The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales

by Frank Belknap Long

  When Twoon shut his green-lidded eyes tight he could see the great and indomitable Richard trampling on his cloak in the bright sunlight of Earth, shouting at the top of his lungs: “I am Richard, your King! Is there one amongst you man enough to dispute my strength in unarmored combat?”

  “Twoon!” shrilled his mother’s voice despairingly, amidst the Sherwood Forest Knights and the shining trumpets. “I’ve baked some waffle muffins for you. You like them, don’t you, darling?”

  Well… He did like waffle muffins.

  Almost reverently he folded his mesh-armor jerkin, and carried it to his locker aboard the rocket ship Morning Star. He saluted his commanding officer briskly in the passageway, exchanged winks with a pilot room buddy, and walked quickly to the stairwell—a stairwell in a far less glory-spangled world. He called down: “Coming, Mother!”

  Mother Caracas waited for her son to seat himself at the kitchen table before she placed her bare right arm into the oven and withdrew the tray of delicious-looking waffle muffins.

  “Twoon,” she said, and her voice was reproachful. “You’ve been upstairs for two solid hours.”

  “I was reading, Momsie,” he said.

  “Oh, I wish those Men hadn’t given you a microfilm projector, and books to go with it. If you were a Man the books might not harm you. But we are Martians, darling. Never forget that. If you do you’ll never know a moment of real contentment.”

  “Contentment,” Twoon repeated, munching uncomprehendingly at a muffin. “Why do you always use that word, Momsie? I’m not sure I know what it means.”

  “You’ll know what it means when you’ve lost it forever,” Mother Caracas said, her eyes resting on her son in compassionate solicitude. “You’ll understand then, darling—when it’s too late.”

  “What’s so bad about being a Man?” Twoon asked, reaching for another muffin. “They taught us a lot of things, Momsie—how to build bridges and tunnels, and houses like this. How to get to places fast, like when you want to call on a friend, and how to have fun playing games, and to stay healthy with injections of vitamins.”

  “Yes, they taught us some valuable things, Twoon. But they can never teach us anything about themselves we don’t know already. There’s harshness in them, Twoon, and cruelty and stupidity. Very few of them have ever known a moment of real contentment. And they don’t like anyone to be different from themselves, to try to reach out for the kind of quiet happiness we had on Mars before the first Earth rocket arrived.”

  “I don’t see why they don’t, Momsie.”

  “I’ll tell you why, darling. When you’ve killed something beautiful in yourself you hate yourself for what you’ve done, and that hate makes a festering wound inside you. There’s only one way of easing the hurt and the torment—finding someone who hasn’t killed the beautiful something, someone who’s different, and heaping scorn and ridicule upon him.”

  “Are all Men like that, Momsie?”

  “Not all Men—but nearly all. Even the Men who aren’t have a little of that maliciousness in them. On Earth there were a few Men, only a few, who refused to kill the beautiful something. They were called poets. They were hated so much they nearly all died in abject poverty, or were driven to self-destruction.”

  “Richard the Lion-Hearted was a Man,” Twoon said, irrelevantly. “He was the strongest, bravest Man who ever lived. I wished I could be like him.”

  “There you go again!” Mother Caracas shook her head, her eyes grief-shadowed. “Strength, bravery! That’s all the Earthmen ever talk about. I read a few chapters of that precious book of yours. Do you really think a Man like Richard ever walked the Earth? The Richard you admire was what Men call a legend. The real flesh-and-blood Richard was quite different. He was brutal, cruel, greedy. He trampled on everyone who got in his way, and when he wanted something he took it.

  “And just because he’d killed the beautiful something in himself he despised ordinary Men. In Richard’s day most ordinary Men were wretchedly ‘different’. They went about in rags and misery.”

  Twoon finished his waffle muffins in silence. Then he stood up and looked at his Mother. “I’m going down to the spaceport,” he said. “Literary Sam promised me another book.”

  Mother Caracas gazed at her son despairingly for an instant, then she picked up her empty plate and carried it to the sink.

  “All right, Twoon,” she said. “Someday you’ll understand.”

  Twoon went out into the bright Martian sunlight. He ambled cheerfully over the board walkway of shining plastic which meandered between the houses with all the resplendence of a quicksilver serpent gliding toward horizons measureless to Man. And as he ambled he pictured himself in a suit of chain armor, brandishing a man-sized lance.

  He was halfway to the spaceport when the Earth children came racing toward him. He had never seen them before and the yell of derision they gave when they caught sight of him so startled him that he halted abruptly in his tracks.

  There were no Martians on the walkway, no adult Martians, that is, and the sight of Twoon standing alone and unprotected seemed to fill the Earth children with an irresistible, sadistic delight. They came romping straight toward him—two boys and two girls—and began at once to shout at him, a wicked gleam in their eyes.

  “Hey, how did you ever get to look like that?”

  “Get off this walk, Green Ears. You hear? We don’t want you on this walk. It’s our walk.”

  “If you don’t get off we’ll push your face right down into the sand.”

  “You heard what Billy said, Green Ears. You’re not human, and you’ve no right to be on our walk!”

  “Yaa. Wart Ears, Green Ears! We’ll take you apart.”

  “And see what makes Martians tick. They have cabbage leaves for brains.”

  “Sure they have. Everyone knows that.”

  “What’ll we do to him if he doesn’t get off?”

  “He’ll get off, don’t worry.”

  The boy called Billy had big strong hands, and a pugnaciously overshot jaw.

  He came up to Twoon and drew back his fist. “Are you getting off, Green Ears, or shall I let you have it right where it’ll hurt?”

  Twoon recoiled in quivering alarm. A vigorously delivered blow from a human fist—even a boy’s fist—could have disastrous consequences to a Martian, wherever it might happen to land. He knew that it could, and he saw himself lying dead on the sand, to his mother’s everlasting sorrow.

  Twoon had no cowardice in him. But he did desire to go on living, if only to spare his mother the grief which would surely come to her if she found him lying dead in the desert with his chest caved in.

  “Make up your mind, Green Ears!” the boy called Billy said.

  Twoon made up his mind. He turned quickly, and started to run, straight back along the walkway toward his home.

  Immediately yells of triumph, frenzied and malicious, arose from behind him. “Look at him go! He don’t even run like a Man!”

  “Naw, Martians don’t know how to run. They just get away fast as they can by squirming over the ground like centipedes.”

  “Are you going to let him get away, Billy?”

  “Not without something to remember us by!” Billy shouted.

  The stone struck Twoon behind his right ear, hurling him to the ground. With a sob he picked himself up, and ran on, a trickling, horrible wetness on the quivering flesh of his scalp.

  When he arrived home he went straight to his room, took the microfilm projector and Richard the Lion-Hearted to the waste disposal, and let the vacuum-suction in the depths of the tube carry both book and projector to everlasting night and oblivion.

  Then he sat down in a chair by the window, and stared out over the rust-red plains of Mars.

  He thought of his Uncle Tek, with his fo
ur abbreviated tentacles—mere greenish stumps they were, like the gangrened limbs of space explorers who had suffered frostbite—and of Aunt Geroris with her bulbous head and stalked eyes. He thought of his sister who had only two tentacles, long, willowy and very beautiful, and of how proudly his mother had gazed into his own sunken, disk-like eyes when she had tucked him into bed in his infancy.

  “A handsome son I have!”

  No two Martians were ever in the least alike. But no Martian ever hated or derided another Martian just because he had fewer tentacles, or a coppery skin instead of a green one, or an extra eye in the middle of his forehead.

  No Martian ever thought of another Martian as “different.” There had been no need for that, and no real understanding of it even.

  Oh, it was good to be a Martian.

  THE SPECTACLES

  Originally published in Fantastic Universe, April 1956

  It was a most delightful day, with a crisp autumn tang in the air and Willie felt a joyful lift throughout his entire being. It was forbidden, of course, and he had no right at all to even enter the hall and go romping over its mottled flagstones toward the case and the spectacles. But he simply didn’t care.

  “Oh, happy me!” he thought. “Oh, joyous day! What do I care if I am caught and punished?”

  He was very little and the case was enormous and it glittered in the sunlight from a picture-window that overlooked a many-splendored bay. Beyond the window gulls dipped and wheeled and far in the distance a black buoy rolled with the sea’s resistless surge.

  It was easy enough to climb into the case and emerge with the spectacles. The glass was shattered over half its length, and the pale mummified brow upon which the spectacles reposed could offer no resistance. Not even the mysterious emanations of thought which had once issued from it could daunt in retrospect so small a thief on such a day as this.

  “Oh, glorious, carefree, wonderful me!” intoned Willie.

  Into the case he crawled and out of it he strode triumphant, with the spectacles perched on the bridge of his gladsomely vibrating nose.

  “Where will I sit?” he asked himself, looking up first at the sky above, and then down with a pensive wink at the waters which covered the earth.

  “Right here by the window. Why not? Big dreams, wonderful dreams, must have room to stretch their limbs and go striding over land and sea like giants in search of their lady loves.”

  Willie sat down, crossed his small legs and looked out through the spectacles at the sea and the sky.

  Almost immediately a ship came into view. It was a very large ship and passengers thronged the rails and white handkerchiefs fluttered in the breeze, and there was a great shouting from the decks and a rejoicing that could not possibly have existed at all if Willie had not been sitting there to take part in it.

  “Hello, Willie!” came in a rising chorus. “Isn’t it a glorious day? We’re heading straight into the sunrise, Willie. Believe it or not, there are palm-fringed islands out there just begging to be explored, and brown-skinned women who would die immediately if no one ever came to make love to them.

  “Think of it, Willie. This big round Earth is ours to enjoy for ever and ever.”

  “I know,” said Willie, and waved back. Or rather, he shouted it. “I understand! You don’t have to tell me! I know what it means to be a man, and young and in love. I even know what you’re thinking. The women you are holding in your arms wouldn’t seem half so wonderful if you couldn’t dream of brown-skinned girls too—women you’ll never really meet, women who don’t even exist.”

  “Sure, Willie, sure—that’s it. But how did you know? How did you even guess? You’re just a—”

  “Willie, put those spectacles down this minute!” a familiar voice interrupted. “Take them off and give them to me. I’ll put them back, and then we’ll both have to be very humble, and hope that destruction won’t come upon us. You’ve done a terrible thing, Willie. It’s worse than a crime. It’s—”

  Willie jumped up and took the spectacles off, and gave them to the mother-model. She stood towering over him, sternly severe and reproving, her seven-foot android robot bulk blotting out the sunlight at her back.

  “We were made to obey Man—not to try to understand him!” she said.

  “But he is gone forever now. He will never return.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We were made to obey.”

  Willie looked at the mummified figure in the case and his small conical head drooped in resignation. The autumn sky seemed suddenly gray and forbidding and the waters which covered the Earth had become a leaden expanse of emptiness.