by Hank Davis
He thought he’d made a joke, but she looked thoughtful, said “hmmm,” then made a note on her phone. “Of course, France isn’t the only place where snails are a delicacy,” she mused.
The helicopter was landing, taking his mind off the misfired joke. They stepped out about a hundred yards from yet another field. This one had tanks sitting in it.
Typically, witnesses said they had fallen from a clear sky and come down with unnatural slowness. But not slow enough. Some of them were obviously damaged. Some had landed upside down. And, since not all of the tanks had been towed from the field by the next day, other tanks had landed on top of tanks that were already there.
“I guess these are more useful than bayonets or hand grenades,” Dr. Greene said.
“Not by much,” Duncan replied. “These are Sherman tanks. Hopelessly obsolete. Primitive electronics, insufficient armor. And some of the tanks that were towed off the field before the second, um, tank drop were missing parts in their engines..”
“But the Sherman tank is a well-known, uh, model—” she wasn’t sure if “model” was the right word “—and if people thought more tanks were needed, they might have that kind of tank deeper in their minds.”
“So, the mysterious source of this falling largesse is reading some minds, but not very well?”
“Maybe. I’m just guessing.”
“Or maybe somebody left teeth in the field and the tooth fairy dropped off a bunch of tanks.”
She recognized that one as a joke. “Maybe somebody sowed dragon’s teeth,” she said.
Duncan looked at the usual radar equipment and cameras set up outside the perimeter of the tank-strewn field, and was sure that once again, they wouldn’t provide any answers. He was also sure that no one would report any Sherman tanks missing.
He was right.
“At Seringapatan, India, about the year 1800, fell a hailstone . . . I blurt out something that should, perhaps, be withheld for several hundred pages—but that damned thing was the size of an elephant.”
—Charles Fort,
The Book of the Damned
EARLY JULY
Dr. Greene was getting used to riding Huey copters, and was no longer bothered by the sides being open in flight or worried about falling out. She was looking out the side and said, “There it is—” then stopped as they got closer and the size of the objects became more obvious.
“Only two of them,” Duncan said, “one on each day. Maybe the mystery agency is pushing the limits of their budget.” He wished he weren’t joking. He’d like to think that the agency had some kind of limits.
Greene was still silent as they approached the closer of the two huge ships lying on their side. Finally she said, “I didn’t realize how big they were.”
“Big, but obsolete,” Duncan said. “This is a World War II battleship. Besides, it’s in the middle of Utah, hundreds of miles from any water.”
About a hundred yards farther away was a more modern fighting vessel. It had had missiles on board, but they had been removed. No word yet on whether they were functional. He hoped that they weren’t.
They retreated back to where the inevitable instrumentation was set up and waited. And on schedule, on the third day, a nuclear submarine descended to the ground. It groaned as it settled and its hull cracked loudly under the uneven strain. A missile tube’s hatch popped off and rolled across the field like a runaway hubcap. He wondered if there was a missile in the tube and if it was functional.
“That submarine has nuclear missiles, doesn’t it?” Dr. Greene said.
He considered that she probably didn’t have a security clearance high enough, if she had one at all, nor a need to know, and decided, to hell with it. “It looks like it has them. The guys who took away the missiles, or what looked like missiles, from the second ship will probably be back to look it over. And probably won’t tell us anything.”
“I don’t suppose any submarines will turn up missing,” she said.
“Probably not. I can’t see from here, but there’ll probably be no name on the sub. The other two ships didn’t have names. That looks like an American design. It’d be more interesting if a Russian sub were dropped here.”
“I suppose if the Russians were disarming, they would get things falling on—” she began, then her cell phone rang. She answered, spoke to someone named Dave, then listened for a couple of minutes, thanked the caller, and closed the phone. Her expression was grim and she was very quiet for a couple of minutes.
Finally, the colonel said, “You were saying?”
“What was I saying? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. That was a friend who’s a political junky. I asked him to keep track of what the President is doing for me, though I didn’t tell him why. He called to say she just made a speech about how our nuclear arsenal is obscenely bloated and she intends to reduce it to a tenth or less of the current stockpile.”
It was the colonel’s turn to be very quiet.
“Warheads don’t go off unless they’ve been armed, do they?” she asked. “If an ICBM just fell from the sky the impact wouldn’t set it off, would it?” She sounded like a child who wanted to be told there was no monster in the closet.
“That’s above my pay grade,” Duncan said. Not to mention my security clearance, he thought. “But I think that’s right. But—” he said, and stopped, wishing he’d shut up sooner.
“But? But what?”
“The hand grenades all had their pins still in them, so falling ICBMs—” he had to stop after the phrase “falling ICBMs.” For a second, he was back at the first location, watching bayonets fall point down from the sky.
“But a warhead is hundreds of times more complicated. They—or It—or whatever is doing this might leave out the parts that make the warhead even capable of exploding.” Why didn’t I shut up?
Tomorrow was July 4th. He thought of fireworks. Very bright fireworks.
“Or they might leave out a part that keeps it from exploding unless the thing is armed?” she said. “Is that it?”
He nodded, then said, “And none of those bayonets fell with scabbards around them. The elementary safety measure must have seemed unimportant.”
They looked at each other, then both looked up into the sky, into the blue, cloudless, and now very ominous sky.
“If there is a universal mind, must it be sane? [. . .] Do things fall where a universal mind, which may be the mind of an idiot, conceives that they are needed?”
—Damon Knight,
Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained.
SUCCESS STORY
by Earl Goodale
Here’s a case where the alien invaders may have bitten off more than they could chew; particularly if an alien soldier has doubts about which side he’s on.
Earl Goodale is a puzzlement. He only had two stories published:“The Zoet Space” in 1958 and this story in 1960. However, he certainly didn’t write like a beginner, and “Success Story” was the lead story in the April 1960 issue of Galaxy, one of the three most prestigious SF magazines of the time, which leads me to suspect that “Earl Goodale” was a pseudonym for an established writer. If that suspicion is correct and someone knows who Earl Goodale is, or was, I hope they’ll come forth to dispel the mystery. In any case, I’m glad that the mysterious Mr. Goodale wrote this very cynical, very funny yarn.
Once my name was Ameet Ruxt, my skin was light blue, and I was a moderately low-ranking member of the Haldorian Empire. Or should I say I was a member of the lower income group? No, definitely “low-ranking,” because, in a warrior society, even one with as high a technological level as a statistician sits low on the totem pole. He is handed the wrong end of the stick—call it what you will; he’s the one who doesn’t acquire even one wife for years and he hasn’t a courtesy title. He’s the man they draft into their Invasion Forces—the Haldorians are always invading someone—and turn him into a Fighter Basic in a third of a year.
“Look,” I’d complained to the burly two-str
iper in the Receiving Center, “I’m a trained statistician with a degree and—”
“Say ‘Sir’, when you address me.”
I started over again. “I know, Sir, that they use statisticians in the service. So if Haldor needs me in the service, it’s only sensible that I should work in statistics.”
The Hweetoral looked bored, but I’ve found out since that all two-stripers looked bored; it’s because so many of them have attained, at that rank, their life’s ambition. “Sure, sure. But we just got a directive down on all you paper-pushers. Every one of you from now on out is headed for Basic Fighter Course. You know, I envy you, Ruxt. Haldor, what I wouldn’t give to be out there with real men again! Jetting down on some new planet—raying down the mongrels till they yelled for mercy—and grabbing a new chunk of sky for the Empire. Haldor! That’s the life!” He glanced modestly down at his medaled chest.
“Yes, Sir,” I said, “it sure is. But look at my examination records you have right there. Physically, I’m only a 3 and you have to have a 5 to go to Basic Fighter. And besides,” I threw in the clincher, though I was a bit ashamed of it, “my fighting aptitude only measures a 2!”
The Hweetoral sneered unsubtly and grabbed a scriber with heavy fingers. A couple of slashes, a couple of new entries, and lo, I was now a 5 in both departments. I was qualified in every respect.
“See,” he said, “that’s your first lesson in the Service, Ruxt. Figures don’t mean a thing, because they can always be changed. That’s something a figure-pusher like you has to learn. So—” he shoved out that ponderous hand and crushed mine before I could protect myself—“good luck, Ruxt. I know you’ll get through that course—alive, I mean.” He chuckled heartily. “And I know men!”
He was right. I got through alive. But then, 76.5 percent of draftees do get through the Basic Fighter Course alive. But for me, it took a drastic rearrangement of philosophy.
Me, all I’d ever wanted was a good life. An adequate income, art and music, congenial friends, an understanding wife—just one wife was all I’d ever hoped for. As you can see, I was an untypical Haldorian on every point.
After my first day in Basic Fighter Course, I just wanted to stay alive.
“There’s two kinds of men we turn out here,” our Haldor told us as we lined up awkwardly for the first time (that scene so loved by vision-makers). We new draftees called our Trontar our Haldor because he actually had the power over our bodies that the chaplains assured us the Heavenly Haldor had over our liberated spirits. Our Trontar looked us over with his fatherly stare, flexing his powerful arm muscles so that his three tattooed stripes rippled and danced. “Yeah,” he went on, “two kinds of men: Fighting men and dead men!” The Trontar grinned that fighting Haldorian grin you see all your lives on the Prop Sheets. “And I’ll tell you something, men. When you leave here—all Fighters Basic—I’m going to envy you. Yeah, I’ll really envy you gutsy killers when you go out in that big Out-There and grab yourselves a new chunk of sky.” He paused and studied our faces. “Now we’re gonna run, and I do mean run, two full decades. The last four men in get to do it over again, and pull kitchen duty tonight too.”
I tried, as others have tried, to slip quietly out of Basic Fighter. I tried being sick, but following sick report one found oneself doing a full day’s training—after the understanding medics had shoved some pep pills into you. I demanded a physical examination. They weren’t going to push me around.
After a couple of days in solitary, I asked in a nice way for physical evaluation.
Well, I asked. I wasn’t very smart in those days.
They weren’t interested in the story of how my records had been falsified or in my fighting aptitude.
“Look, draftee,” the psycho-man said after I finally got to him, “the fact that you’ve got to see me shows you have enough of a fighting aptitude. Your Trontar didn’t encourage you to request evaluation, did he? And he isn’t going to like you very much when you report back to your platoon, is he?”
I shuddered. “Not exactly.”
“Call me ‘Sir’.”
“No, Sir. But I was desperate, Sir. I don’t think I can stand . . .”
“Draftee, you know that some unfortunate men break down in training and that we have to take them out. Maybe you’ve already lost some that way. Suppose you were brought in here, gibbering, yowling, and drooling—I guess we’d have to cure you and send you back home as non-fighter material, eh?”
Someone up here liked me! Here was a tip on how to escape back to the old quiet life. I nodded agreeably.
“But you know, don’t you,” he said softly, “that first we run a thorough test on our drooling draftee? Say it’s you . . .”
I nodded again.
“We most always detect fakers. And you know there’s a death penalty for any Haldorian attempting to escape his duty.” He smiled sadly, and reminiscently.
I nodded. Maybe someone up here didn’t like me.
“So we’d shoot you dead with one of those primitive projectile weapons, as an object lesson for both you and the draftees we had remaining.”
I nodded and tried to show by my countenance how much I approved of people being shot dead with primitive weapons.
“But suppose,” he went on, “that you’d really cracked up or that you’d faked successfully?”
“Yes, Sir?” Hope returned, hesitantly and on tip-toes, ready to flee.
“Then we’d cure you,” he said. “But the cure unfortunately involves the destruction of your higher mental faculties. And so there’d be nothing for it but to ship you off to one of the mining planets. That’s standard procedure, if you didn’t know. But I think you’ll be all right now, don’t you?”
Hope fled. I assured him that I’d be just fine and reported back, on the double, to my training platoon.
“Just in time, Ruxt,” my Trontar greeted me. “Back for full duty, I take it? That’s the Haldorian spirit!” He turned to the platoon which was lined up like three rows of sweaty statues. “Men, remember what I told you about taking cover when you’re under fire—and staying under cover? Just suppose we suddenly came under fire—flat trajectory stuff—out here on this flat exercise ground with no cover except in that latrine pit over there. Would any of you hesitate to dive into that latrine pit? And once in there, safe and sound, would any of you not stay there until I gave the word to come out?”
A perceptible shudder passed like a wave over the platoon. We knew the Trontar did not ask pointless questions.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” he assured us, “and you’d even stay in there all day under this hot sun if you had to. Ruxt! You’re rested and refreshed from visiting the hospital. You demonstrate how it’s done.”
It was a long day, even though my Trontar kindly sent some sandwiches over to me at high noon. I didn’t eat much. But I did do a lot of thinking. There was one last hope. I wrote a letter to a remote clan relative who was supposed to have a small amount of influence. It was a moving letter. I told how my test results had been falsified, what beasts our trainers were, how the medics refused to retest me—very much the standard letter that new Haldorian trainees write. As I went out to mail this plea, one evening, I met two of my fellow trainees starting out on a night march in full field equipment.
“How come?” I asked, instantly fearful that I’d missed some notice on the bulletin board.
“We wrote letters,” one of them said simply.
“The Trontar censors all our mail,” said the other. “Didn’t you know? Oh, well, neither did we.”
As they marched off, I made a small bonfire out of my letter after first, almost, just throwing it away—before I remembered that the Hweetorals checked our waste cans. What a man has to do to hold two measly stripes!
Acceptance of the inevitable is the beginning of wisdom, says the ancient Haldorian sage. I put in an application for transfer to the Statistical Services to be effective upon completion of Basic Fighter Course.
“Statis
tical Services?” the Company Clerk asked. “What’s that? Anyhow, you’re going to be a Fighter Basic, if you get through this training,” he said darkly. The Company Clerk was a sad victim of our Haldorian passion for realistic training; he had lacked one day of completing Basic Fighter when he’d let his leg dangle a bit too long after he’d scaled a wall, and the training gentlemen had unemotionally shot it off. As it turned out, our efficient surgeon/replacers had been unable, for some technical reason, to grow back enough leg for full duty. So there was nothing for it but to use the man as could be best done. They’d made him a clerk—mainly because that was the specialty they were shortest of at the time.
“Who says you can put in for Statistical Services?” the Company Clerk demanded.
“Reg 39-47A.” I was learning my way around. The night before I was on orderly duty in the office. I had tracked down the chapter and verse which, theoretically, allowed a man to change his destiny.
“Know the Regs, do you? Starting to be a troublemaker, huh? Yeah, Ruxt, I’ll put in your application.”
I turned away with some feeling of relief. This might possibly work.
The Company Clerk called me back. “You know the Regs so good, Ruxt,” he said. “How come you didn’t ask me for permission to leave? I’m cadre, you know.” He leaned back in his chair and grinned at me. “Just to help you remember the correct Haldorian deportment, I’m putting you on kitchen duty for the next three nights. That way,” he grinned again, “you can divide up your five hours of sleep over three nights instead of crowding them all into one.”
Poor deluded Company Clerk! I actually averaged three hours of sleep every one of those three nights—after I found out that the Mess Trontar would accept my smoking ration.