(1/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  The third day passed without the appearance of the black ship. But on the very evening of that day the speaker announced: "All passengers will prepare for transfer from the shuttle ship to the Mars liner. Bring hand luggage--"

  Mel sat paralyzed while he listened to the announcement. So it was true! He felt the faint jar that rocked the Martian Princess as the two ships coupled. From his stateroom port Mel could see the stranger, black, ugly, and somehow deadly. He wished he could show Dr. Martin this "illusion"!

  He packed swiftly and left the room. Mel joined the surprised and excited throng now, not hanging back, but eager to find out the secret of the great black ship.

  The transition from one ship to the other was almost imperceptible. The structure of both corridors was the same, but Mel knew when the junction was crossed. He sensed the entry into a strange world that was far different from the common one he knew.

  Far down the corridor the crowd was slowing, forming into lines before stewards who were checking tickets. The passengers were shunted into branching corridors leading to their own staterooms. So far everything was so utterly normal that Mel felt an overwhelming despondency. It was just as they had been told; they were transferring to the Mars liner from the shuttle.

  The steward glanced at his ticket, held it for a moment of hesitation while he scanned Mel's face. "Mr. Norton--please come with me."

  The steward moved away in a direction no other passengers were taking. Another steward moved up to his place. "That way," the second man said to Mel. "Follow the steward."

  * * * * *

  Mel's heart picked up its beat as he stepped out of the line and moved slowly down the corridor after the retreating steward. They walked a long way through branching silent corridors that showed no sign of life.

  They stopped at last before a door that was like a score of others they had passed. There were no markings. The steward opened the door and stood aside. "In here please," he said. Mel entered and found himself alone. The steward remained outside.

  The room was furnished as an office. It was carpeted and paneled luxuriously. A door leading from a room at his left opened and admitted a tall man with graying hair. The man seemed to carry an aura of power and strength as he moved. An aura that Mel Hastings recognized.

  "James Connemorra!" Mel exclaimed.

  The man bowed his head slightly in acknowledgement. "Yes, Mr. Hastings," he said.

  Mel was dismayed. "How do you know who I am?" he said.

  James Connemorra looked through the port beside Mel and at the stars beyond. "I have been looking for you long enough I ought to know who you are."

  Something in the man's voice chilled Mel. "I have been easy enough to find. I'm only a news reporter. Why have you been looking for me?"

  Connemorra sank into a deep chair on the opposite side of the room. "Can't you guess?" he said.

  "It has something to do with what happened--before?" Mel asked. He backed warily against the opposite wall from Connemorra. "That time when I escaped from the Martian Princess rather than come aboard the black ship?"

  Connemorra nodded. "Yes."

  "I still don't understand. Why?"

  "It's an old story." Connemorra shrugged faintly. "A man learns too much about things he should know nothing of."

  "I have a right to know what happened to my wife. You know about her don't you?"

  Connemorra nodded.

  "What happened to her? Why was she different after her trip to Mars?"

  James Connemorra was silent for so long that Mel thought he had not heard him. "Is everyone different when they get back?" Mel demanded. "Does something happen to everybody who takes the Mars trip, the same thing that happened to Alice?"

  "You learned so much," said Connemorra, speaking as if to himself, "I had to hunt you down and bring you here."

  "What do you mean by that? I came through my own efforts. Your office tried to stop me."

  "Yet I knew who you were and that you were here. I must have had something to do with it, don't you think?"

  "What?"

  "I forced you to come by deception, so that no one knows you are here--except the old man whose name you used. Who will believe him that you came on the Martian Princess? Our records will show that a Jake Norton will be there on Earth. No one can ever prove that Mel Hastings ever came aboard."

  * * * * *

  Mel let his breath out slowly. His fear suddenly swallowed caution. He took a crouching step forward. Then he stopped, frozen. James Connemorra tilted the small pistol resting in his lap. Mel did not know how it came to be there. He had not seen it a moment ago.

  "What are you going to do?" Mel demanded. "What are you going to do with all of us?"

  "You know too much," said Connemorra, shrugging in mock helplessness. "What can I do with you?"

  "Explain what I don't understand about the things you say I know."

  "Explain to you?" The idea seemed to amuse Connemorra greatly, as if it had some utterly ridiculous aspect. "Yes, I might as well explain," he said. "I haven't had anyone interested enough to listen for a long time.

  "Men have never been alone in space. We have been watched, inspected, and studied periodically since Neanderthal times by races in the galaxy who have preceded us in development by hundreds of thousands of years. These observers have been pleasantly excited by some of the things we have done, appalled by others.

  "There is a galactic organization that has existed for at least a hundred thousand years. This organization exists for the purpose of mutual development of the worlds and races of the galaxy. It also exists to maintain peace, for there were ages before its organization when interstellar war took place, and more than one great world was wiped out in such senseless wars.

  "When men of Earth were ready to step into space, the Galactic Council had to decide, as it had decided on so many other occasions, whether the new world was to be admitted as a member. The choice is not one which a new world is invited to make; the choice is made for it. A world which begins to send its ships through space becomes a member of the Council, or its ships cease to travel. The world itself may cease to exist."

  "You mean this dictatorial Council determines whether a world is fit to survive and actually wipes out those it decides against?" gasped Mel in horror. "They set themselves up as judges in the Universe?"

  "That's about the way they operate, to put it bluntly," said Connemorra. "You can call them a thousand unpleasant names, but you can't change the fact of their existence, nor the fact of their successful operation for a period as long as the age of the human race.

  "They would never have made their existence known to us if we had not begun sending our ships into space. But once we did that we were entering territory staked out by races that were there when we crawled out of our caves. Who can say what their rights are?"

  "But to pass judgment on entire worlds--"

  "We have no choice but to accept that such judgment is passed."

  "And their judgment of Earth--?"

  "Was that Earth was not ready for Council membership. Earthmen are still making too many blunders to join creatures that could cross the galaxy at the speed of light when we were learning how to chip flint."

  "But they didn't wipe us out!"

  * * * * *

  James Connemorra looked out at the stars. "I wonder," he said. "I wonder--"

  "What do you mean?" Mel said in a tight voice.

  "We have defects which are not quite like any they have encountered before. We have developed skills in the manufacture of artifacts, but we have no capacity for using them. For example, we have developed vast systems of communication, but these systems have not improved our communications they have actually blocked communication."

  "That's crazy!" said Mel. "Do they suppose smoke signals are superior to the 3-d screens in our homes?"

  "As a matter of fact, they do. And so do I. When a man must resort to smoke signals he is very certain that he has something to say before he goes to th
e trouble of putting the message in the air. But our fabulous screens prevent us from communicating with each other by throwing up a wall of pseudo-communication that we can't get through. We subject ourselves to a barrage of sound and light that has a communication content of almost zero.

  "The same is true of our inventions in transportation. We have efficient means of travel to all parts of the world and now to the Universe itself. But we don't travel. We use our machines to block traveling."

  "I can understand the first argument, but not this one!" said Mel.

  "We move our bodies to new locations with our machines, but our minds remain at home. We take our rutted thoughts, our predispositions, our cultural concepts wherever we go. We do not touch, even with a fragment of our minds, that which our machines give us contact with. We do not travel. We move in space, but we do not travel.

  "This is their accusation. And they're right. We are still doing what we have always done. We are using space flight for the boring, the trivial, the stupid; using genius for a toy, like a child banging an atomic watch on the floor. It happened with all our great discoveries and inventions: the gasoline engine, the telephone, the wireless. We've built civilizations of monumental stupidity on the wonders of nature. One race of the Galactics has a phrase they apply to people like us: 'If there is a God in Heaven He has wept for ten thousand years.'

  * * * * *

  "But all this is not the worst. A race that is merely stupid seldom gets out to space. But ours has something else they fear: destructiveness. They have plotted our history and extrapolated our future. If they let us come out, war and conflict will follow."

  "They can't know that!"

  "They say they can. We are in no position to argue."

  "So they plan to destroy us--"

  "No. They want to try an experiment that has been carried out just a few times previously. They are going to reduce us from what they term the critical mass which we have achieved."

  "Critical mass? That's a nuclear term."

  "Right. Meaning ready to blow up. That's where we are. Two not-so-minor nuclear wars in fifty years. They see us carrying our destructiveness into space, fighting each other there, infecting other races with our hostility. But if we are broken down into smaller groups, have the tools of war removed, and are forced to take another line of development--well, they have hopes of salvaging us."

  "But they can't do a thing like that to us! What do they intend? Taking groups of Earthmen, deporting them to other worlds--breaking them apart from each other forever--?"

  The coldness found its resting place in Mel's chest. He stared at James Connemorra. Then his eyes moved slowly over the walls of the room in the black ship and out to the stars. The black ship.

  "This ship--! You transfer your passengers to this Galactic ship for deportation to other worlds! But they come back--"

  "They are sent to colonies on other worlds where conditions are like those on Earth--with significant exceptions. The colonies are small, the largest are only a few thousand. The problems there are different than on Earth--and they are tough. The natural resources are not the same. The development of the resulting cultures will be vastly different from that of Earth. The Galactic Council is very interested in the outcome--which will not be known with certainty for a thousand years or so."

  "But they come back," Mel repeated. "You bring them back!"

  "For each Earthman who goes out, a replacement is sent back. The replacement is an android supplied by the Council."

  "Android!" Mel felt his reason slipping. He knew he was shouting. "Then Alice--the Alice that died was an android, she was not my wife! My Alice is still alive! You can take me to her--"

  Connemorra nodded. "Alice is still alive, and well. No harm has come to her."

  "Take me to her!" Mel knew he was pleading, but in his anguish he had no pride.

  Connemorra seemed to ignore his plea. "Earth's population is slowly being diluted by the removal of top people. The androids behave in every way like the individuals they replace, but they are preconditioned against the inherent destructiveness of Earthmen."

  Blind anger seemed to rise within Mel. "You have no right to separate me from Alice. Take me to her!"

  His rage ignited and he leaped forward.

  The small gun in Connemorra's hand spurted twice. Mel felt a double impact in a moment of great wonder. It couldn't end like this, he thought. It couldn't end without his seeing Alice once more. Just once more--

  * * * * *

  He sank to the floor. The pain was not great, but he knew he was dying. He looked down at his hand that covered the great wound in his mid-section. There was something wrong.

  He felt the stickiness, but the red blood was not welling out. Instead, a thick bubble of green ooze moved from the wound and spread over his clothes and his hand. An alien greenness that was like nothing human.

  He had seen it once before.

  Alice.

  He stared up at Connemorra with wide, wondering eyes.

  "Everything went wrong, my poor android," said Connemorra softly. "After your human was brought back to the ship we were forced to go through with the usual process of imprinting his mind content upon his android. But we had to wipe out all memory of the attempted escape from the Martian Princess. This was not successful. It still clung in the nightmares you experienced. And the psycho-recovery brought it all back.

  "We tried to cover it with an amnesiac condition instead of the usual pre-printed memory of a Mars vacation. And all this might have worked if the Alice android had not been defective also. A normal android has protective mechanisms that make accidents and subsequent discovery impossible. But the Alice android failed, and you set out on a course to uncover us. I had to find a way to destroy you--murder.

  "I'm truly sorry. I don't know how an android thinks or feels. Sometimes I'm afraid of all of you. You are like men, but I've seen the factories in which you are produced. There are many things I do not know. I know only that I had to obey the Galactic Council or Earth would have been destroyed long ago.

  "And something else I know: Alice and Mel Hastings are content and happy. They are on a lovely world, very much like Central Valley."

  He closed his eyes as he felt the life--or whatever it was--seeping out of him. It came out right, after all, he thought.

  Like a wooden soldier with a painted smile, fallen from a shelf, he lay twisted upon the floor.

  THE END

  * * *

  Contents

  THE MOON IS GREEN

  By FRITZ LEIBER

  Anybody who wanted to escape death could, by paying a very simple price--denial of life!

  "Effie! What the devil are you up to?"

  Her husband's voice, chopping through her mood of terrified rapture, made her heart jump like a startled cat, yet by some miracle of feminine self-control her body did not show a tremor.

  Dear God, she thought, he mustn't see it. It's so beautiful, and he always kills beauty.

  "I'm just looking at the Moon," she said listlessly. "It's green."

  Mustn't, mustn't see it. And now, with luck, he wouldn't. For the face, as if it also heard and sensed the menace in the voice, was moving back from the window's glow into the outside dark, but slowly, reluctantly, and still faunlike, pleading, cajoling, tempting, and incredibly beautiful.

  "Close the shutters at once, you little fool, and come away from the window!"

  "Green as a beer bottle," she went on dreamily, "green as emeralds, green as leaves with sunshine striking through them and green grass to lie on." She couldn't help saying those last words. They were her token to the face, even though it couldn't hear.

  "Effie!"

  She knew what that last tone meant. Wearily she swung shut the ponderous lead inner shutters and drove home the heavy bolts. That hurt her fingers; it always did, but he mustn't know that.

  "You know that those shutters are not to be touched! Not for five more years at least!"

  "I only want
ed to look at the Moon," she said, turning around, and then it was all gone--the face, the night, the Moon, the magic--and she was back in the grubby, stale little hole, facing an angry, stale little man. It was then that the eternal thud of the air-conditioning fans and the crackle of the electrostatic precipitators that sieved out the dust reached her consciousness again like the bite of a dentist's drill.

  "Only wanted to look at the Moon!" he mimicked her in falsetto. "Only wanted to die like a little fool and make me that much more ashamed of you!" Then his voice went gruff and professional. "Here, count yourself."

  She silently took the Geiger counter he held at arm's length, waited until it settled down to a steady ticking slower than a clock--due only to cosmic rays and indicating nothing dangerous--and then began to comb her body with the instrument. First her head and shoulders, then out along her arms and back along their under side. There was something oddly voluptuous about her movements, although her features were gray and sagging.

  The ticking did not change its tempo until she came to her waist. Then it suddenly spurted, clicking faster and faster. Her husband gave an excited grunt, took a quick step forward, froze. She goggled for a moment in fear, then grinned foolishly, dug in the pocket of her grimy apron and guiltily pulled out a wristwatch.

  He grabbed it as it dangled from her fingers, saw that it had a radium dial, cursed, heaved it up as if to smash it on the floor, but instead put it carefully on the table.

  "You imbecile, you incredible imbecile," he softly chanted to himself through clenched teeth, with eyes half closed.

  She shrugged faintly, put the Geiger counter on the table, and stood there slumped.

  He waited until the chanting had soothed his anger, before speaking again. He said quietly, "I do suppose you still realize the sort of world you're living in?"

  * * * * *

  She nodded slowly, staring at nothingness. Oh, she realized, all right, realized only too well. It was the world that hadn't realized. The world that had gone on stockpiling hydrogen bombs. The world that had put those bombs in cobalt shells, although it had promised it wouldn't, because the cobalt made them much more terrible and cost no more. The world that had started throwing those bombs, always telling itself that it hadn't thrown enough of them yet to make the air really dangerous with the deadly radioactive dust that came from the cobalt. Thrown them and kept on throwing until the danger point, where air and ground would become fatal to all human life, was approached.