News From Elsewhere

by Edmuind Cooper

  “He said he was going to look around within a hundred-yard radius and collect samples. Then he ordered me back to the rocket.”

  “What did Captain Trenoy do?”

  “He questioned me and then spoke to you, sir, describing the landscape in detail and giving you a commentary on Dr. Luiss’s activities.”

  “Why did Captain Trenoy leave the rocket?”

  “Dr. Luiss called to him over the personal wavelength in a very excited voice. He said that he’d found the skeleton of a large quadruped with a cranial capacity of approximately one cubic foot. He said that the animals on Planet Five must have reached a very high evolutionary stage. Finally he suggested that Captain Trenoy come and have a look for himself, leaving me in the rocket. The Captain said it didn’t seem a very intelligent procedure, but Dr. Luiss replied that there were no living animals in sight, that the pampas were far enough away to give a reasonable safety margin, and that if the butterflies came near they could certainly be dispersed by ultrasonics.”

  Dr. Blane nodded. “That’s true. I heard snatches of their conversation over the transceiver. Did Captain Trenoy give you any instructions before he left?”

  “He put me through a simple test to make sure that my memory and reasoning ability were not damaged. Then he told me to stay in the rocket and not leave it under any circumstances.”

  “At which point,” said Dr. Blane thoughtfully, “you took over the commentary.”

  “That is so,” agreed Whizbang with a trace of hesitation. “I continued with the commentary until you gave me instructions to return to the Prometheus ”

  “But since I did not radio those instructions,” said Blane, staring hard at the robot, “we are left with two possibilities. Name them!”

  The robot was silent for a moment. Then he spoke slowly. “One: that my circuits are damaged. Two: that

  some other entity caused me to receive the message.” “Which do you think it is?” snapped Blane.

  “If you would like to test me, sir..began Whizbang. “To hell with tests! Which is it?”

  “I think my circuits are intact.”

  “Then you think the message originated elsewhere?” “Yes, sir—if you are sure you did not send it.”

  Blane controlled himself with difficulty. “We’ll leave that for the moment. Repeat verbatim your commentary to the point where I apparently ordered you to return.” “Whizbang to Prometheus,” said the robot. “Captain Trenoy is now descending through the oubliette to join Dr. Luiss. Dr. Luiss is examining the skeleton of the quadruped. The nearest butterflies are about two hundred yards away. There is a small cloud of them rising from the pampas. They appear to be circling aimlessly at an altitude of a hundred and fifty feet. . . . Captain Trenoy has now joined Dr. Luiss. They are digging together by the side of the skeleton. . . . The butterflies are drifting slightly. Captain Trenoy glances at them every few seconds while continuing his work. Now the cloud is almost above the skeleton at about two hundred feet . . . Suddenly the two men stand up. They stare at the butterflies. Dr. Luiss remarks over his personal radio that it is the most incredible thing he ever heard. Suddenly the butterflies drop fifty feet. At the same time Captain Trenoy and Dr. Luiss begin to unscrew their headpieces very slowly. . . .” Whizbang stopped.

  “Go on! Go on!” urged Dr. Blane.

  “Then, sir,” said Whizbang, “I heard your voice through the transceiver. You said: ‘Prometheus to Whizbang. Return to orbit immediately. Urgent! Return to orbit immediately. Over and out.’ ”

  “What happened next?” asked Blane.

  “I informed Captain Trenoy over the ground radio. He said: ‘You must obey, Whizbang. You must always obey.* So I sealed the rocket and took off as rapidly as possible. By the time I had equalized gravity and was beginning to release power, the butterflies had dropped another fifty feet. Captain Trenoy and Dr. Luiss were standing motionless. They had taken off their headpieces. . . . Then I had to let in power, and the rocket climbed.”

  “Was Captain Trenoy’s voice normal?”

  “No, sir. He spoke slowly and very quietly.”

  “Are you sure it was his voice?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  For two or three minutes Dr. Blane strode nervously up and down, tortured by indecision. Finally he made up his mind.

  “I am going down, Whizbang.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You will remain on duty here.”

  Dr. Blane set the rocket down gently. He unstrapped himself, stood up, and gazed through the plastigl-ass dome. A quarter of a mile away, he saw two motionless figures standing erect on a stretch of brown and crimson rock. Focusing the binoculars, Dr. Blane made out a cloud of butterflies hovering about ten feet above the men. The heads of his two companions were strangely obscured, but dull sunlight glinted on the surface of a headpiece lying at the feet of one of them.

  Grimly, Dr. Blane reached for the two ultrasonic vibrators. Placing them carefully in the pockets of his pressure suit, he descended through the oubliette. A few seconds later he stood on the strange surface of Planet Five.

  Gripping a vibrator in each hand, he looked cautiously around him, and then up at the sky. Apart from the cloud above the two men a quarter of a mile away, and the endless activity on the pampas, there did not seem to be any immediate danger.

  Slowly Dr. Blane walked toward his companions. At one hundred yards he stopped, stood quite still, took careful aim. He gave the cloud of butterflies a two-second dose of vibration. They scattered with much violent flapping, and a few dropped crazily down to the rocky surface. As they fell, another small cloud rose, and Dr. Blane knew then what had been obscuring the heads of Trenoy and Luiss. He fought back a sharp, involuntary sickness and marched on.

  At fifty yards he thought it was an illusion, but at twenty-five yards it became inescapable fact. Dr. Blane was approaching two men in pressure suits who were dead but still standing. Their clean-picked skulls were fixed in two barren grins.

  In his own pressure suit, Blane wqs sweating with panic. A sixth sense warned him to turn around and run. But it was already too late. For to Dr. Blane’s heightened perception there came the first faint strains of a vast, compelling music. It was the pattern, the experience, the mobility, the sheer harmony of a thousand symphonies condensed into a single chord.

  Turning with a tremendous effort, he saw the butterflies rising from the pampas, and knew—in the instant before that colossal theme of ecstasy blocked all thought—that presently the butterflies would begin to circle lower and lower.

  There were tears in Dr. Blane’s eyes. But they were not tears for his own approaching death. They were the only way in which he, and his companions before him, could react to an experience that was profound beyond any known to man, that was compelling and final, tearing its way past the flimsy threshold of human consciousness.

  The vibrators dropped from his impatient fingers. Slowly, hypnotically, Dr. Blane fumbled for the release clips of his headpiece. And the music swelled like sacramental thunder, the soundless music of thousands of multicolored butterflies, thousands of insect carnivores closing in upon their selected prey. And across the pampas, across the brown and crimson rocks, myriads of flapping wings proclaimed their centralization of power— submergence of the individual in a tremendous group identity.

  Dr. Blane stood there, unable to think, unable to see, unable to move—waiting for the butterflies to descend. Waiting for the crunch of small but powerful mandibles.

  The nine-hour day on Planet Five drew quietly to a close. Then the sun, known to Earthlings as the Companion of Sirius, began to slip smoothly over a blue and purple horizon. Presently the butterflies rose, winging across the pampas to their nocturnal, batlike roosts. Presently there was only the solitude of night, the remote mystery of stars. . . .

  The survey ship Prometheus remained in orbit for ten more days. Whizbang, the robot, kept a steady vigil by the transceiver on the navigation deck, in accordance with instructions. But the l
ack of response to his repeated signals forced him to the obvious conclusion.

  He satisfied himself that there was one very sound reason why there could be no survivors: men, unlike robots, cannot exist without water. Unfortunately, the water on Planet Five was different from its terrestrial counterpart, belonging to a different geological cycle. Its chemical symbol was infinitely more complex than mere H2O.

  So Whizbang brought in an open verdict, secure in the conviction that his masters could no longer be alive.

  He had, however, no knowledge of the manner of their deaths. When he too had been a victim of the butterfly-mind, he had not heard the compelling music, for it was reaching to something far deeper than a synthetic brain. He had merely been positronically disturbed. He had merely been, for the first time in his robotic existence, asleep while his batteries were still powered. Nor could he know that, with a superior act of volition, the butterfly-mind had simply willed him to go away. Being metallic, he was not a possible source of food; and not being a source of food, he was only irrelevant.

  But even a robot must rationalize when forced to act without human command. So Whizbang had found it necessary to “invent” Dr. Blane’s instructions to return to the Prometheus.

  Standing now on the navigation deck, he stared with red, expressionless eyes at the surface of Planet Five.

  At last he reached a decision. The information would have to be given to other human beings, who would then assume responsibility.

  Whizbang jerked himself up into the astrodome and began to take bearings. As he worked, he knew neither happiness nor anxiety, neither hope nor despair, neither regret nor relief.

  He knew only that he could handle the relativity drive more efficiently than men.

  THE LIZARD OF WOZ

  Ynkwysytyv dropped Ms flying saucer down to ten thousand feet and allowed it to amble through the sky at a thousand miles an hour. Below him lay the United States of America, which he found very boring to look at.

  His telescope had revealed no signs at all of intelligent lizard life—only a host of odd-looking bipeds who lived in peculiar-shaped Mves and used primitive land carriages to get from one place to another. True, they had flying machines—but of a somewhat amateurish design.

  As a matter of fact, Ynkwysytyv had whiled away the last few minutes by playing leapfrog with two ridiculously flimsy jet aircraft. But when they began to pump rockets at him, he lost Ms temper and neatly burned off their w7ings with a heat ray—which made life interesting for a couple of incredulous Air Force pilots. Fortunately their ejector seats and parachutes were in working order.

  If the truth be known, Ynkwysytyv—or Ynky, as Ms colleagues in the United Planets Organization called him—was not only bored but definitely unhappy. He had to admit, however, that the assignment to this remote and backward area of the galaxy was largely Ms own doing. If he had not allowed Ms tail to be turned by the irresistible scales and the seductive yellow streak of the Senior Administrator’s only daughter, he would still be at U.P.O. headquarters on Woz.

  He sighed nostalgically as he thought of Ms home planet, five hundred light-years away. He sighed as he remembered the clear green skies, the deep blue grass, the pink rain forests, and the boiling crimson oceans. Then he snorted with disgust as he looked down at the miserable world he had come to survey.

  The colors were wrong, the inhabitants were backward and ugly, and the whole place would probably have to be fumigated to make it fit for colonization. Possibly a few of the more intelligent natives could be retained for slave labor. But their rudimentary technology seemed to indicate that this was hardly worthwhile. Robots would be far more efficient.

  However, his instructions were to survey the planet, establish friendly contact with the inhabitants, and prepare a detailed report on their culture—if any. All of which was a complete waste of time, since the report would be filed away and forgotten for a couple of centuries. Then some junior official would stumble across it and sign an order for total demolition under the slum-clearance program.

  Ynky had every justification for taking a cynical view of life. His journey to the Solar System had lasted more than ten years, and his hibernation clock had accidentally woken him up eighteen months before planetfall—thus giving him ample opportunity for reflection on lizard’s inlizardity to lizard. It was downright vindictive of the Senior Administrator to pack him off to this hole—and all because his sex band had turned purple at the wrong moment.

  Being a mere two hundred years old, Ynky regarded it as the worst possible beginning for the best century of his youth. By the time he got back to Woz all the females in his egg group would have mated, and he would be condemned to a bachelor existence for at least another seventy-five years.

  During his hibernation in the flying saucer, Ynky had naturally been programmed to fluency in all major terrestrial languages, for he was not the first Woz lizard to visit Earth. Some years previously, a blue-tailed language specialist had touched down to do research on elementary methods of communication. He had managed to beam back to Woz the basic language patterns of English, French, Russian, and Chinese before being converted into a nourishing soup by the uncultured inhabitants of New Guinea.

  Ynky gazed distastefully down at the planetary surface and shrugged. Might as well make a start somewhere. He reluctantly eased the saucer Earthwards.

  Below was a deserted highway and an equally deserted roadside cafe. Ynky hovered indecisively for a moment, wondering whether he should press on to a more promising location. But what was the use? The whole civilization was monotonously primitive.

  He touched down about a hundred yards from the cafe. He got out of the saucer, sniffed the air cautiously—too much poisonous oxygen and not enough nitrogen—and began to walk along the highway. Then, realizing he had forgotten something, he went back and rendered the saucer invisible as a precaution against any curious bipeds who happened along.

  As lizards go, Ynky was an impressive specimen. Poised erect on his hind legs, he was four feet tall, excluding an extra three feet of red and purple tail that waved proudly behind him like an animated battle standard. However, in accordance with what the late blue-tailed language specialist had observed of diplomatic procedure, he also wore a top hat and morning coat.

  His entrance, therefore, at the Shady Nook Cafe introduced an element of novelty into the otherwise quiet existence of its proprietor, one Sam Goodwin. Sam, whose favorite relaxation was to read all about bug-eyed monsters, behaved with commendable fortitude when one actually appeared.

  “Howdy,” said Sam, scratching his gray hair and trying to look as if the top hat hadn’t shaken him at all. “How are things in the galaxy?”

  Ynky was pleasantly surprised by this first contact with Homo sapiens. He had anticipated some initial difficulty.

  “We try to keep the constellations burning,” he said modestly, “but you know how it is.”

  “Sure,” agreed Sam confidentially. “What’ll you eat? Steak, fried chicken, burger?”

  Ynky shuddered, remembering the blue-tailed lizard’s repeated warnings about the standard of terrestrial cooking. “I’ll take fruit,” he said. “A dozen apples, a dozen oranges, and a dozen bananas.”

  “Drink?” said Sam, filling the counter with fruit.

  “Milk,” decided Ynky. “About six quarts.”

  He disposed of the lot simultaneously, to Sam’s intense interest. Ten seconds later. Ynky dexterously slipped an arm down his throat and extracted empty milk cartons, banana skins, and orange peel all neatly tied up in a plastic wrapper for disposal.

  “Cute trick,” observed Sam. “Is that normal, or just for the benefit of the natives?”

  “Normal,” said Ynky. “We have somewhat delicate table manners on Woz.”

  “Come again?”

  “Woz is my home planet. I have been given the task of reporting to the United Planets Organization on the state of your world. ... I may add that, though I find you as a biped less repulsive than I
had expected, I shall probably have to recommend fumigation.”

  “You have my interest,” said Sam. “What is fumigation, and why?”

  Ynky leaned on the counter, removed his top hat, and expounded. “Fumigation is a means of rendering a planet sterile by the introduction of an interesting gas that our chemists have developed. It is a breeder gas. That is to say, if a small quantity is introduced into any atmosphere it will quickly make the whole atmosphere lethal. A fine achievement, don’t you think? Well beyond your own elementary science, of course.”

  Sam had read about this sort of situation in the pulp magazines. He was not sure he approved of it.

  “Permit me to inquire,” he said courteously, “why this little old planet should be fumigated?”

  Ynky smiled. “We have made the mistake of trying to civilize bipeds before. Too intractable. There were some rather promising apes on Sirius Five—intelligent enough to train as technicians, or so we thought. Unfortunately, they developed a mania for political independence and blew three of our battle squadrons out of space before we demonstrated to them the error of their ways. ... So you see, it is not wise to educate inferior creatures beyond their natural ability. It will be rather a pity about Homo sapiens. In some ways you are a definite improvement on the apes of Sirius.”

  “Thank you,” said Sam. “That’s nice to know.”

  “Don’t mention it,” said Ynky. “There is the possibility of retaining a few slaves, of course. If you are interested, I’ll gladly recommend you.”

  “Thank you,” repeated Sam. “That’s real considerate. ... I guess you must have a pretty big team investigating earth right now.”

  Ynky gave him a patronizing smile. “No,” he said. “Only me. One lizard was considered adequate for such a simple assignment.”