“If you’re talking nonsense—” growled Mr. Graw. But he put through the call.
Caulborn was licking his lips in anticipation of what he would have done to Pop. What Caulborn had suffered in loss of pride yesterday could all be made up today. He’d show Graw!
It was an uncomfortable wait, while Hannibal protested at intervals and Caulborn rubbed his hands. But at last Mr. Barstow, in a sweat, came loping in.
“You called me, Graw? By God, I hope you’ve got news.”
Graw pointed at Pop. “This idiot claims to have your station. He says this is it.”
Barstow snatched up the “model” of Pennsylvania. It stung his hands and he put it back. He turned to Pop. “Is this a joke? That’s a perfect replica, certainly, but—”
“Look,” said Pop, “this is Hannibal Pertwee, probably the smartest scientist since Moses.”
“Oh, you,” said Barstow.
“So you know him,” said Pop.
“He used to bother us quite a bit,” said Barstow. “What is it now?”
“Ah, we get somewhere,” said Pop. “Barstow, if this gentleman replaces your Pennsylvania Station and these other objects, will you make a contract with him?”
“About his ideas on freight?” said Barstow. “I don’t know which is the craziest statement, that you’ll restore the buildings, or that anything he can think up will affect our freight. But go ahead.”
Pop yanked out a slip of paper. “I typed this. Sign it.”
Smiling indulgently, Barstow signed the agreement. Graw and Caulborn shrugged and witnessed it with their names.
“All right,” said Pop to Hannibal. “This is what you used to be begging for. You’ve got it now. Go ahead.”
And indeed Hannibal Pertwee had undergone a change. All trace of sullenness was gone from his face, replaced by growing hope. “You mean,” he said to Barstow, “that you’ll really consider my propositions? That you may utilize my findings?”
“I’ve said so in this paper,” said Barstow impatiently.
Hannibal rubbed his hands. “Well, you see, gentlemen, my idea was to reduce freight in size so that it could be shipped easily. And so I analyzed the possibilities of infinite acceleration—”
“Spare the lecture,” said Pop. “Get busy. They won’t understand anything but action.”
“Ah, yes. Action. May I have the cigarette case?”
Pop handed it over.
“You see, you turn it upside down and—”
“Wait!” cried Pop. “My God, you almost made them come back in here. You want to kill all of us?” Hastily he hauled Hannibal outside, taking the bar and a taxicab with him.
“Now,” said Pop, setting them down in a cleared space.
Hannibal caressed the case. “It was very ingenious, I thought. I had been waiting for this very thing. Apparatus would have been noticed, you see, but this was perfect. One can stand on the edge of a crowd and press the buttons, both together, and the atomic bubble within is set into nearly infinite acceleration. It spins out and engulfs the first whole object it embraces and sets it spinning in four dimensions. Of course, as the object spins at a certain speed, it is accordingly reduced in size. Einstein—”
“Just push the buttons,” said Pop.
“Oh, of course. You see, to stop the object from spinning we have merely to engulf it with an atomic bubble spinning in four dimensions, all opposite to the first—”
“The buttons,” said Pop.
Hannibal turned the case around so that it would open down. He pointed it in the general direction of the tiny taxi.
“It compresses time as well as space,” continued Hannibal. “I just release the bubble—”
swoooOOSH!
The taxi increased in size like a swiftly inflated balloon. The tick-tick-tick of its engine was loud in the room. The cabby finished opening the door and then turned to where he had last seen Pop.
“What address, buddy?” and then he saw his surroundings. He stared, gulped, looked at the ring of reporters and office men and hastily shut off his engine, shaking his head as though punch-drunk.
“Now the bar,” said Pop.
Hannibal pushed the buttons again and, suddenly—
swoooOOSH!
The bar was there, full size.
The British bartender finished filling the glass with an expert twist of his wrist. “And I says, ‘A sinful city like this will sooner or later—’” He had been turning to put away the bottle. But now he found no mirrors, only the reaches of the city room. His British calm almost deserted him.
Pop handed the drink to the cabby who instantly tossed it down.
“Now we better not have a bar in this place,” said Pop, “if I know reporters. Cabby, you and the barkeep step back here out of the way. Do your stuff, Hannibal.”
SWOssssh!
Click, click.
SWOssssh!
And both bar and taxi were toy-sized instantly. The cabby began to wail a protest, but Pop shoved the tiny car into his hands.
“We’ll make it grow up shortly,” said Pop. “Down in the street. Frankie! You and Lawson get some cameras. Freeman, you call the mayor and tell him to gather round for the fun. Sweeney, you write up an extra lead, telling the city all is well. I’ll knock out the story on this—”
“Oh, no, you won’t,” said Graw.
“Huh?” said Pop. “But you said, in front of witnesses—”
“I don’t care what I said. I’ve suddenly got an idea. Who got out those extras so fast yesterday?”
“Pop did!” yelled Sweeney, instantly joined by a chorus.
Graw turned to Caulborn. “At first I believed you. But when I got to thinking it over after I found out how fast they really had come—”
“He didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” said Pop. “He’s just a little young.”
“Pop,” said Graw, “you can’t have his job.”
“Well, I didn’t say—”
“Pop,” said Graw, “I’ve got a better spot for you than that. You’re managing editor. Maybe you can make this son-in-law of mine amount to something if you train him right.”
“Mana … managing editor?” gaped Pop.
“I’m going to slip out of the job,” said Graw. “I need rest. And so, Mr. Managing Editor, I leave you to your editions.”
The roof-raising cheer which went up from half a hundred throats about them made Pop turn lobster-color. Savagely he faced around.
“Well?” said Pop. “What are you waiting for? We got an extra edition to get out and that means work. Hannibal, you trot along with Frankie and Lawson. They’ll help you put them buildings back. And listen, Frankie, don’t miss any shots.” Hastily he scribbled out the addresses where ship and taxi belonged and then shooed them on their way.
Pop took up the package he had left at the switchboard. He went into the office marked “Managing Editor” and laid his belongings on the desk. He shed his coat, rolled up his sleeves and reached for the phone.
“Copy boy!” he shouted.
“Okay, Pop.”
WHY I SELECTED DON’T LOOK NOW
Why I selected Don’t Look Now as my favorite science fiction story is because it has the technical accuracy of Jules Verne, the realism of H. G. Wells, the social implications of Tolstoi (Leo—the Count, I mean), the freedom of Laurence Sterne, and the terseness of the Bible (the King James translation, of course). Moreover, I can honestly say it is my favorite story because I have reread all my others, on publication, and they disgusted me. For one reason or another, I didn’t get around to rereading Don’t Look Now, and can therefore regard it with the unbiased, critical, gemlike eye of the happy creator.
As everyone knows who has ever written—and who hasn’t? —the actual process of writing generally causes a state of psychopathic euphoria to set in. During literary gestation, the writer knows perfectly well that this yarn is the best he’s ever written, and very likely the best anybody’s ever written. This state of self-adulation may l
ast for an indefinite period. In my case, unfortunately, it seldom does. If I didn’t maintain it artificially, by cheers, cries of “Bravo!” and a built-in self-reflexive claque, I probably would never submit a finished story to an editor. I would just tear it, and myself, up.
But luckily I have not reread Don’t Look Now since it was written, so I can very fairly say it’s my favorite yarn.
Anyway, my wife wrote it.
HENRY KUTTNER
Don’t Look Now - Henry Kuttner
That Man Beside You May Be a Martian. They Own Our World, but Only a Few Wise and Far-Seeing Men Like Lyman Know It!
THE man in the brown suit was looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar. The reflection seemed to interest him even more deeply than the drink between his hands. He was paying only perfunctory attention to Lyman’s attempts at conversation. This had been going on for perhaps fifteen minutes before he finally lifted his glass and took a deep swallow.
“Don’t look now,” Lyman said.
The brown man slid his eyes sidewise toward Lyman, tilted his glass higher, and took another swig. Ice-cubes slipped down toward his mouth. He put the glass back on the red-brown wood and signaled for a refill. Finally he took a deep breath and looked at Lyman.
“Don’t look at what?” he asked.
“There was one sitting right beside you,” Lyman said, blinking rather glazed eyes. “He just went out. You mean you couldn’t see him?”
The brown man finished paying for his fresh drink before he answered. “See who?” he asked, with a fine mixture of boredom, distaste and reluctant interest. “Who went out?”
“What have I been telling you for the last ten minutes? Weren’t you listening?”
“Certainly I was listening. That is—certainly. You were talking about—bathtubs. Radios. Orson—”
“Not Orson. H. G. Herbert George. With Orson it was just a gag. H. G. knew—or suspected. I wonder if it was simply intuition with him? He couldn’t have had any proof—but he did stop writing science fiction rather suddenly, didn’t he? I’ll bet he knew once, though.”
“Knew what?”
“About the Martians. All this won’t do us a bit of good if you don’t listen. It may not anyway. The trick is to jump the gun—with proof. Convincing evidence. Nobody’s ever been allowed to produce the evidence before. You are a reporter, aren’t you?”
Holding his glass, the man in the brown suit nodded reluctantly.
“Then you ought to be taking it all down on a piece of folded paper. I want everybody to know. The whole world. It’s important. Terribly important. It explains everything. My life won’t be safe unless I can pass along the information and make people believe it.”
“Why won’t your life be safe?”
“Because of the Martians, you fool. They own the world.” The brown man sighed. “Then they own my newspaper, too,” he objected, “so I can’t print anything they don’t like.” “I never thought of that,” Lyman said, considering the bottom of his glass, where two ice-cubes had fused into a cold, immutable union. “They’re not omnipotent, though. I’m sure they’re vulnerable, or why have they always kept under cover? They’re afraid of being found out. If the world had convincing evidence—look, people always believe what they read in the newspapers. Couldn’t you—”
“Ha,” said the brown man with deep significance.
Lyman drummed sadly on the bar and murmured, “There must be some way. Perhaps if I had another drink… .” The brown-suited man tasted his collins, which seemed to stimulate him. “Just what is all this about Martians?” he asked Lyman. “Suppose you start at the beginning and tell me again. Or can’t you remember?”
“Of course I can remember. I’ve got practically total recall. It’s something new. Very new. I never could do it before. I can even remember my last conversation with the Martians.” Lyman favored the brown man with a glance of triumph.
“When was that?”
“This morning.”
“I can even remember conversations I had last week,” the brown man said mildly. “So what?”
“You don’t understand. They make us forget, you see. They tell us what to do and we forget about the conversation—it’s post-hypnotic suggestion, I expect—but we follow their orders just the same. There’s the compulsion, though we think we’re making our own decisions. Oh, they own the world, all right, but nobody knows it except me.”
“And how did you find out?”
“Well, I got my brain scrambled, in a way. I’ve been fooling around with supersonic detergents, trying to work out something marketable, you know. The gadget went wrong— from some standpoints. High-frequency waves, it was. They went through and through me. Should have been inaudible, but I could hear them, or rather—well, actually I could see them. That’s what I mean about my brain being scrambled. And after that, I could see and hear the Martians. They’ve geared themselves so they work efficiently on ordinary brains, and mine isn’t ordinary any more. They can’t hypnotize me, either. They can command me, but I needn’t obey—now. I hope they don’t suspect. Maybe they do. Yes, I guess they do.”
“How can you tell?”
“The way they look at me.”
“How do they look at you?” asked the brown man, as he began to reach for a pencil and then changed his mind. He took a drink instead. “Well? What are they like?”
“I’m not sure. I can see them, all right, but only when they’re dressed up.”
“Okay, okay,” the brown man said patiently. “How do they look, dressed up?”
“Just like anybody, almost. They dress up in—in human skins. Oh, not real ones, imitations. Like the Katzenjammer Kids zipped into crocodile suits. Undressed—I don’t know. I’ve never seen one. Maybe they’re invisible even to me, then, or maybe they’re just camouflaged. Ants or owls or rats or bats or—”
“Or anything,” the brown man said hastily.
“Thanks. Or anything, of course. But when they’re dressed up like humans—like that one who was sitting next to you awhile ago, when I told you not to look—”
“That one was invisible, I gather?”
“Most of the time they are, to everybody. But once in a while, for some reason, they—”
“Wait,” the brown man objected. “Make sense, will you? They dress up in human skins and then sit around invisible?” “Only now and then. The human skins are perfectly good imitations. Nobody can tell the difference. It’s that third eye that gives them away. When they keep it closed, you’d never guess it was there. When they want to open it, they go invisible—like that. Fast. When I see somebody with a third eye, right in the middle of his forehead, I know he’s a Martian and invisible, and I pretend not to notice him.”
“Uh-huh,” the brown man said. “Then for all you know, I’m one of your visible Martians.”
“Oh, I hope not!” Lyman regarded him anxiously. “Drunk as I am, I don’t think so. I’ve been trailing you all day, making sure. It’s a risk I have to take, of course. They’ll go to any length—any length at all—to make a man give himself away. I realize that. I can’t really trust anybody. But I had to find someone to talk to, and I—” He paused. There was a brief silence. “I could be wrong,” Lyman said presently. “When the third eye’s closed, I can’t tell if it’s there. Would you mind opening your third eye for me?” He fixed a dim gaze on the brown man’s forehead.
“Sorry,” the reporter said. “Some other time. Besides, I don’t know you. So you want me to splash this across the front page, I gather? Why didn’t you go to see the managing editor? My stories have to get past the desk and rewrite.”
“I want to give my secret to the world,” Lyman said stubbornly. “The question is, how far will I get? You’d expect they’d have killed me the minute I opened my mouth to you— except that I didn’t say anything while they were here. I don’t believe they take us very seriously, you know. This must have been going on since the dawn of history, and by now they’ve had time to get care
less. They let Fort go pretty far before they cracked down on him. But you notice they were careful never to let Fort get hold of genuine proof that would convince people.”
The brown man said something under his breath about a human interest story in a box. He asked, “What do the Martians do, besides hang around bars all dressed up?”
“I’m still working on that,” Lyman said. “It isn’t easy to understand. They run the world, of course, but why?” He wrinkled his brow and stared appealingly at the brown man. “Why?”
“If they do run it, they’ve got a lot to explain.”
“That’s what I mean. From our viewpoint, there’s no sense to it. We do things illogically, but only because they tell us to. Everything we do, almost, is pure illogic. Poe’s Imp of the Perverse—you could give it another name beginning with M. Martian, I mean. It’s all very well for psychologists to explain why a murderer wants to confess, but it’s still an illogical reaction. Unless a Martian commands him to.”
“You can’t be hypnotized into doing anything that violates your moral sense,” the brown man said triumphantly.
Lyman frowned. “Not by another human, but you can by a Martian. I expect they got the upper hand when we didn’t have more than ape-brains, and they’ve kept it ever since. They evolved as we did, and kept a step ahead. Like the sparrow on the eagle’s back who hitch-hiked till the eagle reached his ceiling, and then took off and broke the altitude record. They conquered the world, but nobody ever knew it. And they’ve been ruling ever since.”
“But—”
“Take houses, for example. Uncomfortable things. Ugly, inconvenient, dirty, everything wrong with them. But when men like Frank Lloyd Wright slip out from under the Martians’ thumb long enough to suggest something better, look how the people react. They hate the thought. That’s their Martians, giving them orders.”
“Look. Why should the Martians care what kind of houses we live in? Tell me that.”
Lyman frowned. “I don’t like the note of skepticism I detect creeping into this conversation,” he announced. “They care, all right. No doubt about it. They live in our houses. We don’t build for our convenience, we build, under order, for the Martians, the way they want it. They’re very much concerned with everything we do. And the more senseless, the more concern.
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