Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  A faraway look came into her eyes. "Oh, if I only could! If I only could be a girl again, with a chance to get married...."

  "Pack your things," Vanderkamp said quietly.

  "It must have been all of a month before I saw Vanderkamp again," Harrigan continued, waving for another scotch and soda. "I was down in the vicinity on an assignment and I took a run over to his place.

  "He was home this time. He came to the door, which he had chained on the inside. He recognized me, and it was plain at the same time that he had no intention of letting me in.

  "I came right out with the first question I had in mind. 'The thing that bothers me,' I said to him, 'is how you get that time machine of yours in and out of that shed.'

  "'Mr. Harrigan,' he answered, 'newspaper reporters ought to have at least elementary scientific knowledge. You don't. How in hell could even a time machine be in two places at once, I ask you? If I take that machine back three centuries, that's where it is—not here. And three centuries ago that shop wasn't standing there. So you don't go in or out; you don't move at all, remember? It's time that moves.'

  "'I called the other day,' I went on. 'Your sister spoke to me. Give her my regards.'

  "'My sister's left me,' he said shortly, 'to stew, as you might say, in my own time machine.'

  "'Really?' I said. 'Just what do you have in mind to do next?'

  "'Let me ask you something, Mr. Harrigan,' he answered. 'Would you sit around here waiting for an atomic war if you could get away?'

  "'Certainly not,' I answered.

  "'Well, then, I don't intend to, either.'

  "All this while he was standing at the door, refusing to open it any wider or to let me in. He was making it pretty plain that there wasn't much he had to say to me. And he seemed to be in a hurry.

  "'Remember me to the inquiring public thirty years hence, Mr. Harrigan,' he said at last, and closed the door.

  "That was the last I saw of him."

  Harrigan finished his scotch and soda appreciatively and looked around for the bartender.

  "Did he take off then?" I asked.

  "Like a rocket," said Harrigan. "Queerest thing was that there wasn't a trace of him. The machine was gone, too—the same way as the last time, without a disturbance in the shop. He and his machine had simply vanished off the face of the earth and were never heard from again.

  "Matter of fact, though," Harrigan went on thoughtfully, "Vanderkamp's disappearance wasn't the really queer angle on the pitch. The other thing broke in the papers the week after he left. The neighbors got pretty worked up about it. They called the police to tell them that Vanderkamp's sister Julie was back, only she was off her nut—and a good deal changed in appearance, too.

  "Gal going blarmy was no news, of course, but that last bit about her appearance—they said she looked about twenty years older, all of a sudden—sort of rang a bell. So I went over there. It was Julie, all right; at least, she looked a hell of a lot like Julie had when I last saw her—provided you could grant that a woman could age twenty years in the few weeks it had been. And she was off her rocker, sure enough—or hysterical. Or at least madder than a wet hen. She made out like she couldn't speak a word of English, and they finally had to get an interpreter to understand her. She wouldn't speak anything but Dutch—and an old-fashioned kind, too.

  "She made a lot of extravagant claims and kept insisting that she would bring the whole matter up in a complaint before Governor Stuyvesant. Said she wasn't Julie Vanderkamp, by God, but was named Anna Van Tromp—which is an old Dutch name thereabouts—and claimed that she had been abducted from her home on the Bowery. We pointed out the Third Avenue El and told her that was the Bowery, but she just sniffed and looked at us as though we were crazy."

  I toyed with my drink. "You mean you actually listened to the poor girl's story?" I asked.

  "Sure," Harrigan said. "Maybe she was as crazy as a bedbug, but I've listened to whackier stories from supposedly sane people. Sure, I listened to her." He paused thoughtfully for a moment, then went on.

  "She claimed that this fellow Vanderkamp had come to her house and filled her with a lot of guff about the wonderful country he lived in, and how she ought to let him take her to see it. Apparently he waxed especially eloquent about an automatic washing-machine and dryer, and that had fascinated her, for some reason. Then, she said, he'd brought a ten-year-old girl along—though where in the world old Vanderkamp could have picked up a tot like that is beyond me—and the kid had added her blandishments to the plot. Between them, they had managed to lure her into the old guy's machine. From what she said, it was obviously the time machine she was talking about, and if she was Julie there was no reason why she shouldn't know about it. But she talked as though it was a complete mystery to her, as though she'd no idea what the purpose of it was. Well, anyway, here she was—and very unhappy, too. Wanted to go back to old New Amsterdam, but bad.

  "It was a beautiful act, even if she was nuts. The strange thing was, though, that there were some things even a gal going whacky couldn't explain. For instance, the house was filled with what the experts said were priceless antiques from Dutch New Amsterdam, of the period just prior to the British siege. You'd think those things would make poor Julie feel more at home, seeing as she claimed to belong in that period, but apparently they just made her homesick. And, curiously enough, all the modern gadgets were gone. All those handy little items that make the twentieth century so livable had been taken away—including the washing-machine and dryer, by the way. Julie—or Anna, as she called herself—claimed that Vanderkamp had taken it back with him, wherever he'd gone to, after he'd brought her there."

  "Poor woman," I said sympathetically. "They toted her off to the booby hatch, I suppose."

  "No...." Harrigan said slowly. "They didn't, as a matter of fact. Since she was harmless, they let her stay in the house a while. Which was a mistake, it seems. Of course, she wasn't from the seventeenth century. That's impossible. All the same—." He broke off abruptly and stared moodily into his glass.

  "What happened to her?" I asked.

  "She was found one morning about two weeks after she got there," he said. "Dead. Electrocuted. It seems she'd stuck her finger into a light socket while standing in a bathtub full of water. An accident, obviously. As the Medical Examiner said, it was an accident any six-year-old child would have known enough about electricity to avoid.

  "That is," Harrigan added, "a twentieth-century child...."

  * * *

  Contents

  McILVAINE'S STAR

  By August Derleth

  Old Thaddeus McIlvaine discovered a dark star and took it for his own. Thus he inherited a dark destiny—or did he?

  "Call them what you like," said Tex Harrigan. "Lost people or strayed, crackpots or warped geniuses—I know enough of them to fill an entire department of queer people. I've been a reporter long enough to have run into quite a few of them."

  "For example?" I said, recognizing Harrigan's mellowness.

  "Take Thaddeus McIlvaine," said Harrigan.

  "I never heard of him."

  "I suppose not," said Harrigan. "But I knew him. He was an eccentric old fellow who had a modest income—enough to keep up his hobbies, which were three: he played cards and chess at a tavern called Bixby's on North Clark Street; he was an amateur astronomer; and he had the fixed idea that there was life somewhere outside this planet and that it was possible to communicate with other beings—but unlike most others, he tried it constantly with the queer machinery he had rigged up.

  "Well, now, this old fellow had a trio of cronies with whom he played on occasion down at Bixby's. He had no one else to confide in. He kept them up with his progress among the stars and his communication with other life in the cosmos beyond our own, and they made a great joke out of it, from all I could gather. I suppose, because he had no one else to talk to, McIlvaine took it without complaint. Well, as I said, I never heard of him until one morning the city editor—it was old
Bill Henderson then—called me in and said, 'Harrigan, we just got a lead on a fellow named Thaddeus McIlvaine who claims to have discovered a new star. Amateur astronomer up North Clark. Find him and get a story.' So I set out to track him down...."

  It was a great moment for Thaddeus McIlvaine. He sat down among his friends almost portentously, adjusted his spectacles, and peered over them in his usual manner, half way between a querulous oldster and a reproachful schoolmaster.

  "I've done it," he said quietly.

  "Aye, and what?" asked Alexander testily.

  "I discovered a new star."

  "Oh," said Leopold flatly. "A cinder in your eye."

  "It lies just off Arcturus," McIlvaine went on, "and it would appear to be coming closer."

  "Give it my love," said Richardson with a wry smile. "Have you named it yet? Or don't the discoverers of new stars name them any more? McIlvaine's Star—that's a good name for it. Hard a port of Arcturus, with special displays on windy nights."

  McIlvaine only smiled. "It's a dark star," he said presently. "It doesn't have light." He spoke almost apologetically, as if somehow he had disappointed his friends. "I'm going to try and communicate with it."

  "That's the ticket," said Alexander.

  "Cut for deal," said Leopold.

  That was how the news about McIlvaine's Star was received by his cronies. Afterward, after McIlvaine had dutifully played several games of euchre, Richardson conceived the idea of telephoning the Globe to announce McIlvaine's discovery.

  "The old fellow took himself seriously," Harrigan went on. "And yet he was so damned mousy about it. I mean, you got the impression that he had been trying for so long that now he hardly believed in his star himself any longer. But there it was. He had a long, detailed story of its discovery, which was an accident, as those things usually are. They happen all the time, and his story sounded convincing enough. Just the same, you didn't feel that he really had anything. I took down notes, of course; that was routine. I got a picture of the old man, with never an idea we'd be using it.

  "To tell the truth, I carried my notes around with me for a day or so before it occurred to me that it wouldn't do any harm to put a call in to Yerkes Observatory up in Wisconsin. So I did, and they confirmed McIlvaine's Star. The Globe had the story, did it up in fine style.

  "It was two weeks before we heard from McIlvaine again...."

  That night McIlvaine was more than usually diffident. He was not like a man bearing a message of considerable importance to himself. He slipped into Bixby's, got a glass of beer, and approached the table where his friends sat, almost with trepidation.

  "It's a nice evening for May," he said quietly.

  Richardson grunted.

  Leopold said, "By the way, Mac, whatever became of that star of yours? The one the papers wrote up."

  "I think," said McIlvaine cautiously, "I'm quite sure—I have got in touch with them. Only," his brow wrinkled and furrowed, "I can't understand their language."

  "Ah," said Richardson with an edge to his voice, "the thing for you to do is to tell them that's your star, and they'll have to speak English from now on, so you can understand them. Why, next thing we know, you'll be getting yourself a rocket or a space-ship and going over to that star to set yourself up as king or something."

  "King Thaddeus the First," said Alexander loftily. "All you star-dwellers may kiss the royal foot."

  "That would be unsanitary, I think," said McIlvaine, frowning.

  Poor McIlvaine! They made him the butt of their jests for over an hour before he took himself off to his quarters, where he sat himself down before his telescope and found his star once more, almost huge enough to blot out Arcturus, but not quite, since it was moving away from that amber star now.

  McIlvaine's star was certainly much closer to the Earth than it had been.

  He tried once again to contact it with his home-made radio, and once again he received a succession of strange, rhythmic noises which he could not doubt were speech of some kind or other—a rasping, grating speech, to be sure, utterly unlike the speech of McIlvaine's own kind. It rose and fell, became impatient, urgent, despairing—McIlvaine sensed all this and strove mightily to understand.

  He sat there for perhaps two hours when he received the distant impression that someone was talking to him in his own language. But there was no longer any sound on the radio. He could not understand what had taken place, but in a few moments he received the clear conviction that the inhabitants of his star had managed to discover the basic elements of his language by the simple process of reading his mind, and were now prepared to talk with him.

  What manner of creatures inhabited Earth? they wished to know.

  McIlvaine told them. He visualized one of his own kind and tried to put him into words. It was difficult, since he could not rid himself of the conviction that his interlocutors might be utterly alien.

  They had no conception of man and doubted man's existence on any other star. There were plant-people on Venus, ant-people on Andromeda, six-legged and four-armed beings which were equal parts mineral and vegetable on Betelguese—but nothing resembling man. "You are evidently alone of your kind in the cosmos," said his interstellar correspondent.

  "And what about you?" cried McIlvaine with unaccustomed heat.

  Silence was his only answer, but presently he conceived a mental image which was remarkable for its vividness. But the image was of nothing he had ever seen before—of thousands upon thousands of miniature beings, utterly alien to man; they resembled amphibious insects, with thin, elongated heads, large eyes, and antennae set upon a scaled, four-legged body, with rudimentary beetle-like wings. Curiously, they seemed ageless; he could detect no difference among them—all appeared to be the same age.

  "We are not, but we rejuvenate regularly," said the creature with whom he corresponded in this strange manner.

  Did they have names? McIlvaine wondered.

  "I am Guru," said the star's inhabitant. "You are McIlvaine."

  And the civilization of their star?

  Instantly he saw in his mind's eye vast cities, which rose from beneath a surface which appeared to bear no vegetation recognizable to any human eye, in a terrain which seemed to be desert, of monolithic buildings, which were windowless and had openings only of sufficient size to permit the free passage of its dwarfed dwellers. Within the buildings was evidence of a great and old civilization....

  "You see, McIlvaine really believed all this. What an imagination the man had! Of course, the boys at Bixby's gave him a bad time; I don't know how he stood it, but he did. And he always came back. Richardson called the story in; he took a special delight in deviling McIlvaine, and I was sent out to see the old fellow again.

  "You couldn't doubt his sincerity. And yet he didn't sound touched."

  "But, of course, that part about the insect-like dwellers of the star comes straight out of Wells, doesn't it?" I put in.

  "Wells and scores of others," agreed Harrigan. "Wells was probably the first writer to suggest insectivorous inhabitants on Mars; his were considerably larger, though."

  "Go on."

  "Well, I talked with McIlvaine for quite a while. He told me all about their civilization and about his friend, Guru. You might have thought he was talking about a neighbor of his I had only to step outside to meet.

  "Later on, I dropped around at Bixby's and had a talk with the boys there. Richardson let me in on a secret. He had decided to rig up a connection to McIlvaine's machine and do a little talking to the old fellow, making him believe Guru was coming through in English. He meant to give McIlvaine a harder time than ever, and once he had him believing everything he planned to say, they would wait for him at Bixby's and let him make a fool of himself.

  "It didn't work out quite that way, however...."

  "McIlvaine, can you hear me?"

  McIlvaine started with astonishment. His mental impression of Guru became confused; the voice speaking English came clear as a bell, as if
from no distance at all.

  "Yes," he said hesitantly.

  "Well, then, listen to me, listen to Guru. We have now had enough information from you to suit our ends. Within twenty-four hours, we, the inhabitants of Ahli, will begin a war of extermination against Earth...."

  "But, why?" cried McIlvaine, astounded.

  The image before his mind's eye cleared. The cold, precise features of Guru betrayed anger.

  "There is interference," the thought-image informed him. "Leave the machine for a few moments, while we use the disintegrators."

  Before he left the machine, McIlvaine had the impression of a greater machine being attached to the means of communication which the inhabitants of his star were using to communicate with him.

  "McIlvaine's story was that a few moments later there was a blinding flash just outside his window," continued Harrigan. "There was also a run of instantaneous fire from the window to his machine. When he had collected his wits sufficiently, he ran outside to look. There was nothing there but a kind of grayish dust in a little mound—as if, as he put it, 'somebody had cleaned out a vacuum bag'. He went back in and examined the space from the window to the machine; there were two thin lines of dust there, hardly perceptible, just as if something had been attached to the machine and led outside.

  "Now the obvious supposition is naturally that it was Richardson out there, and that the lines of dust from the window to the machine represented the wires he had attached to his microphone while McIlvaine was at Bixby's entertaining his other two cronies, but this is fact, not fiction, and the point of the episode is that Richardson disappeared from that night on."

  "You investigated, of course?" I asked.

  Harrigan nodded. "Quite a lot of us investigated. The police might have done better. There was a gang war on in Chicago just at that time, and Richardson was nobody with any connections. His nearest relatives weren't anxious about anything but what they might inherit; to tell the truth, his cronies at Bixby's were the only people who worried about him. McIlvaine as much as the rest of them.