometimes he went with the Pleistocene tribe and sometimes he stayed away as long as several moons. Flat-head, who was the Leader, did not like this, because he wanted to tell all the young men when they should hunt and where but Gur would not listen to him.

  Nor did he try to make Gur listen as he would have done with any of the others. He had tried that once and he still bore the scar of Gur’s flint knife on his shoulder. He knew he could not kill Gur save by deception, and even that was too dangerous. As long as Gur made no issue of his chieftainship, and he never did, he would not press him. That was the first of Gur’s strangenesses. He had defeated Flat-head in combat, and yet he had not killed him nor had he taken the role of leader.

  The old people, the women and the young hunters talked about this often. But they could not understand Gur’s ways.

  But this was not Gur’s only strangeness, this and his aloofness from the tribe. He did other odd things too. Ka’s daughter Ka-La was desired by all the males of the little band, but she had eyes and heart for no one but Gur. His lithe handsomeness drew her to him—and he was such a good hunter too, when he wanted to be.

  One day she asked him, “Am I not good to look upon, Gur? Would I not be a good mate? Do not all the hunters want me?”

  Gur looked up from the flint knife he was working to a razors edge and nodded.

  “Yes, Ka-La,” he agreed, “all these things are true.”

  Her eyelashes fluttered prettily. “Then why do you not want me?”

  “You are not for me, Ka-La,” Gur answered, not unpleasantly, but patiently, as if he were instructing a child.

  “I do not understand you,” Ka-La said angrily. With a toss of her pretty head, she walked away and thereafter she said nothing to him. But still she did not mate.

  Gur was not only strange in these ways. He spent many hours with the old men, learning how to work the flint and stone, learning how to chip a rock and how to hone an edge on a weapon with water and sand. This was unheard, of for a hunter. Their weapons were made by the old men and that was enough. It justified the old ones’ existence. But Gur was not content to take his weapons. They had to be made by himself.

  As a result of all these things, Gur was not liked by anyone. His courage and might as a hunter and warrior were unquestioned and so he was left to his own devices, even though there were some who muttered against him.

  Gur did not gorge himself and fall asleep after a successful hunt and he did not sit and chew leaves and grass by the hour. Always his
mind churned and fermented and he was asking things. Even when he was a child this quality did not engender him to his parents.

  The Dawn-People lived simply and while they fed well because this was good land, rich in small game, it also abounded in the bigger animals who made their lives miserable many times. Hunters would return laden with deer-carcasses and the smell of the freshly killed meat would bring the killers on their trail. A saber-toothed tiger might suddenly bound into the group and kill two or three hunters before the rest could get away. The Dawn-People were helpless, except for the sheer flight against the killers like the saber-toothed tiger and the giant buffalo or the mastodon.

  And this was what bothered Gur. Always he thought about it and he realized that against the huge claws and powerful fangs of a rippling-muscled animal like the saber-toothed tiger, the flint knife of the hunter was useless. And so his mind thought and thought about this.

  Abstraction and extension of this thought to other weapons occurred to none of the Dawn-People. Had not they and their ancestors used flint knives through all time? It did not occur to anyone to think of another tool for killing.

  It occurred to no one that is, except Gur.

  And this was what was on his mind. And the more he thought about it the more puzzled he got. A bigger flint knife was not the answer. He had tried that and found it only to be huge and weighty and unwieldy, useless for the rapid work of fighting and killing.

  The flint knife itself, the ordinary tool of the Dawn-People was of no use in fighting the killer animals. To get close enough to use it, you had to come within range of claw and fang—and then you were dead.

  One day Gur went out into the jungle which surrounded the small clearing that served as home for the Dawn-People and killed a small deer and because he was hungry, he sat down and struck a fire to cook one of the haunches.

  While his strong white teeth were tearing into the half-burnt, half-raw meat, his eyes wandered on long green branch that had fallen near the fire and one thick end of which was actually in the flame. He noticed that because the wood was green and flexible, it did not burn. It was a phenomenon he had seen many times without real comprehension. Satiated, he put down the haunch and idly reached for the branch. The part that had been in the fire was partially charred and because it was split where the wind had detached it from an overhead tree, it was sort of pointed, not keenly like a flint knife but still pointed.

  Musing, Gur pulled the striplings from the branch and found he had a pole a couple of hands longer than himself, as thick around at one end as three of his fingers, and with a hardened point at that end. It was not the first time he had grasped a wooden staff.

  His eyes fixed on the hardened end and something enormous happened in his mind. He was puzzled for a moment and he had to collect his thoughts. He thought and thought and the abstraction finally came through. He hefted the pointed stick.

  It was as if he had a long, light usable flint knife, longer even than himself. He could stick an animal with this tool and still be away from the animal.

  All these ideas did not come at once. Slowly they percolated through his mind—and then he heard it!

  There was the sudden snapping of a twig and Gur froze. He glanced to the side where the sound had come from. He looked up. It was only Ka-La!

  “Why are you here?” Gur asked contemptuously.

  “I wanted to be with you, Gur, I wanted to talk with you. I . . .”

  She stopped abruptly as Gur’s eyes widened. She looked to the side and she saw what had attracted Gur’s sight. At the third corner of the triangle which made the small clearing stood a huge saber-toothed tiger. Its eyes were on Ka-La and even in that glance Ka-La knew she was dead, for. the animal’s muscles tensed ever so slightly just before its leap.

  Something also happened to Gur. Ordinarily he would have been in the low-hanging tree branches. He didn’t know what impelled him to do it, but he shouted. “Ka-La!” he screamed hoarsely, “Ka-La!”

  The tiger, its attention diverted, saw him, changed its position slightly and leaped.

  Gur reacted, not instinctively, but in some way to forces unknown. He crouched, the fire-hardened stick grasped with all the strength he was capable of, its butt anchored against the ground. One huge razor-edge claw sent him spinning with a sweeping, cutting blow on his shoulder.

  But Gur was not dead. Nor was Ka-La. Both of stared at the most unbelievable sight they’d ever seen. The tiger was standing on all fours and screaming maddeningly infuriated cries of agony and rage. And right between the forelegs protruding clear through the animal, was Gur’s hardened stick. Then with a shudder the tiger dropped to the ground—dead, sprawled in an inert heap.

  And Ka-La was at Gur’s side. Her hands busied themselves with his torn shoulder, but all he was doing was babbling incoherently about his “long knife”. He looked to the crude spear and he looked back to Ka-La and she smiled. Gur would be her mate. Gur knew that too, for he smiled also. Gur was the Spearman of the Dawn . . .

  THE END

  Perchance to Dream

  Sam Dewey

  “WELL, THAT’S it,” the port official said, stamping the last of the papers. “The manifest is clear, captain and you’ll blast off tomorrow evening.” He glanced at his watch. “Sorry to have kept you so long.”

  Captain John Brentwood got up and stretched. This paperwork was always tedious.

  “Thank you,” he said, “I think I’ll have a look around town. It’s been four years since I’ve been Terra-bound. I haven’t seen New Denver since I was a good twelve years old.”

  The port official smiled. “I’m afraid you’ll find things considerably changed, captain. Fortunately the government has cleaned up the roistering hells we used to have here.” John looked puzzled at the sanctimonious simper that stretched across the man’s face.

  “Oh, I don’t mean a man’s pleasures have been stopped,” he added. “Matter of fact, you’ll enjoy yourself a great deal more. Would you like to recommend a good Euphoria?—or perhaps a Narco-Synthesis would appeal to you—all government controlled of course.”

  An expression of disgust went across John’s face. “No thank you,” he said brusquely, “I don’t care for the induced pleasures—I’m not interested in drugs.”

  The port official shrugged. “As you wish,” he said, the smile gone from his face, “but you’ll find little else to do. The government wants its citizens to use the Euphoria. But you Colonials don’t seem to understand.”

  “We’re not a bunch of junkies,” John said, and immediately regretted it. The port official’s face was white.

  “I could report you for that, Captain Brentwood,” he said, “but I won’t. Suppose you run along now. Let me give you a bit of advice. Euphoria are state institutions designed to provide citizens with pleasure without exposing them to sin—just remember that—you’ll find no roistering dives. This isn’t Venusberg, you know Goodbye.”

  It was only nine o’clock, but already the streets were quiet. The famous “spacemen’s Alley” was dead except for the huge fluorescent signs advertising the one single red word “Euphoria!” John knew that the places were filled with people lying in cots soaking up the synthetic pleasures of visual imagery—so neat—so clean—so rotten! He was filled with disgust and for a moment he thought he’d turn around and go back to the ship. Thank God he didn’t have to stay here any longer than a day.

  Finally he came upon a small sign: “Food and Drinks.” He noticed that “food” was the first word. They were really discouraging human discourse he thought wryly. John entered the bar and looked around.

  “Whiskey and water,” John said.

  “You Terran?” the bartender asked guardedly. John shook his head.

  “No, Venusian Colonial,” he said.

  The bartender said nothing but served the drink.

  “Why ain’t you in a Euphoria?” the bartender said curiously.

  John grinned. “For the same reason you aren’t. I’m not a junk
ie or a hop-head.”

  The bartender’s face looked alarmed. “Hey, watch your language mister,” he said. He withdrew from John and volunteered no further conversation. These people are really terrified, John thought.

  John glanced around the room. No one—yes, there was a table occupied. In the far corner, a girl sat toying with the remnants of a meal. John took his glass and walked over to the table.

  “Do you mind?” he said and sat down.

  The girl looked up frightened. She saw his uniform and obviously recognized the Colonial markings.

  “No, it’s all right,” she said listlessly. “I don’t care.”

  John introduced himself and learned that the girl was Marcia Clayton. John ordered drinks for them. The girl was friendly and conversational. John commented on that, strange in this world.

  “I can afford to be,” she said wryly. She tossed a sheet of paper toward him. He picked it up and read.

  “To Marcia Clayton (it said)—age 22—skill—computer. You will present yourself on (date) for personal arrest. The charge is failure to comply with the requirements of citizenship. Compliance with this order is imperative . . .” There was more, but John didn’t need to read on.

  “It’s that bad now?” he asked.

  “It’s worse,” she said. “I’d run, but there’s no place to run to.”

  Just then the door opened and a man came in. He looked around the room and spotted the table at which John and Marcia were seated. He came over.

  “Marcia Clayton?” he asked politely.

  Marcia looked up and John saw terror in her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered the color draining from her face.

  “I have orders to ask you to accompany me to Section Three of Euphoria-Control. Please do this now.”

  He looked at the girl. “Marcia dear”—he emphasized the endearment—“—don’t you think we’d better go with the man?”

  “I have only orders for the girl,” the man said quickly.

  Marcia seemed to have become paralyzed from fright. With an effort she aroused herself, slipped into her coat and went out with the man, not even deigning to look at John.