Caviar

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Take the barracks first. Clean ’em up. Then work south.”

  Johansen was alone on a small hill near the center of the island. He carried a camera, and though he knew pretty well that his chances of ever getting ashore again were practically nonexistent, he liked angle shots of his tower, and took innumerable pictures. The first he knew of the planes was when he heard their whining dive over the barracks. He stood transfixed, saw a shower of bombs hurtle down and turn the barracks into a smashed ruin of broken wood, metal and bodies. The picture of Kidder’s earnest face flashed into his mind. Poor little guy—if they ever bombed his end of the island he would—But his tower! Were they going to bomb the plant?

  He watched, utterly appalled, as the planes flew out to sea, cut back and dove again. They seemed to be working south. At the third dive he was sure of it. Not knowing what he could do, he nevertheless turned and ran toward Kidder’s place. He rounded a turn in the trail and collided violently with the little biochemist. Kidder’s face was scarlet with exertion, and he was the most terrified-looking object Johansen had ever seen.

  Kidder waved a hand northward. “Conant!” he screamed over the uproar. “It’s Conant! He’s going to kill us all!”

  “The plant?” said Johansen, turning pale.

  “It’s safe. He won’t touch that! But … my place … what about all those men?”

  “Too late!” shouted Johansen.

  “Maybe I can—Come on!” called Kidder, and was off down the trail, heading south.

  Johansen pounded after him. Kidder’s little short legs became a blur as the squadron swooped overhead, laying its eggs in the spot where they had met.

  As they burst out of the woods, Johansen put on a spurt, caught up with the scientist and knocked him sprawling not six feet from the white line.

  “Wh… wh—”

  “Don’t go any farther, you fool! Your own damned force field—it’ll kill you!”

  “Force field? But—I came through it on the way up—Here. Wait. If I can—” Kidder began hunting furiously about in the grass. In a few seconds he ran up to the line, clutching a large grasshopper in his hand. He tossed it over. It lay still.

  “See?” said Johansen. “It—”

  “Look! It jumped! Come on! I don’t know what went wrong, unless the Neoterics shut it off. They generated that field—I didn’t.”

  “Neo—huh?”

  “Never mind,” snapped the biochemist, and ran.

  They pounded gasping up the steps and into the Neoterics’ control room. Kidder clapped his eyes to a telescope and shrieked in glee. “They’ve done it! We’ve done it!”

  “Who’s—”

  “My little people! The Neoterics! They’ve made the impenetrable shield! Don’t you see—it cut through the lines of force that start up that field out there! Their generator is still throwing it up, but the vibrations can’t get out! They’re safe! They’re safe!” And the overwrought hermit began to cry. Johansen looked at him pityingly and shook his head.

  “Sure—your little men are all right. But we aren’t,” he added, as the floor shook to the detonation of a bomb.

  Johansen closed his eyes, got a grip on himself and let his curiosity overcome his fear. He stepped to the binocular telescope, gazed down it. There was nothing there but a curved sheet of gray material. He had never seen a gray quite like that. It was absolutely neutral. It didn’t seem soft and it didn’t seem hard, and to look at it made his brain reel. He looked up.

  Kidder was pounding the keys of a teletype, watching the blank yellow tape anxiously.

  “I’m not getting through to them,” he whimpered. “I don’t know what’s the mat—Oh, of course!”

  “What?”

  “The shield is absolutely impenetrable! The teletype impulses can’t get through or I could get them to extend the screen over the building—over the whole island! There’s nothing those people can’t do!”

  “He’s crazy,” Johansen muttered. “Poor little—”

  The teletype began clicking sharply. Kidder dove at it, practically embraced it. He read off the tape as it came out. Johansen saw the characters, but they meant nothing to him.

  “Almighty,” Kidder read falteringly, “pray have mercy on us and be forbearing until we have said our say. Without orders we have lowered the screen you ordered us to rise. We are lost, O great one. Our screen is truly impenetrable, and so cut off your words on the word machine. We have never, in the memory of any Neoteric, been without your word before. Forgive us our action. We will eagerly await your answer.”

  Kidder’s fingers danced over the keys. “You can look now,” he gasped. “Go on—the telescope!”

  Johansen, trying to ignore the whine of sure death from above, looked.

  He saw what looked like land—fantastic fields under cultivation, a settlement of some sort, factories, and—beings. Everything moved with incredible rapidity. He couldn’t see one of the inhabitants except as darting pinky-white streaks. Fascinated, he stared for a long minute. A sound behind him made him whirl. It was Kidder, rubbing his hands together briskly. There was a broad smile on his face.

  “They did it,” he said happily. “You see?”

  Johansen didn’t see until he began to realize that there was a dead silence outside. He ran to a window. It was night outside—the blackest night—when it should have been dusk. “What happened?”

  “The Neoterics,” said Kidder, and laughed like a child. “My friends downstairs there. They threw up the impenetrable shield over the whole island. We can’t be touched now!”

  And at Johansen’s amazed questions, he launched into a description of the race of beings below them.

  Outside the shell, things happened. Nine airplanes suddenly went dead-stick. Nine pilots glided downward, powerless, and some fell into the sea, and some struck the miraculous gray shell that loomed in place of an island, slid off, and sank.

  And ashore, a man named Wright sat in a car, half dead with fear, while government men surrounded him, approached cautiously, daring instant death from a now-dead source.

  In a room deep in the White House, a high-ranking army officer shrieked, “I can’t stand it any more! I can’t!” and leaped up, snatched a red cube off the President’s desk, ground it to ineffectual litter under his shining boots.

  And in a few days they took a broken old man away from the bank and put him in an asylum, where he died within a week.

  The shield, you see, was truly impenetrable. The power plant was untouched and sent out its beams; but the beams could not get out, and anything powered from the plant went dead. The story never became public, although for some years there was heightened naval activity off the New England coast. The navy, so the story went, had a new target range out there—a great hemi-ovoid of gray material. They bombed it and shelled it and rayed it and blasted all around it, but never even dented its smooth surface.

  Kidder and Johansen let it stay there. They were happy enough with their researches and their Neoterics. They did not hear or feel the shelling, for the shield was truly impenetrable. They synthesized their food and their light and air from the materials at hand, and they simply didn’t care. They were the only survivors of the bombing, with the exception of three poor maimed devils who died soon afterwards.

  All this happened many years ago, and Kidder and Johansen may be alive today, and they may be dead. But that doesn’t matter too much. The important thing is that the great gray shell will bear watching. Men die, but races live. Some day the Neoterics, after innumerable generations of inconceivable advancement, will take down their shield and come forth. When I think of that I feel frightened.

  Ghost of a Chance

  SHE SAID, “There’s something following me!” in a throttled voice, and started to run.

  It sort of got me. Maybe because she was so tiny and her hair was so white. Maybe because, white hair and all, she looked so young and helpless. But mostly, I think, because of what she said. “There’s something foll
owing me.” Not “someone.” “Something.” So I just naturally hauled out after her.

  I caught her at the corner, put my hand on her shoulder. She gasped, and shot away from me. “Take it easy, lady,” I panted. “I won’t let it get you.”

  She stopped so suddenly that I almost ran her down. We stood looking at each other. She had great big dark eyes that didn’t go with her hair at all. I said, “What makes you go dashing around at three o’clock in the morning?”

  “What makes you ask?” Her voice was smooth, musical.

  “Now, look—you started this conversation.”

  She started to speak, and then something over my shoulder caught her eye. She froze for a second; and I was so fascinated by the play of expression on her face that I didn’t follow her gaze. Abruptly she brought her eyes back to my face and then slapped it. It was a stinger. I stepped back and swore, and by the time I was finished she was halfway up the block. I stood there rubbing my cheek and let her go.

  I met Henry Gade a couple of days later and told him about it. Henry is a practical psychologist. Perhaps I should say his field is practical psychology, because Henry ain’t practical. He has theories. He has more damn theories than any man alive. He is thirty and bald and he makes lots of money without doing any work.

  “I think she was crazy,” I said.

  “Ah,” said Henry, and laid a finger beside his nose. I think the nose was longer. “But did you ask her what she thought?”

  “No. I only asked her what she was doing running around that time of night.”

  “The trouble with you, Gus, is that you have no romance in you. What you should have done was to catch her up in your arms and smothered her with kisses.”

  “She’d have sla—”

  “She did, anyway, didn’t she?” said Henry, and walked off.

  Henry kids a lot. But he sometimes says crazy things like that when he isn’t kidding a bit.

  I met the girl again three months later. I was in the Duke’s beer garden looking at his famous sunflower. The sunflower was twelve feet tall and had crutches to keep it standing up. It grew beside the dirt alley that was the main road of the beer garden. There were ratty-looking flowerbeds all over the place and tables set among them. And Japanese lanterns that had been out in the rain, and a laryngitic colored band. The place was crowded, and I was standing there letting all that noise beat me back and forth, looking at the sunflower. The Duke swore he could fill a No. 6 paper bag with the seeds from that one flower.

  And then she said, “Hello. I’m sorry I had to slap your face.” She was squinched up against the stem of the sunflower, in amongst all those shadows and leaves.

  I said, “Well, if it isn’t my pretty little pug. What do you mean, you’re sorry you had to? You should be just sorry you did.”

  “Oh, I had to. I wouldn’t slap you just for nothing.”

  “Oh—I did something? I shoulda got slapped?”

  “Please,” she said. “I am sorry.”

  I looked at her. She was. “What are you doing in there—hiding?”

  She nodded.

  “Who are you hiding from?”

  She wouldn’t say. She just shrugged and said she was just—you know—hiding.

  “Is it the same thing you were running away from that night?”

  “Yes.”

  I told her she was being silly. “I looked all around after you left and there wasn’t a thing on the street.”

  “Oh, yes there was!”

  “Not that I could see.”

  “I know that.”

  I suddenly got the idea that this was a very foolish conversation. “Come out of there and have a beer with me. We’ll talk this thing over.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that!”

  “Sure you could. Easy. Look.” I reached in and grabbed her.

  “You should know better than that,” she said, and then something happened to break the stem of the big sunflower. It tottered and came crashing down like a redwood. The huge flower landed on the tray that Giuseppe, the waiter, was carrying. It held eight long beers, two pitchers and a martini. The beers and a lot of broken glass flew in every direction but up. The martini went back over his head and crashed on the bars of the cage where the Duke kept his trained squirrel. There was some confusion. The girl with the white hair was gone. All the time that the Duke was telling me what a menace I was, I kept staring over his heaving shoulder at the squirrel, which was lapping up the martini that had splashed inside the cage. After the Duke ran out of four-letter words he had me thrown out. We’d been pretty good friends before that, too.

  I got hold of Henry as soon as I could. “I saw that girl again,” I told him, “and I grabbed her like you said.” I told him what had happened. He laughed at me. Henry always laughs at me.

  “Don’t look so solemn about it, Gus!” he said, and slapped me on the back. “A little excitement is good for the blood. Laugh it off. The Duke didn’t sue you, did he?”

  “No,” I said, “not exactly. But that squirrel of his ate the olive out of that cocktail that fell into his cage and got awful sick. And the Duke went and had the doctor send his bill to me. Stomach pump.”

  Henry had been eating salted nuts, and when I said that he snorted half a mouthful of chewed nuts up into his nose. I’ve done that and it hurts. In a way I was glad to see Henry suffer.

  “I need some help,” I told him after he got his health back. “Maybe that girl’s crazy, but I think she’s in trouble.”

  “She most certainly is,” said Henry. “But I don’t see what you could do about it.”

  “Oh, I’d figure out something.”

  “I also don’t see why you want to help her out.”

  “That’s a funny thing,” I said slowly. “You know me, Henry—I got no use for wimmen unless they leave me alone. Every time one of ’em does something nice, it’s because she’s figgerin’ to pull something lousy a little later.”

  Henry swallowed some cashews carefully and then laughed. “You’ve summed up at least seven volumes of male objectivism,” he said. “But what has that got to do with your silver-haired Nemesis?”

  “Nemesis? I thought maybe she was Polish. Her? Well, she’s never done anything to me that wasn’t lousy. So I figure maybe she’s different. I figure maybe she’s going to work it the other way around and pull something nice. And I want to be around when that happens.”

  “Your logic is labored but dependable.” He said something else, about what’s the use of being intelligent and educated when all wisdom rests on the lips of a child of nature, but I didn’t catch on. “Well, I’m rather interested in whether or not you can do anything for her. Go ahead and stick your neck out.”

  “I don’t know where she lives or nothing.”

  “Oh—that.” He pulled out a little notebook and a silver pencil and wrote down something. “Here,” he said, tearing it off and handing it to me. It said, “Iola Harvester, 2336 Dungannon Street.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Your damsel in distress. Your dark-eyed slapper of faces.”

  “How the devil do you know her name?”

  “She was a patient of mine for quite a while.”

  “She was? Why you son-of-a-gun! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  I started for the door, reading over the name and address. “You know what, Henry?”

  “What?”

  “Iola’s a pretty name.”

  Henry laughed. “Let me know how you make out.”

  I went up and rang the bell. It was a big apartment house; Iola lived on the fourth floor. The foyer door belched at me and I pushed it open and went in. They had one of those self-service elevators so I went up the stairs. Those things make me nervous.

  She was waiting up on her floor to find out who had rung the bell. She was wearing a black housecoat that touched the floor all the way around and was close around her throat. It had a stiff collar that stuck up and out and seeme
d to sort of cradle her head. There was a zipper all down the front and two silver initials on the left breast. I couldn’t get my wind right away and it wasn’t the stairs.

  “Oh!” she said. “It’s you!”

  “Yup!” I looked at her for a minute. “Gee! I didn’t know you were so tiny!” There was something about her that made me want to laugh out loud, but not because I saw anything funny. When I said that she got pink.

  “I… don’t know whether I should ask you in,” she said. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “My name is Gus. So now you can ask me in.”

  “You’re the only man I have ever met who can be fresh without being fresh,” she said, and stood aside. I didn’t know what she meant, but I went in, anyway. It was a nice place. Everything in it was delicate and small, like Iola. I stood in the middle of the floor spinning my hat on one finger until she took it away from me. “Sit down,” she said. I did and she did, with the room between us. “What brings you here; how did you find out my address; and will you have some coffee or a drink?”

  “I came because I think you’re in a jam and you might need help. A friend of mine gave me your name and address. I don’t want any coffee and what have you got to drink?”

  “Sauterne,” she said. “Rum, rye and Scotch.”

  “I never touch that stuff.”

  “What do you drink?”

  “Gin.” She looked startled. “Or milk. Got any milk?”

  She had. She got me a great big glass of it. She even had some herself. She said, “Now, what’s on your mind?”

  “I told you, Miss Iola. I want to help you.”

  “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Oh, yes there is. There must be. If you’ll tell me what’s botherin’ you, making you hide away in … in sunflowers and runnin’ away from nothing. I’ll bet I could fix you up—What are you laughing at?”