Troublemakers: Stories by Harlan Ellison

by Harlan Ellison

  I swear they won’t get anything out of me but my name, rank, and serial number, he thought desperately.

  He mumbled those particulars aloud, as reassurance: “Marnames Qarlo Clobregnny, pryt, sizfifwunohtootoonyn.”

  The drunks looked up from their table and their shakes, at the sound of his voice. The man with the rosedrop nose rubbed a dirty hand across fleshy chin folds, repeated his philosophy of the strange man in the locked cell.

  “Screwloose!”

  He might have remained in jail indefinitely, considered a madman or a mad rifleman. But the desk sergeant who had booked him, after the soldier had received medical attention, grew curious about the strangely shaped weapon.

  As he put the things into security, he tested the Brandelmeier–hardly realizing what knob or stud controlled its power, never realizing what it could do–and melted away one wall of the safe room. Three inch plate steel, and it melted bluely, fused solidly.

  He called the Captain, and the Captain called the F.B.I., and the F.B.I. called Internal Security, and Internal Security said, “Preposterous!” and checked back. When the Brandelmeier had been thoroughly tested–as much as could be tested, since the rifle had no seams, no apparent power source, and fantastic range–they were willing to believe. They had the soldier removed from his cell, transported along with the pouch, and a philologist named Soames, to the I.S. general headquarters in Washington, D.C. The Brandelmeier came by jet courier, and the soldier was flown in by helicopter, under sedation. The philologist named Soames, whose hair was long and rusty, whose face was that of a starving artist, whose temperament was that of a saint, came in by specially chartered lane from Columbia University. The pouch was sent by sealed Brinks truck to the airport, where it was delivered under heaviest guard to a mail plane. They all arrived in Washington within ten minutes of one another and, without seeing anything of the surrounding countryside, were whisked away to the subsurface levels of the I.S. Buildings.

  When Qarlo came back to consciousness, he found himself again in a cell, this time quite unlike the first. No bars, but just as solid to hold him in, with padded walls. Qarlo paced around the cell a few times, seeking breaks in the walls, and found what was obviously a door, in one corner. But he could not work his fingers between the pads, to try and open it.

  He sat down on the padded floor, and rubbed the bristled top of his head in wonder. Was he never to find out what had happened to himself? And when was he going to shake this strange feeling that he was being watched?

  Overhead, through a pane of one-way glass that looked like a ventilator grille, the soldier was being watched.

  Lyle Sims and his secretary knelt before the window in the floor, along with the philologist named Soames. Where Soames was shaggy, ill-kept, hungry-looking and placid…Lyle Sims was lean, collegiate-seeming, brusque and brisk. He had been special advisor to an unnamed branch office of Internal Security, for five years, dealing with every strange or offbeat problem too outré for regulation inquiry. Those years had hardened him in an odd way: he was quick to recognize authenticity, even quicker to recognize fakery.

  As he watched, his trained instincts took over completely, and he knew in a moment of spying, that the man in the cell below was out of the ordinary. Not so in any fashion that could be labeled–“drunkard,” “foreigner,” “psychotic”–but so markedly different, so other, he was taken aback.

  “Six feet three inches,” he recited to the girl kneeling beside him. She made the notation on her pad, and he went on calling out characteristics of the soldier below. “Brown hair, clipped so short you can see the scalp. Brown…no, black eyes. Scars. Above the left eye, running down to center of left cheek; bridge of nose; three parallel scars on the right side of chin; tiny one over right eyebrow; last one I can see, runs from back of left ear, into hairline.

  “He seems to be wearing an all-over, skintight suit something like, oh, I suppose it’s like a pair of what do you call those pajamas kids wear…the kind with the back door, the kind that enclosed the feet?”

  The girl inserted softly, “You mean snuggies?”

  The man nodded, slightly embarrassed for no good reason, continued, “Mmm. Yes, that’s right. Like those. The suit encloses his feet, seems to be joined to the cape, and comes up to his neck. Seems to be some sort of metallic cloth.

  “Something else…may mean nothing at all, or on the other hand…” He pursed his lips for a moment, then described his observation carefully. “His head seems to be oddly shaped. The forehead is larger than most, seems to be pressing forward in front, as though he had been smacked hard and it was swelling. That seems to be everything.”

  Sims settled back on his haunches, fished in his side pocket, and came up with a small pipe, which he cold-puffed in thought for a second. He rose slowly, still staring down through the floor window. He murmured something to himself, and when Soames asked what he had said, the special advisor repeated, “I think we’ve got something almost too hot to handle.”

  Soames clucked knowingly, and gestured toward the window. “Have you been able to make out anything he’s said yet?”

  Sims shook his head. “No. That’s why you’re here. It seems he’s saying the same thing, over and over, but it’s completely unintelligible. Doesn’t seem to be any recognizable language, or any dialect we’ve been able to pin down.”

  “I’d like to take a try at him,” Soames said, smiling gently. It was the man’s nature that challenge brought satisfaction; solution brought unrest, eagerness for a new, more rugged problem.

  Sims nodded agreement, but there was a tense, strained film over his eyes, in the set of his mouth. “Take it easy with him, Soames. I have a strong hunch this is something completely new, something we haven’t even begun to understand.”

  Soames smiled again, this time indulgently. “Come, come, Mr. Sims. After all…he is only an alien of some sort…all we have to do is find out what country he’s from.”

  “Have you heard him talk yet?”

  Soames shook his head.

  “Then don’t be too quick to think he’s just a foreigner. The word alien may be more correct than you think–only not in the way you think.”

  A confused look spread across Soames’s face. He gave a slight shrug, as though he could not fathom what Lyle Sims meant…and was not particularly interested. He patted Sims reassuringly, which brought an expression of annoyance to the advisor’s face, and he clamped down on the pipestem harder.

  They walked downstairs together; the secretary left them, to type her notes, and Sims let the philologist into the padded room, cautioning him to deal gently with the man. “Don’t forget,” Sims warned, “we’re not sure where he comes from, and sudden movements may make him jumpy. There’s a guard overhead, and there’ll be a man with me behind this door, but you never know.”

  Soames looked startled. “You sound as though he’s an aborigine or something. With a suit like that, he must be very intelligent. You suspect something, don’t you?”

  Sims made a neutral motion with his hands. “What I suspect is too nebulous to worry about now. Just take it easy…and above all, figure out what he’s saying, where he’s from.”

  Sims had decided, long before, that it would be wisest to keep the power of the Brandelmeier to himself. But he was fairly certain it was not the work of a foreign power. The trial run on the test range had left him gasping, confused.

  He opened the door, and Soames passed through, uneasily.

  Sims caught a glimpse of the expression on the stranger’s face as the philologist entered. It was even more uneasy than Soames’s had been.

  It looked to be a long wait.

  Soames was white as paste. His face was drawn, and the complacent attitude he had shown since his arrival in Washington was shattered. He sat across from Sims, and asked him in a quavering voice for a cigarette. Sims fished around in his desk, came up with a crumpled pack and idly slid them across to Soames. The philologist took one, put it in his mouth, th
en, as though it had been totally forgotten in the space of a second, he removed it, held it while he spoke.

  His tones were amazed. “Do you know what you’ve got up there in that cell?”

  Sims said nothing, knowing what was to come would not startle him too much; he had expected something fantastic.

  “That man…do you know where he…that soldier–and by God, Sims, that’s what he is–comes from, from–now you’re going to think I’m insane to believe it, but somehow I’m convinced–he comes from the future!”

  Sims tightened his lips. Despite himself, he was shocked. He knew it was true. It had to be true, it was the only explanation that fit all the facts.

  “What can you tell me?” he asked the philologist.

  “Well, at first I tried solving the communications problem by asking him simple questions…pointing to myself and saying ‘Soames,’ pointing to him and looking quizzical, but all he’d keep saying was a string of gibberish. I tried for hours to equate his tones and phrases with all the dialects and subdialects of every language I’d ever known, but it was no use. He slurred too much. And then I finally figured it out. He had to write it out–which I couldn’t understand, of course, but it gave me a clue–and then I kept having him repeat it. Do you know what he’s speaking?”

  Sims shook his head.

  The linguist spoke softly. “He’s speaking English. It’s that simple. Just English.

  “But an English that has been corrupted and run together, and so slurred, it’s incomprehensible. It must be the future trend of the language. Sort of an extrapolation of gutter English, just contracted to a fantastic extreme. At any rate, I got it out of him.”

  Sims leaned forward, held his dead pipe tightly. “What?”

  Soames read it off a sheet of paper:

  “My name is Qarlo Clobregnny. Private. Six-five-one-oh-two-two-nine.”

  Sims murmured in astonishment. “My God…name, rank and–”

  Soames finished for him, “–and serial number. Yes, that’s all he’d give me for over three hours. Then I asked him a few innocuous questions, like where did he come from, and what was his impression of where he was now.”

  The philologist waved a hand vaguely. “By that time, I had an idea what I was dealing with, though not where he had come from. But when he began telling me about the War, the War he was fighting when he showed up here, I knew immediately he was either from some other world–which is fantastic–or, or…well, I just don’t know!”

  Sims nodded his head in understanding. “From when do you think he comes?”

  Soames shrugged. “Can’t tell. He says the year he is in–doesn’t seem to realize he’s in the past–is K79. He doesn’t know when the other style of dating went out. As far as he knows, it’s been ‘K’ for a long time, though he’s heard stories about things that happened during a time they dated ‘GV.’ Meaningless, but I’d wager it’s more thousands of years than we can imagine.”

  Sims ran a hand nervously through his hair. This problem was, indeed, larger than he’d thought.

  “Look, Professor Soames, I want you to stay with him, and teach him current English. See if you can work some more information out of him, and let him know we mean him no hard times.

  “Though Lord knows,” the special advisor added with a tremor, “he can give us a harder time than we can give him. What knowledge he must have!”

  Soames nodded in agreement. “Is it all right if I catch a few hours’ sleep? I was with him almost ten hours straight, and I’m sure he needs it as badly as I do.”

  Sims nodded also, in agreement, and the philologist went off to a sleeping room. But when Sims looked down through the window, twenty minutes later, the soldier was still awake, still looking about nervously. It seemed he did not need sleep.

  Sims was terribly worried, and the coded telegram he had received from the President, in answer to his own, was not at all reassuring. The problem was in his hands, and it was an increasingly worrisome problem.

  Perhaps a deadly problem.

  He went to another sleeping room, to follow Soames’s example. It looked like sleep was going to be scarce.

  Problem:

  A man from the future. An ordinary man, without any special talents, without any great store of intelligence. The equivalent of “the man in the street.” A man who owns a fantastic little machine that turns sand into solid matter, harder than steel–but who hasn’t the vaguest notion of how it works, or how to analyze it. A man whose knowledge of past history is as vague and formless as any modern man’s. A soldier. With no other talent than fighting. What is to be done with such a man?

  Solution:

  Unknown.

  Lyle Sims pushed the coffee cup away. If he ever had to look at another cup of the disgusting stuff, he was sure he would vomit. Three sleepless days and nights, running on nothing but dexedrine and hot black coffee, had put his nerves more on edge than usual. He snapped at the clerks and secretaries, he paced endlessly, and he had ruined the stems of five pipes. He felt muggy and his stomach was queasy. Yet there was no solution.

  It was impossible to say, “All right, we’ve got a man from the future. So what? Turn him loose and let him make a life for himself in our time, since he can’t return to his own.”

  It was impossible to do that for several reasons: (1) What if he couldn’t adjust? He was then a potential menace, of incalculable potential. (2) What if an enemy power–and God knew there were enough powers around anxious to get a secret weapon as valuable as Qarlo–grabbed him, and did somehow manage to work out the concepts behind the rifle, the firmer, the mono-atomic anti-gravity device in the pouch? What then? (3) A man used to war, knowing only war, would eventually seek or foment war.

  There were dozens of others, they were only beginning to realize. No, something had to be done with him.

  Imprison him?

  For what? The man had done no real harm. He had not intentionally caused the death of the man on the subway platform. He had been frightened by the train. He had been attacked by the executives–one of whom had a broken neck, but was alive. No, he was just “a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made,” as Housman had put it so terrifyingly clearly.

  Kill him?

  For the same reasons, unjust and brutal…not to mention wasteful.

  Find a place for him in society?

  Doing what?

  Sims raged in his mind, mulled it over and tried every angle. It was an insoluble problem. A simple dogface, with no other life than that of a professional soldier, what good was he?

  All Qarlo knew was war.

  The question abruptly answered itself: If he knows no other life than that of a soldier…why, make him a soldier. (But…who was to say that, with his knowledge of futuristic tactics and weapons, he might not turn into another Hitler, or Genghis Khan?) No, making him a soldier would only heighten the problem. There could be no peace of mind were he in a position where he might organize.

  As a tactician then?

  It might work at that.

  Sims slumped behind his desk, pressed down the key of his intercom, spoke to the secretary, “Get me General Mainwaring, General Polk and the Secretary of Defense.”

  He clicked the key back. It just might work at that. If Qarlo could be persuaded to detail fighting plans, now that he realized where he was, and that the men who held him were not his enemies and allies of Ruskie-Chink (and what a field of speculation that pair of words opened!).

  It just might work…

  …but Sims doubted it.

  Mainwaring stayed on to report when Polk and the Secretary of Defense went back to their regular duties. He was a big man, with softness written across his face and body, and a pompous white moustache. He shook his head sadly, as though the Rosetta Stone had been stolen from him just before an all-important experiment.

  “Sorry, Sims, but the man is useless to us. Brilliant grasp of military tactics, so long as it involves what he calls ‘eighty-thread beams’ and tel
epathic contacts.

  “Do you know those wars up there are fought as much mentally as they are physically? Never heard of a tank or a mortar, but the stories he tells of brain-burning and spore-death would make you sick. It isn’t pretty, the way they fight.

  “I thank God I’m not going to be around to see it; I thought our wars were filthy and unpleasant. They’ve got us licked all down the line for brutality and mass death. And the strange thing is, this Qarlo fellow despises it! For a while there–felt foolish as hell–but for a while there, when he was explaining it, I almost wanted to chuck my career, go out and start beating the drum for disarmament.”

  The General summed up, and it was apparent Qarlo was useless as a tactician. He had been brought up with one way of waging war, and it would take a lifetime for him to adjust enough to be of any tactical use.

  But it didn’t really matter, for Sims was certain the General had given him the answer to the problem, inadvertently.

  He would have to clear it with Security, and the President, of course. And it would take a great deal of publicity to make the people realize this man actually was the real thing, an inhabitant of the future. But if it worked out, Qarlo Clobregnny, the soldier and nothing but the soldier, could be the most valuable man Time had ever spawned.

  He set to work on it, wondering foolishly if he wasn’t too much the idealist.

  Ten soldiers crouched in the frozen mud. Their firmers had been jammed, had turned the sand and dirt of their holes only to icelike conditions. The cold was seeping up through their suits, and the jammed firmers were emitting hard radiation. One of the men screamed as the radiation took hold in his gut, and he felt the organs watering away. He leaped up, vomiting blood and phlegm–and was caught across the face by a robot-tracked triple beam. The front of his face disappeared, and the nearly decapitated corpse flopped back into the firmhole, atop a comrade.