The Day the Earth Stood Still: Selected Stories of Harry Bates

by Harry Bates

  " 'Enough!' I cried, and the flip of my arm was followed by another sharp crack. 'Justice to the mother who bore Homo Sapiens! Next!'

  "The next was an awful-looking wreck–worse than the first. 'What good can you say of him?' I asked.

  " 'He is a great scientist.'

  " 'Can you interpret his thoughts?'

  "Pearl sunk and thunk. 'Mind force–' she said tonelessly. 'How powerful–mm–yes, powerful–Basis of everything living–mm–really is everything–no living, all thinking–in direct proportion as it is not, there is nothing. Mm, yes, everything is relative, but everything together makes unity–therefore, we have a relative unit–or, since the reverse is the other half of the obverse, the two together equal another unity, and we get the equation: a relative unit equals a unit of relativity–Sounds as if it might mean something. Einstein was a primitive. I agree with Wlyxzso. He was a greater mind than Yutwexi. And so it is proved that mind always triumphs over matter–'

  " 'Proved!' I said–and crack went his neck! 'Justice!' I cried. 'Next!'

  "The next, Pearl told me, was a metaphysician. 'Ye gods' I cried; 'don't tell me that among this lot of super-metaphysicians there is a specialist and an ultra. What's he thinking?'

  "But this time poor Pearl was in doubt. 'To tell the truth we're not sure whether he thinks or not,' she said, 'or whether he is alive or dead. Sometimes we seem to get ideas so faint that we doubt if we really hear them; at others there is a pure blank.'

  " 'Try,' I ordered. 'Try hard. Every last dead one must have his chance to be killed.'

  "She tried. Eventually she said, 'I really think he is alive–Truth-air-truth firmly rooted high in air–ah, branching luxuriantly down toward earth–but never touching, so I cannot quite reach the branches, though I so easily grasp the roots–'

  "Crack! went his neck.

  "I cracked a dozen others. It got easier all the time. Then, Pearl presented me to the prize of the collection. He had a head the size of a bushel basket.

  " 'What good can you say of him?'

  " 'He is the greatest of us all, and I do beg that you will spare him,' was her reply. 'I don't know what his specialty is, but every one here regarded him so highly!'

  " 'What is he thinking?' I asked.

  " 'That's it,' she replied. 'No one knows. From birth he has never spoken; he used to drool at the mouth; no one has been able to detect any sign of cerebration. We put him in a cell very early. One of us gave an opinion that he was a congenital hydrocephalic idiot, but that was an error of judgment, for the rest of us have always been sure that his blankness is only apparent. His meditations are simply beyond our gross sensibilities. He no doubt ponders the uttermost problems of infinity.'

  " 'Try,' I said. 'Even he gets his chance.'

  "Pearl tried, and got nothing. Crack! went his neck.

  "And so it went. One by one, with rapid dispatch, and with a gusto that still surprises me when I think of it, I rid the earth of its public enemies. By the time the sun was high in the heavens the job was complete, and I had become the next lord of creation!

  CHAPTER VIII

  "The effect of the morning's work sent Pearl into a meditation that lasted for hours. When she came out of it she seemed her usual self; but inside, as I know now, something was changed, or, let us say, accelerated; and when this acceleration had reached a certain point my goosish ambition was ignominiously cooked. Ah, and very well cooked! Humorous and serious–I was well done on both sides!

  "But realization of my final humiliation came late and suddenly. My thoughts were not at all on any danger like that, but on millions of darling descendants in whose every parlor would hang my picture, when Pearl came out of her extended trance.

  "I had decided to be awfully nice to her-a model father even if not the perfect lover–so it was almost like a courtier that I escorted her out on the field and handed her over to a large stone, where she promptly sat and efficiently asked what I wanted. I imagined she showed a trace of disappointment when I told her I only wished to talk over some arrangements relative to our coming civilization; but she made no remark, let me paint a glowing picture of the possibilities, and agreed with me on the outlines of the various plans I had formed.

  "I was in a hurry. I asked her if she desired to slip back to my time to have the ceremony performed.

  "This offer was, I thought, a delicate gesture on my part. She came back with what amounted to a terrific right to the heart. She said severely, " 'Yes, Frick, I will marry you, but first, you must court me.' "Observe, now, Miles, and you, Charles, my rapid ascent to asshood's most sublime peak. Countless other men have spent their lives trying to attain that dizzy height; a few have almost reached its summit, but it remained for me, the acting lord of creation, to achieve it. For–there was nothing else to do about it–I began to court her!

  " 'Hold my hand,' she said–and I held her hand. She thought. 'Tell me that you love me,' she required. I told her that I loved her. 'But look at me when you say it,' she demanded–and I looked into her fleshless face with the thin lips that always reminded me of alum and said again that I loved her. Again she took thought, and I got the impression that she was inspecting her sensations. 'Kiss me,' she ordered; and when I did she slid to the ground in a think!

  " 'There are mysteries in there somewhere,' she said when I pulled her up. 'I shall have to give a great deal of thought to them.'

  "I was in a hurry! I told her–Lord forgive me!–that she was clearly falling in love with me! And within herself she found something–I can't imagine what–that encouraged the idea. I struck while the iron was–well, not at absolute zero.

  " 'Oh, come on,' I urged her. 'You see how we love each other: let's get married and get it over with.'

  " 'No. you'll have to court me,' she answered, and I'll swear she was being coy. 'And court me for a long time, too,' she added. 'I found out all about it, in your time. It takes months.'

  "This was terrible! 'But why wait? Why? We love each other. Look at Romeo and Juliet! Remember?'

  " 'I liked that young man Rudy better,' she came back at a tangent.

  " 'You mean the man in the night club?' I asked.

  " 'Yes,' she answered. 'He seemed to be singing just to me.

  " 'Not singing–crooning!' I corrected irritably.

  " 'Yes, crooning,' she allowed. 'You croon to me, Frick.'

  "Imagine it! Me, of all people; she, of all people; and out in the middle of that field in broad daylight!

  "But did I croon? I crooned. You have not seen me at the heights yet!

  " 'More,' she said abstractedly. 'I think I feel something.'

  "I crooned some more.

  " 'Something with love and above in it,' she ordered.

  "I made up something with love and above in it.

  " 'And something with you and true,' she went on.

  "I did it.

  " 'Now kiss me again.'

  "And I did that!

  "Thank Heaven she flopped into another think! I escaped to the woods while she was unconscious, and did not see her again till the next day.

  "My friends, this was the ignoble pattern of my life for the two weeks that followed.

  "I suffered; how I suffered! There I was, all a-burning to be the author of a new civilization, luxuriating in advance at thought of titanic tasks complete; and there she was, surely the most extraordinary block to superhuman ambition that ever was, forever chilling my ardor, ruthlessly demanding to be courted! I held hands with her all over that portion of time; I gazed into her eyes at the tomb of old Hydrocephalus himself; I crooned to her at midnight; and I'll bet that neighborhood was pitted for years in the places she suddenly sat down to meditate on in the midst of a kiss!

  "She had observed closely–all too closely–the technique of love overtures here in our time, and noted particularly the effect on the woman, so she must needs always be going off into a personal huddle to see if, perhaps, she was beginning to react in the desired manner!

&nb
sp; "Ah, there was brains! How glad I am that I'm dumb!

  "I began to lose weight and go around tired. I saw that our courtship could go on forever. But she saved me with an idea she got out of one of those novels she had read. She told me one rainy morning, brightly, that it might be a good thing if we did not see each other for a couple of months. She had so very, very much to think over, and, incidentally, how sorry she was for her poor countrymen who had died without dreaming life could hold such wealth of emotional experience as she had accumulated from me!

  "By then I was as much as ever in a rush to get my revised race off under their own power, but I was physically so exhausted that my protests lacked force, and I had to give in. So we made all arrangements and had our last talk. It was fully understood that I was to come back in two months and take her as my bride. She showed me how to operate the traveler. I set the controls, and in a matter of a minute I was back here in this room.

  "But I tricked her. That is, in a sense. For I didn't wait two months. The idea occurred to me to straddle that period in the traveler–so in only another minute I was materializing in the time two months away that I was to call back and claim her! I was thankful for that machine, for the long ordeal had left my body weak and my nerves frazzled, and I don't know how I could have stood so long a delay. You see, I was in such a hurry!

  "Ah, had I known! The catastrophe was already upon me! Note its terrible, brief acceleration!

  "When I arrived, all was exactly as before. The great building was as dusty, the community as deserted, the block of cells just as morbid as when I left. Only the fields had changed. I found Pearl sitting before the tomb of Hydrocephalus, meditating.

  " 'I'm surprised to find you back so soon,' were her words of greeting. 'It seemed only a week.'

  " 'Did you have a good time, my Pearl-of-great-price?' I asked tenderly. (She had come to insist on that name. Once, near despair, I had used it with a different meaning, and afterward she required me to lash myself with it whenever I addressed her.)

  " 'It was a period of most interesting integration,' she replied. 'In fact, it has been a precious experience. But I have come to realize that we were hasty in terminating the noble lives of my fellow men.'

  "This was ominous! I made her go for a walk in the fields with me. Three times on the way out she found things I lightly mentioned to be problems requiring immediate squatting and meditating!

  "I sensed that this was the crisis, and it was. I threw all my resources into an attempt to force immediate victory. I held her hands with one of mine, hooked my free arm around her waist, placed my lips to hers and crooned, 'Marry me right now, darling! I can't wait! I love you, I adore you, I am quite mad over you'–and damn it, at the word mad she squatted!

  "I picked her up and tried it again, but like clockwork, on the word mad she went down again. Oh, I was mad over her, all right!

  "I was boiling! You see, I had to hurry so! She was changing right under my nose!

  "I fairly flew back to the time machine. I was going to learn once and for all what my future with regard to a potential human race was to be. I set its dials one year ahead.

  "This time I found Pearl in the vacant cell. She was distinctly older, dryer, thinner, and her head was larger in size. She sat on the dais as had the others; and there was a light dust on her clothing–

  " 'It is strange that you should come at this moment,' she said in a rusty voice. 'I was thinking of you.'

  "With the last word she closed her eyes–so she should not see me, only think of me. I saw that the food box was full. Despair in my heart, I went back to the traveler.

  "For a long time I hesitated in front of it. I was close to the bottom. The change had happened so quickly! To Pearl it took a year, to me, only an hour; yet her acts were as fixed, her character as immutable, as if they had been petrified under the weight of a millennium.

  "I nerved myself for what I had to do. Suddenly, recklessly, I jumped on the traveler, set it for seventy years ahead, and shot forth into time.

  "I saw Pearl once more. I hardly recognized her in the monster who sat on the dais in her cell. Her body was shriveled. Her head had grown huge. Her nose had subsided. Her mouth was a nasty, crooked slit. She sat in thick dust; and there was an inch of it where there had once been brown hair, and more on every little upper surface.

  "She had a musty smell!

  "She had reverted to type. She had overcome the differentness of her start and was already far down the nauseating road which over-brained humanity has yet to go.

  "As I stood looking at her, her eyelids trembled a little, and I felt she knew I was there. It was horrible; but worse was to come. The mouth, too, moved; it twisted; opened; and out of it came an awful creak.

  " 'Tell me that you love me.'

  "I fled back to my time!"

  CHAPTER IX

  Frick's long narrative had come to a close, but its end effect was of such sudden horror that Miles and I could not move from the edges of our chairs. In the silence Frick's voice still seemed to go on, exuberant, laughing, bitter, flexing with changing moods. The man himself sat slumped back in his chair, head low, drained of energy.

  We sat this way long minutes, each with his thoughts, and each one's thoughts fixing terribly on the thing we knew Frick was going to do and which we would not ask him not to do. Frick raised his head and spoke, and I quivered at the implication of his words.

  "The last time she had food for only five years," he said.

  Out of the depths of me came a voice, answering, "It will be an act of mercy."

  "For you," Frick said. "I shall do it because she is the loathsome last."

  He got up; fixed us in turn with bitter eyes.

  "You will come?" he asked.

  We did not answer. He must have read our assent in our eyes. He smiled sardonically.

  He went over to the door he had pointed out, unlocked it with a key from his pocket, pulled its heavy weight open, entered, switched on a light. I got up and followed, trembling, Miles after me.

  "I had the traveler walled up," Frick said. "I have never used it since."

  I saw the machine. It was as he had described it. It hung in nothingness two feet off the floor! For a moment I lacked the courage to step on, and Frick pushed me up roughly. He was beginning to show the excitement which was to gather such momentum.

  Miles stepped up promptly, and then Frick himself was up, hands on the controls. "Don't move!" he cried–and then the room was dim goldenness, then nothing at all, and I felt permeated with fathomless silence.

  Suddenly there was the goldenness again, and just as suddenly it left. We were in a small dark room. It was night.

  I wondered if she knew we were coming.

  We went to her silently, prowlers in infinity, our carpet the dust of ages. A turn, a door–and there was field land asleep under the pale wash of a gibbous moon. A walk, a turn–and there were the thirty-six sepulchers of the degenerate dead. One, not quite dead.

  I was as in a dream.

  Through the tall grass we struck, stealthily, Frick in the van like a swift-stalking animal. Straight through the wet grass he led us, though it clung to our legs as if to restrain us from our single purpose. Straight among those silent sepulchers we went. Nature was nodding; her earth stretched out everywhere oblivious; and the ages to come, they did not care. Nor cared the mummied tenants of each tomb around us. Not now, with their heads resting on their ribs. Only Frick did, very much. He was a young humanity's agent because of an old one's degradation. Splendidly, he was judge and executioner.

  He slowed down before the sepulcher where was one who was yet alive. He paused there; and I prayed. An intake of breath, and he pulled open the door and entered. Dreadfully, Miles, then I, edged in after.

  The door swung closed.

  The tomb was a well of ink. Unseen dust rose to finger my throat. There was a musty smell! I held my breath, but my heart pounded on furiously. Ever so faintly through the pressing silence
I heard the pounding of two others.

  Could it be possible that a fourth heart was weakly beating there?

  Faint sounds of movement came from my left. An arm brushed my side, groping. I heard a smothered gasp; I think it was from Miles. Soon I had to have air, and breathed, in catches. I waited, straining, my eyes toward where, ahead, there might have been a deeper blackness through the incessant gloom.

  Silence. Was Frick gathering courage? I could feel him peering beside me there, afraid of what he had to see.

  I knew a moment when the suspense became intolerable, and in that moment it was all over. There was a movement, a scratch, a match sputtered into light; for one eternal second I looked through a dim haze of dust on a mummied monstrosity whose eyelids moved!–and then darkness swept over us again, and there was a sharp crack, as of a broken stick, and I was running wildly with Death itself at my heels through that graveyard in a race to the building where lay our traveler,

  In minutes we were back in our own time; in a few more Frick had blown up the traveler and I was out of the laboratory making for the Sound, sharp on my mind, as I went, the never-to-be-forgotten picture of Miles as he had raced behind me blurting, "She blinked! Oh, she blinked!" and that other, striding godlike in the rear, a little out of his head at the moment, who waved his arms over that fulfilled cemetery and thundered–

  "Sic transit gloria mundi!"

  A MATTER OF SIZE

  CHAPTER I

  THOUGH his head was as stuffed with cotton, the details of the scene in his New York laboratory that night came back with insistent clearness. It was long past the turn of the clock, and he had been working for hours on a monograph on the Mutrantian Titans, which would establish indubitably the biological brotherhood of those colossi of Saturn's Satellite Three with the genus Homo of Earth. He was deeply immersed, and the muted night murmurs of the great city around and below washed unheeded through his cars.

  Then something, perhaps a slight motion, an extraneous noise, caused him to look up–and there, within the lamplight on the far side of his desk, stood the most amazing figure of a man that he, ethnologist though he was, had ever seen.