“I know,” said her husband soothingly. “But the ‘lorum is pretty smart in its own way. It will take care of itself.”
There was doubt in his tone, however, and his son was quick to spot it. The little boy said:
“Don’t worry about Uncle ‘Lorum. It told us to tell you everything was—what does jim-dandy mean, Daddy?”
“Yes, what does jim-dandy mean, Mr. Lawrence?” asked Julie.
“Why—it’s archaic Earth slang for fine,” said Harold Lawrence. He glanced at his wife and smiled. “Did Uncle ‘Lorum have anything else to tell you that you think we should know?”
“Well—yes, Daddy,” said Martin. He glanced sheepishly at O’Hare, who had drifted up from his cabin. “It was like a fairy story but it didn’t feel like a fairy story.”
“What did Uncle ‘Lorum say—what was it?” O’Hare’s voice was sharp with suddenly reawakened suspicion. It was little Julie who broke the silence.
“He told us a story about an ambitious king who wanted a suit of clothes like no other suit in the world,” she parroted. “His tailors couldn’t make good enough ones for him, so he cut off their heads. Finally a man came along and said he could make the suit so different that nobody could even see it. . . .” “Good heavens!” It was O’Hare, and there was dawning comprehension in his green Irish eyes. “ ‘The Emperor’s New Suit’!” He gazed at the others, almost pleading. “Funny,” he added, “I was thinking of it just before the attack.”
“You mean the one about the king who thought he was wearing an invisible suit until the little boy pointed out that he was stark naked?” said Harold Lawrence, frowning.
~ * ~
They took the elevator to the control room and adjusted the remote-control scanner on the planet they had just left, now a full three thousand miles behind them.
“Good heavens!” said Lawrence. “Something’s happened to the ‘lorum. It’s spread out all over the compound!”
“I see,” said O’Hare sourly. Then, suddenly, he lashed into an outburst of colorful Gaelic profanity.
“Take it easy,” said Lawrence. “What’s it all about, anyway?”
“Can’t you see?” asked the biologist, pointing again toward the scanner screen. “Can’t you understand that we’ve spent six years being the original suckers of the spaceways?”
“Come again?” said Lawrence.
“I’m not crazy,” said O’Hare soberly. “Put it together—the ‘lorum, the compound, the invisible monsters.”
Comprehension dawned slowly in Lawrence’s light-blue eyes. “Then you mean—”
“I mean the mangards never were,” O’Hare replied. “I’ve been suspecting it more and more lately.”
“And now the ‘lorum has assumed its natural shape since we are gone.”
“Exactly,” said O’Hare. “For six long Earth years we have been spending the bulk of our time giving the ‘lorum a home to fit its true relaxed shape. During all that time it has remained in defense position, its body balled like that of an armadillo.
“And whenever we began to get at our real work it would stage another mangard attack,” said O’Hare, bitter now that full understanding had come to him. “ ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’!”
“But the attacks,” protested Harold Lawrence. “Surely—”
“Pfui!” said O’Hare rudely. “There were no attacks. Our friend simply put on a fireworks show to frighten us whenever it thought we needed a spur.”
“But I myself saw it destroy an Ardigan with a bolt of electricity,” said Lawrence. “Why should it need walls to protect itself from the other life on the planet?”
O’Hare swore again. “When I think of the way we swallowed that hooey about the S-shape being contrary to the mangards’ molecular makeup! The reason it wanted all those S-shaped bastions was so it could stretch out in comfort. Gentlemen, when bigger suckers are made, we’ll be them.”
“I’m beginning to understand,” said Lawrence. “Our ‘lorum is lazy— perhaps the laziest creature of its intelligence in the cosmos. So lazy that it is willing to sit in an unnatural position for two of its years and put on occasional electric shows to keep us building walls to save it in future from having to exert energy to blast wandering Ardigans.”
“We can’t let it get away with this,” said O’Hare.
“We’ve been had,” said Lawrence. “But I don’t think we had better do anything about it.”
“We could plant an A-pellet right in the middle of that thing’s patio,” said O’Hare, eyes still on the scanner.
“Somehow,” said Lawrence thoughtfully, “I don’t think any such measures would work. No creature of the ‘lorum’s intelligence and telepathic powers would remain long in ignorance of our weapons—and it must by this time have devised its defense.”
“Aye, you’re right, Harry,” said O’Hare sadly. “And the nerve of the creature, leaving word with the children to tell us we’ve been hoaxed!”
“There’s a lot of ham in the ‘lorum,” said Lawrence, moving forward to check the control settings. “What an exit line!”
<
~ * ~
James H. Schmitz
SECOND NIGHT OF SUMMER
With this tale we encounter in full bloom the notion of a highly advanced interstellar civilization quietly and efficiently run by an enormous but unobtrusive technological bureaucracy which, in this particular instance, however, plays but a subdued background part in the actual development of the narrative. Along with it, we also meet the concept that many of the planets in the Galaxy will be of the Earthian sort and will either have developed essentially human life forms or will have been colonized by Earth people. Not all of the civilizations found on these planets will be on the same level of development, of course.
These are some of the commonplaces of modern science fiction. What is not commonplace in this particular story is the unique struggle against a fantastic extra-Galactic invasion with which it deals.
~ * ~
ON THE night after the day that brought summer officially to the land of Wend, on the planet of Noorhut, the shining lights were seen again in the big hollow at the east end of Grimp’s father’s farm.
Grimp watched them for more than an hour from his upstairs room. The house was dark, but an occasional murmur of voices floated up to him through the windows below. Everyone in the farmhouse was looking at the lights.
On the other farms around and in the village, which was over a hill and another two miles up the valley, every living soul who could get within view of the hollow was probably doing the same. For a time, the agitated yelling of the Village Guardian’s big pank-hound had sounded clearly over the hill, but he had quieted down then very suddenly—or had been quieted down, more likely, Grimp suspected. The Guardian was dead-set against anyone making a fuss about the lights—and that included the pank-hound, too.
There was some excuse for the pank-hound’s excitement, though. From the window, Grimp could see there were a lot more lights tonight than had turned up in previous years—big, brilliant-blue bubbles, drifting and rising and falling silently all about the hollow. Sometimes one would lift straight up for several hundred feet, or move off over the edge of the hollow for about the same distance, and hang there suspended for a few minutes, before floating back to the others. That was as far as they ever went away from the hollow.
There was, in fact, no need for the Halpa detector-globes to go any farther than that to get the information wanted by those who had sent them out, and who were listening now to the steady flow of brief reports, in some Halpa equivalent of human speech-thought, coming back to them through the globes: “No signs of hostile activity in the vicinity of the breakthrough point. No weapons or engines of power within range of detection. The area shows no significant alterations since the last investigation. Sharp curiosity among those who observe us consciously—traces of alarm and suspicion. But no overt hostility.”
The reports streamed on without inte
rruption, repeating the same bits of information automatically and incessantly, while the globes floated and dipped soundlessly above and about the hollow.
Grimp continued to watch them, blinking sleepily now and then, until a spreading glow over the edge of the valley announced that Noorhut’s Big Moon was coming up slowly, like a Planetary Guardian, to make its own inspection of the lights. The globes began to dim out then, just as they always had done at moonrise in the preceding summers; and even before the top rim of the Big Moon’s yellow disk edged over the hills, the hollow was completely dark.
Grimp heard his mother starting up the stairs. He got hurriedly into bed. The show was over for the night and he had a lot of pleasant things to think about before he went to sleep.
Now that the lights had showed up, his good friend Grandma Erisa Wannattel and her patent-medicine trailer were sure to arrive, too. Sometime late tomorrow afternoon, the big draft-trailer would come rolling up the valley road from the city. For that was what Grandma Wannattel had done the past four summers—ever since the lights first started appearing above the hollow for the few nights they were to be seen there each year. And since four years were exactly half of Grimp’s whole life, that made Grandma’s return a mathematical certainty for him.
Other people, of course, like the Village Guardian, might have a poor opinion of Grandma, but just hanging around her and the trailer and the gigantic, exotic-looking rhinocerine pony that pulled it was, in Grimp’s opinion, a lot better even than going to the circus.
And vacations started the day after tomorrow! The whole future just now, in fact, looked like one good thing after another, extending through a vista of summery infinities.
Grimp went to sleep happily.
~ * ~
AT ABOUT the same hour, though at a distance greater than Grimp’s imagination had stretched as yet, eight large ships came individually out of the darkness between the stars that was their sea, and began to move about Noorhut in a carefully timed pattern of orbits. They stayed much too far out to permit any instrument of space-detection to suspect that Noorhut might be their common center of interest..
But that was what it was. Though the men who crewed the eight ships bore the people of Noorhut no ill will, hardly anything could have looked less promising for Noorhut than the cargo they had on board.
Seven of them were armed with a gas which was not often used any more. A highly volatile lethal catalyst, it sank to the solid surface of a world over which it was freed and spread out swiftly there to the point where its presence could no longer be detected by any chemical means. However, its effect of drawing the final breath almost imperceptibly out of all things that were oxygen-breathing was not noticeably reduced by diffusion.
The eighth ship was equipped with a brace of torpedoes, which were normally released some hours after the gas-carriers dispersed their invisible death. They were quite small torpedoes, since the only task remaining for them would be to ignite the surface of the planet that had been treated with the catalyst.
All those things might presently happen to Noorhut. But they would happen only if a specific message was flashed from it to the circling squadron—the message that Noorhut already was lost to a deadly foe who must, at any cost now, be prevented from spreading out from it to other inhabited worlds.
~ * ~
NEXT afternoon, right after school, as Grimp came expectantly around the bend of the road at the edge of the farm, he found the village policeman sitting there on a rock, gazing tearfully down the road.
“Hello, Runny,” said Grimp, disturbed. Considered in the light of gossip he’d overhead in the village that morning, this didn’t look so good for Grandma. It just didn’t look good.
The policeman blew his nose on a handkerchief he carried tucked into the front of his uniform, wiped his eyes, and gave Grimp an annoyed glance.
“Don’t you call me Runny, Grimp!” he said, replacing the handkerchief. Like Grimp himself and most of the people on Noorhut, the policeman was brown-skinned and dark-eyed, normally a rather good-looking young fellow. But his eyes were swollen and red-rimmed now; and his nose, which was a bit larger than average, anyway, was also red and swollen and undeniably runny. He had hay-fever.
Grimp apologized and sat down thoughtfully on the rock beside the policeman, who was one of his numerous cousins, most of the families of Noorhut being somehow related. He was about to mention that he had overheard Vellit using the expression when she and the policeman came through the big Leeth-flower orchard above the farm the other evening—at a much less leisurely rate than was their custom there. But he thought better of it. Vellit was the policeman’s girl for most of the year, but she broke their engagement regularly during hay-fever season and called him cousin instead of dearest.
“What are you doing here?” Grimp asked bluntly instead.
“Waiting,” said the policeman.
“For what?” said Grimp, with a sinking heart.
“Same individual you are, I guess,” the policeman told him, hauling out the handkerchief again.
He blew. “This year she’s going to go right back where she came from or get pinched.”
“Who says so?” scowled Grimp.
“The Guardian, that’s who,” said the policeman. “That good enough for you?”
“He can’t do it!” Grimp said hotly. “It’s our farm, and she’s got all her licenses.”
“He’s had a whole year to think up a new list she’s got to have,” the policeman informed him. He fished in the breast-pocket of his uniform, pulled out a folded paper and opened it. “He put thirty-four items down here I got to check—she’s bound to miss on one of them.”
“It’s a dirty trick!” said Grimp, rapidly scanning as much as he could see of the list.
“Let’s us have more respect for the Village Guardian, Grimp!” the policeman said warningly.
“Uh-huh,” muttered Grimp. “Sure…” If Runny would just move his big thumb out of the way. But what a list! Trailer; rhinocerine pony (beast, heavy draft, imported); patent medicines; household utensils; fortune-telling; pets; herbs; miracle-healing—
The policeman looked down, saw what Grimp was doing and raised the paper out of his line of vision. “That’s an official document,” he said, warding Grimp off with one hand and tucking the paper away with the other. “Let’s us not get our dirty hands on it.”
Grimp was thinking fast. Grandma Wannattel did have framed licenses for some of the items he’d read hanging around inside the trailer, but certainly not thirty-four of them.
“Remember that big skinless werret I caught last season?” he asked.
The policeman gave him a quick glance, looked away again and wiped his eyes thoughtfully. The season on werrets would open the following week and he was as ardent a fisherman as anyone in the village—and last summer Grimp’s monster werret had broken a twelve-year record in the valley.
“Some people,” Grimp said idly, staring down the valley road to the point where it turned into the woods, “would sneak after a person for days who’s caught a big werret, hoping he’d be dumb enough to go back to that pool.”
The policeman flushed and dabbed the handkerchief gingerly at his nose.
“Some people would even sit in a haystack and use spyglasses, even when the hay made them sneeze like crazy,” continued Grimp quietly.
The policeman’s flush deepened. He sneezed.
“But a person isn’t that dumb,” said Grimp. “Not when he knows there’s anyway two werrets there six inches bigger than the one he caught.”
“Six inches?” the policeman repeated a bit incredulously—eagerly.
“Easy,” nodded Grimp. “I had a look at them again last week.”
It was the policeman’s turn to think. Grimp idly hauled out his slingshot, fished a pebble out of his small-pebble pocket and knocked the head off a flower twenty feet away. He yawned negligently.
“You’re pretty good with that slingshot,” the policeman remarked. �
�You must be just about as good as the culprit that used a slingshot to ring the fire-alarm signal on the defense unit bell from the top of the schoolhouse last week.”
“That’d take a pretty good shot,” Grimp admitted.
“And who then,” continued the policeman, “dropped pepper in his trail, so the pank-hound near coughed off his head when we started to track him. The Guardian,” he added significantly, “would like to have a clue about that culprit, all right.”
“Sure, sure,” said Grimp, bored. The policeman, the Guardian, and probably even the pank-hound, knew exactly who the culprit was; but they wouldn’t be able to prove it in twenty thousand years. Runny just had to realize first that threats weren’t going to get him anywhere near a record werret.
Possible Worlds of Science Fiction Page 41