The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “So that’s the way it was,” he grunted, finished. “Some of it doesn’t make sense.”

  “None of it does. All I know is that I’m here and Hodges has enough trumped-up evidence to convict me. He wanted to make the charge kidnapping, but they suggested corpse stealing, and compromised on larceny—grand larceny, I guess.”

  “I still might be able to swipe the guard’s keys and attract their attention—”

  Brugh gathered his somewhat pickled senses. “No. Your biggest value to me is in your ability to get in places where a man couldn’t, and find out things without anyone knowing it. If I get out, I can do no more than I can here—I’m not a detective when it comes to human reactions; just physical or chemical puzzles.”

  There was something in that, Hermes had to concede. “Then I’m to work outside?”

  “If you want to. You’re a free agent, not bound to me. Slaves have gone out of fashion, and you’re hardly a robot.” The physicist shook his head. “Why should you help me, come to think of it?”

  “Because I want to grow up, and you might help me; and because in a sense, we both have the same memories and thought actions—I started out with a mixture of dog, cat, and you.” He climbed off the bunk and scuttled across the floor. “I’ll give Hodges your love if I see him.”

  Brugh grinned crookedly. “Do.”

  VIII

  Professor Hiram Hodges stirred and turned over in his bed, a sense of something that wasn’t as it should be troubling his mind. He grunted softly and tried to sleep again, but the premonition still bothered him. And then he realized that there was a rustling sound going on in his study and that it was still too early for his housekeeper.

  He kicked off the sheet and rummaged under the bed for his slippers, drawing on the tattered old robe he’d worn for the last six years. As quietly as he could, he slipped across to the study door, threw it open, and snapped on the light switch, just as the rustling sound stopped. Probably his nephew up to some trick—

  But the room contained neither a nephew nor any other man. Hodges blinked, adjusting his eyes to the light, and stared at his desk.

  It had been closed when he went to bed, he was sure of that. Now it was open, and a litter of papers was strewn across it in haphazard fashion. Someone must have been there and disappeared in the split second it took to snap on the lights.

  Hodges moved over to the desk, stopping to pick up a few scraps of paper that had fallen on the floor, then reached up to close the roll top. As he did so, something small and white made a sudden frantic lunge from among the papers and hit the floor to go scuttling across the room. With startlingly quick reactions for his age, the professor spun his lank frame and scooped up the scurrying object.

  Apparently it was an animated rubber doll that lay twisting in his grasp. Words came spilling out, though the tiny mouth did not move. “All right, you’ve caught me. Do you have to squeeze me to death?”

  Some men, when faced with the impossible, go insane; others refuse to believe. But Hodges’ life had been spent in proving the impossible to be possible, and he faced the situation calmly. A robot wouldn’t have spoken that way, and obviously this wasn’t flesh and blood; equally obviously, it was some form of life. He lifted the figure onto the desk and clamped the wire wastebasket down over it.

  “Now,” he said, “what are you, where from, and what do you want?”

  Hermes devoted full energy to picturing himself as a charging lion, but the professor was not impressed.

  “It’s a nice illusion,” he granted, smiling. “Come to think of it, maybe your other shape isn’t real. Which is it—my nephew or Brugh?”

  Hermes gave up and went over the story of his creation again, point by point, while dawn crept up over the roofs of the adjacent houses and urged him to hurry. Hodges’ first incredulity turned to doubt, and doubt gave place to half belief.

  “So that’s the way it is? All right. I’ll believe you, provided you can explain how you see without the aid of a lens to direct the light against your sensory surface.”

  Hermes had overlooked that detail, and took time off to investigate himself. “Apparently the surface is sensitive only to light that strikes it at a certain angle,” he decided. “And my mouth opening acts as a very rough lens—something on the order of the old pinhole camera. The tar below is curved, and if I want clearer vision, I can put out a thin bubble of fairly transparent surface material to rectify the light more fully, as a lens would. I don’t need an iris.”

  “Ummm. So Brugh decided he’d made life and wanted to make a fool of me by bringing my man to consciousness, eh? Is that why he kidnapped Anthropos?”

  Hermes grunted sourly. His mind was incapable of the sudden rages and dull hates that seemed to fill men’s thoughts, but it was colored by the dislike Brugh had cultivated for the biochemist. “It’s a nice way of lying, professor, but I know Dr. Brugh had nothing to do with your creation.”

  The other grinned skeptically. “How do you know?”

  “I read his mind, where he had to reveal the truth.” In proof, the little god transferred part of the picture he had drawn from Brugh’s mind to that of Hodges.

  “Hm-m-m.” The biochemist lifted the wastebasket off and picked up the little figure. “That would account for the exposed film. Suppose you come with me while I get dressed and try reading my mind. You might be surprised.”

  Hermes was surprised, definitely. In the professor’s mind there had been complete conviction of Brugh’s guilt, shaken somewhat now by the story transferred by Hermes. Instead of being a cooked-up scheme to ruin his rival, the theft of the synthetic man was unquestionably genuine. The god fixed on one detail, trying to solve the riddle.

  A note received the night before had first apprised the biochemist of the disappearance of his pet creation and sent him to the laboratory to investigate. “What happened to the ransom note?” Hermes asked.

  Hodges was stuggling with man’s symbol of slavery to the law of fashion, his necktie. “It’s still in my pocket—here.” He flipped it across the room, where the other could study the crude scrawl. The words were crude and direct:

  Perffeser, we got yur artifishul man itll cost you 1000$ to get him back leave the dough in a papre sack in the garbaj can bak of yur hows noon tomorer and dont cawl the bulls.

  “Obviously the work of a well-educated man,” Hodges grunted, succeeding finally with the tie. “They always try to appear too illiterate when writing those notes. That’s why I thought Dr. Brugh wrote it to throw me off the trail.”

  “Hatred had nothing to do with it, I suppose?”

  “I don’t hate Brugh, and if his conscience didn’t bother him, he wouldn’t hate me. We used to be fairly good friends. We could still be if we weren’t so darned stubborn.” The professor grinned as he picked up the small figure and moved toward the kitchen. “You don’t eat, do you? Well, I do. Brugh played a dirty trick on me, but I’ve put over a few of them myself to get money for my department. At Gorton, it’s always been dog eat dog when appropriations were under debate.”

  “But did you think he’d leave his key lying around for evidence?”

  “People do funny things, and only the department heads are permitted master keys. It had his number.” Hodges swallowed the last of a bun and washed it down with milk. “It is funny, though. Let’s see, now. Brugh left the keys on the table; and sometime yesterday he lost one of them. Tanya was in the laboratory in the morning, just before a date with that confounded nephew of mine. Hm-m-m.”

  “But Tanya wouldn’t—” Hermes felt duty bound to protect Tanya’s reputation.

  Hodges cut in on his protest. “It’s plain you don’t know Tanya Brugh. For herself, she wouldn’t take it. But give her a fairly handsome young man with a smooth line, and she’d sell her own father down the river. That ransom note might be some of Johnny’s pleasant work.”

  “Then you think it’s your nephew?”

  “I don’t think anything, but it might be. He�
�s the type. Tell you what I’ll do; you try to get some of that potassium salt—oh, yes, I knew about it long ago—from your patron, and I’ll help you investigate Johnny.”

  “If you’ll help increase my size.” That question was still a major one in the god’s mind. “How’ll we find out whether young Thomas has the thing?”

  “That’s your worry, son. I’ll carry you there, but from then on, it’s in your hands.” Hodges pocketed Hermes and turned out of the kitchen.

  IX

  Johnny Thomas looked reasonably pleasant as he stuck his head out of the door, though the circles under his eyes were a little too prominent in the early morning hours. He grinned with evident self-satisfaction.

  “Ah, my dear maternal uncle. Do come in.” He kicked aside a newspaper that was scattered across the floor and flipped the cigarette ashes off the one comfortable chair in the room, seating himself on the bed. “What can I do for you this morning?”

  Hodges coughed to cover the noise of Hermes slipping across the room to a dark place under the table. With that attended to, he faced his nephew. “You know Anthropos—that synthetic man I grew in a culture bath? Somebody stole him last night, tank and all, and slipped a note under my door demanding a thousand dollars for his return.”

  “Too bad. But surely, uncle, you don’t think I had anything to do with it?”

  “Of course not; how could you get into the laboratory? But I thought you might help me contact the man and make arrangements to pay. Of course, I’d be willing to let you have a few dollars for your work.”

  Thomas smiled, and looked across the room while apparently making up his mind. As he looked, a cat came out from where no cat should be, gravely lifted a bottle of whiskey, and drank deeply. “Excellent, my dear Thomas,” the cat remarked. “I suppose when you collect that grand from your uncle, we’ll have even better drinks. Smart trick, stealing that thing.”

  The cat licked its chops, sprouted wings, and turned into a fairy. “Naughty, naughty,” said the fairy. “Little boys shouldn’t steal.” It fluttered over to Thomas’ shoulder and perched there, tinkling reproachfully.

  The young man swatted at it, felt his hand pass through it, and jumped for the chair. Now the room was empty, though his eyes darted into every corner. His uncle coughed again. “If you’re done playing, John—” he suggested.

  “Didn’t you see it?”

  “See what? Oh, you mean that fly? Yes, it was a big one. But about this business I have—”

  “I think he’d make a nice meal,” said a grizzly bear, materializing suddenly. “So young and succulent.”

  A shining halo of light quivered violently. “You’d poison your system, Bruin. Go back home.” The bear obediently trotted to the window and passed through the glass; the halo of light struck a commanding note, and a face of wrath appeared in it. “Young man, repent of your ways and learn that your sins have found you out. Time is but short on this mortal sphere, and the bad that we do must follow us through all eternity. Repent, for the hour has come!”

  Thomas quivered down onto the bed again, wiping his forehead. The idea of getting nervous at a time like this! The things couldn’t be real. He turned back to Hodges, who was waiting patiently. “Just a little nervous this morning; not used to getting up so early. Now, as we were saying—”

  Click! The sound was in the young man’s head, and a soft purring voice followed it. “I know a secret, I know a secret, and I’m going to tell! Johnny, old kid, tell the old fossil what a smart guy you are, putting over a trick like that on him. Go ahead and tell!” There was a hot flicker of pain that stabbed up the backbone, then ran around the ribs and began doing something on the order of a toe dance in Thomas’ stomach.

  He gritted his teeth and groaned. Hodges became all solicitation. “Something you ate?” asked the professor. “Just lie down on the bed and relax.”

  There was a whole den of rattlesnakes curled up on the bed, making clicking sounds that seemed to say: “Come ahead, young fellow, it’s breakfast time and we’re hungry!” Thomas had no desire to relax among even imaginary snakes.

  “Gulp—ugh!” he said, and an angel unscrewed its head from the light socket and dropped near him. “Gulp—ouch!” The angel sprouted horns and tail, and carried a red-hot fork that felt most unpleasant when rubbed tenderly along his shins.

  Click! Again the voice was in his head. “Remember that girl at Casey’s? Well, when she committed suicide, it wasn’t so nice. But that was gas, and she didn’t feel any pains. When you commit suicide—”

  “I won’t commit suicide!” The bellow was involuntary, forced out just as the little devil decided his fork would feel worse in the stomach. “Take ’em away!”

  Hodges clucked sympathetically. “Dear, dear! Do you have a dizzy feeling, Johnny?”

  Johnny did, just as the words were out. His head gave an unpleasant twang and leaped from his body, then went whirling around the room. A gnome picked it up, whittled the neck quickly to a point, and drew a whip. “Hi, fellows!” called the gnome. “Come, see the top I made.” He drew the whip smartly across Thomas’ head and sent it spinning as a horde of other little hobgoblins jumped out of odd places to watch. That was a little too much for Johnny, with the addition of two worms that were eating his eyes.

  Hodges chuckled. “All right, Hermes, let him alone. The boy’s fainted. It’s a pity I couldn’t see the things you were forcing on his mind. Must have been right interesting.”

  Hermes came out of the corner, smiling. “They were very nice. I think he’ll talk when he comes to. He persuaded Tanya to get him the key by pretending an interest in cyclotrons—said he was writing a story. She wouldn’t have done it, except that the key was lying so temptingly within reach. He worked on her innocence.”

  “Okay, Hermes,” Hodges grunted. “She’s washed whiter than snow, if you want it that way. Better get back in my pocket; Johnny’s coming around again.”

  It was noon when Hodges came to the cell where Brugh sat. The biochemist dropped the little god on the floor and grinned. “You’re free now, Arlington,” he informed the other. “Sorry I got you in here, but I’ve tried to make up for that.”

  Brugh looked up at the professor’s voice, and his face wasn’t pretty. “Arrughh!” he said.

  The smile on Hodges’ face remained unchanged. “I expected that. But Hermes here can tell you I honestly thought you’d stolen Anthropos. We just finished putting him back where he belongs, and seeing that young nephew of mine leave town. If you’ll avoid committing homicide on me, the warden will unlock the door.”

  “What about my reputation?”

  “Quite untouched,” Hermes assured him. “Professor Hodges succeeded in keeping everything hushed up, and it’s Sunday, so your absence from the university won’t mean anything.”

  The physicist came out of the cell, and his shoulders lifted with the touch of freedom. The scowl on his face was gone, but uncertainty still remained in the look he gave Hodges.

  The biochemist put out a hand. “I’ve been thinking you might help me on Anthropos,” he said. “You know, Arlington, we might make something out of that yet if we worked together.”

  Brugh grinned suddenly. “We might at that, Hiram. Come on home to lunch, and we’ll talk it over while Hermes tells me what happened.”

  Hermes squirmed as a hand lifted him back into the pocket. “How about helping me grow up?”

  The two men were busy discussing other things. The height increase would have to wait.

  X

  Hermes sat on the edge of Anthropos’ tank, kicking his small legs against it and thinking of the last two days. To live in the same house, breathe the same air as Tanya Brugh! He dug up another sigh of ecstasy and followed it with one of despair.

  For Tanya regarded him as some new form of bug, to be tolerated since he was useful, but not to be liked—an attitude shared by her mother. Dr. Brugh had the greatest respect for the little god, and Kitty was fond of him. Of them all, Kitty treated
him best, and Tanya worst.

  Of course, that was due to his height. John Thomas was gone, but there were still Will Young and her other escorts, none less than six feet in height. And Hermes was far from being tall. The consultation, held with Brugh and Hodges, had resulted in nothing; when all was said and done, there was no hope for him.

  He sighed again, and Dixon, who was helping Hodges and Brugh with Anthropos, noticed him. “What’s the matter, Hermes?” he asked good-naturedly. “Alcohol drying out again? Why not try carbon tetrachloride this time?”

  Hermes shook his head. “I don’t need anything. The alcohol seems to have permanently combined with the tar—something like water and a crystal, to form a hydrate. I’m softened thoroughly for all time.”

  Hodges looked up and then turned back to the tank where the synthetic man lay, and Hermes turned his attention to it. As far as outward appearance went, Anthropos was nearly perfect, and a tinge of envy filled the little god’s thoughts.

  Dixon wiped his forehead, “I give up. When three separate divisions of chemistry can’t bring life to him, there’s no hope. Hodges, your man is doomed to failure.”

  “He’s breathing, though,” the biochemist muttered. “Ever since we injected the potassium into him and put it in his nutritive bath, he’s been living, but not conscious. See, his heartbeat is as regular as clockwork.” He indicated the meter that flickered regularly on the tank.

  Brugh refused to look. “To anyone but a biochemist,” he informed the room, “the answer would be obvious. Hiram’s created life, yes; but he can’t give it a good brain. That’s too complex for his electric cell formation determiner. What Anthropos needs is a new brain.”

  “I suppose you’d like to stick his head full of that gummy tar of yours?” Old habit made the words tart, though good fellowship had been restored between them.

  “Why not?” It was Hermes’ voice this time. Inspiration had flashed suddenly through his small mind, opening a mighty vista of marvels to his imagination. “Why wouldn’t that solve it?”