by Fritz Leiber
Paul found himself going through one of his usual guilt spasms. Not five minutes ago he’d been calling these people saucer maniacs, and here was the first one he heard sounding sensible and civilized.
A little man, sitting at the same end of the first row as the dog Ragnarok, now stood up.
“Excuse me, Professor,” the Little Man said, “but according to my watch there are only fifteen minutes of full eclipse left. I want to remind everyone to keep up the watch, while paying attention of course to what our interesting speakers have to say. Rama Joan has told us of cosmic beings able to attend to a dozen lines of thought at once. Surely we can manage two! After all, we did hold this meeting because of the unusual opportunity for sightings, especially of the less bold saucers that shun the light. Let’s not lose what’s left of this precious opportunity to see Bashful Saucers, as Ann calls them.”
Several heads in the front row dutifully swiveled this way and that, showing profiles with uplifted chins.
Margo nudged Paul. “Do your duty,” she whispered gruffly, peering about fiercely.
“Good hunting, everybody,” the Little Man said. “Excuse me, Professor.” He sat down.
But before Beardy could continue, he was challenged by a man with high shoulders and folded arms who sat tall in his seat—Margo tagged him the Ramrod.
“Professor, you’ve given us a lot of fancy double talk,” the Ramrod began, “but it still seems to me to be about saucers that people imagine. I’m not interested in those, even if Mr. Jung was. I’m only interested in real saucers, like the one I talked to and travelled in.”
Paul felt his spirits lift. Now these people were starting to behave as saucer maniacs should!
Beardy seemed somewhat flustered by the challenge. He said, “I’m very sorry if I gave that impression. I thought I made it clear that—”
Doc lifted his bald head and cut short Beardy’s defense by laying a hand on his arm, as if to say, “Let me handle this character.” The She-Turban glanced at him with a faint smile and touched the tie of her evening clothes.
Doc leaned forward and bent his gleaming dome and glittering glasses down toward the Ramrod, as if the latter were some sort of insect.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said with an edge to his voice, “but I believe you also claim to have visited other planets by flying saucer—planets unrecognized by astronomy.”
“That’s right,” the Ramrod replied, sitting an inch taller.
“Just where are those other planets?”
“Oh, they’re…places,” the Ramrod replied, winning a few chuckles by adding: “Real planets don’t let themselves be bossed around by a pack of astronomers.”
Ignoring the chuckles, Doc continued, “Are those planets off at the edge of nowhere—the planets of another star, many light years away?” His voice was gentle now. His thick glasses seemed to beam benignly.
“No, they’re not that,” the Ramrod said. “Why, I visited Arletta just a week ago and the trip only took two days.”
Doc was not to be diverted. “Are they little tiny planets that are hiding behind the sun or the moon or perhaps Jupiter, in a sort of permanent eclipse, like people hiding behind trees in a forest?”
“No, they’re not that either,” the Ramrod asserted, squaring his shoulders afresh, but nevertheless beginning to sound a shade defensive. “They don’t hide behind anybody’s skirts—not them. They’re just…out there. And they’re big, you can bet—as big as Earth. I’ve visited six of them.”
“Humph,” Doc grunted. “Are they by any chance planets that are concealed in hyperspace and that pop out conveniently once in a blue moon—say, when you come visiting?”
Now it was Doc who was getting the chuckles, though he ignored those, too.
“You’re being negativistic,” the Ramrod said accusingly, “and a darn sight too theoretical. Those other planets are just out there, I tell you.”
“Well, if they’re just out there,” Doc roared softly, “why can’t we just see them?” His head was thrown back in triumph, or perhaps it was only that his glasses had slipped down his nose a bit.
There was quite a pause. Then: “Black-negativistic,” the Ramrod amended loftily. “Be a waste of time to tell you how some planets have invisibility screens to make starlight curve around them. I don’t care to talk to you any longer.”
“Let me make my position clear,” Doc said hotly, addressing the whole audience. “I am willing to consider any idea whatsoever—even that there’s an alien planet lurking in our solar system. But I want some hint of a rational explanation, even if it’s that the planet exists in hyperspace. I give Charles Fulby—(he waved toward the Ramrod)—a fractional plus score for his screens notion.”
He subsided, breathing victoriously. The Little Man took this opportunity to pop up from beside the big dog Ragnarok at the end of the front row and say: “Only ten minutes left I know this argument is interesting, but keep watching, please. Remember, we’re first and foremost saucer students. Flying planets are exciting, but just one little saucer, witnessed by a whole symposium, would be a real triumph for us. Thank you.”
ASA HOLCOMB had been blinking his flashlight toward town from the mesa top near the Superstition Mountains. After all, he was supposed to try to save his own life. But now, growing tired of that duty, he looked up again at the stars, diamond-bright during the full eclipse, and he named them without effort, and then lost himself once more in the earth-shadowed moon, standing there in the foreground like some great Hopi emblem hammered out of age-blackened silver. There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky. He could easily lie here and watch all night without a moment of boredom. But the weakness and the strangeness were growing greater, and the rock beneath him had become very cold.
PEPE MARTINEZ and High Bundy rose from their cushions and drifted like leaves toward the grimed brick wall of the roof in Harlem. Pepe said, waving toward the moon: “One more puff and then—poof! I’ll be there, just like John Carter.”
High said: “Don’t forget your spacesuit.”
Pepe said: “I’ll take a big lungful of pot and live on that.” He waved toward the stars. “What’s all that black billboard of jewelry advertising say, High?”
High said: “Billboard! That’s motorsickles, man, every one of them with a diamond headlight, going every way there is.”
Arab, still on his cushion before the tent, and now trickling down his gullet a few drops of muscatel from a thin liqueur glass, called: “What of the night, oh my sons?”
Pepe called back: “Beautiful as a silken serpent, oh my Daddy-o.”
THE MOON continued to swing through Earth’s cold silent shadow at her sedate pace of forty miles a minute, as irrevocably as the blood leaking into Asa Holcomb’s chest, or the spermatozoa lashing their tails in Jake Lesher’s loins, or the hormones streaming from Don Guillermo’s adrenal glands, or the atoms splitting to heat the boilers of the “Prince Charles,” or the wavicles carrying their coded pictures to Spike Stevens’ cave, or Wolf Loner’s unconscious mind opening and shutting its windows in the rhythm he called sanity. Luna had been doing it a billion years ago; she would be doing it a billion years hence. Some day, astronomers said, obscure tidal forces would draw her so close to earth that racking internal tides would shatter her, turning her into something like the rings of Saturn. But that, astronomers said, was still a hundred billion years away.
Chapter
Six
PAUL HAGBOLT nervously nudged Margo Gelhorn, warning her to stop giggling as a woman in the second row called to Doc: “What’s that hyperspace you were saying planets could come out of?”
“Yes, why not give us a run-down?” Beardy suggested like a veteran panelist, turning to Doc.
“It’s a notion that’s turned up in theoretical physics and any number of science-fiction stories.” Doc launched out, adjusting his glasses and then running his hands back across his bald head.
“As you all know, the speed of ligh
t is generally accepted as the fastest possible. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second sounds like a lot, but it’s snail slow when it conies to the vast distances between the stars and within the galaxies—a dismal prospect for space travelers.
“However,” Doc continued, “it’s theoretically possible that space-time may be so warped or crumpled that distant parts of our cosmos touch in a higher dimension—in hyperspace, which is where the word comes in. Or even that every part touches every other part. If that is the case, then faster-than-light travel would be theoretically possible by somehow blasting out of our universe into hyperspace and then back in again at the desired point. Of course, hyperspace travel has been suggested only for spaceships, but I don’t know why a properly equipped planet couldn’t manage it, too—theoretically. Professional scientists like Bernal and philosophers such as Stapledon have theorized about traveling planets, not to mention authors like Stuart and Smith.”
“Theory!” the Ramrod snorted, adding sotto voce: “Hot air!”
“How about that?” Beardy asked Doc, bringing the question onto the platform with a fine impartiality. “Is there any concrete evidence for the existence of hyperspace or hyperspace travel?”
From beyond Doc, the She-Turban glanced toward him and Beardy curiously.
“Not one shred,” Doc said, with a grin. “I’ve tried to goose my astronomer friends into hunting for clues, but they don’t take me very seriously.”
“You interest me,” Beardy said. “Just what form might such clues take?”
“I’ve thought about that,” Doc admitted with relish. “One idea I’ve come up with is that the thrust necessary to get a ship into and out of hyperspace might involve the creation of momentary artificial gravitational fields—fields so intense that they would visibly distort the starlight passing through that volume of space. So I’ve suggested to my astronomer friends that they watch for the stars to waver on clear nights of good seeing—and especially from satellite ’scopes—and that they hunt through short-exposure star photographs for evidence of the same thing happening—stars blanking-out briefly or moving twistedly.”
The thin woman in the second row said: “I saw a story in the papers about a man seeing the stars twirl. Would that be evidence?”
Doc chuckled. “I’m afraid not. Wasn’t he drunk? We mustn’t take these silly-season items too seriously.”
Paul simultaneously felt a shiver hug his chest and Margo clutch his arm.
“Paul,” she whispered urgently. “Isn’t Doc describing exactly what you saw in those four photographs?”
“It sounds similar,” he temporized, trying to straighten it out in his own mind. “Very similar.” Then, wonderingly: “He used the word ‘twist’.”
“Well, how about it?” Margo demanded. “Has Doc got something or hasn’t he?”
“Opperly said—” Paul began…and realized that Doc was speaking to him.
“Excuse me, you two in the back row—sorry, I don’t know your names—do you have a contribution to make?”
“Why, no. No, sir,” Paul called rapidly. “We were simply very much impressed by your presentation.”
Doc waved his hand once in a good-natured acknowledgment.
“Liar,” Margo breathed at Paul with a smile. “I’ve half a mind to tell him all about it.”
Paul hadn’t the heart to say no, which was probably a good thing. He was having another guilt attack, unlocalized but acute. Certainly, he told himself, he couldn’t spill inside Project information—to saucerites, to boot. Still, there was something wrong with a setup in which someone like Doc couldn’t know about those photographs.
But then he started thinking about the point at issue, and the shiver returned. Damn it, there was something devilish about the way Doc’s guesswork fitted with those photographs. He looked up uneasily at the dark moon. Margo’s words resounded thinly in his memory: “What if the stars around it should squiggle now?”
THE MOON-DUST cannisters hanging on their thin metal stalks above the dimly glittering film of carbon dioxide snow looked like the weirdly mechanistic fruits of an ice garden. Moving in his helmet’s headlight beam, Don Merriam stepped toward the nearest one as gently as he could, so as to kick up a minimum of contaminating dust. In spite of his caution, some dry-ice crystals arched up in the path of his metal boots and fell back abruptly, as is the way of dust and “snow” on the airless moon. He touched the trigger on the cannister which sealed it hermetically and then he plucked it from its stalk and dropped it in his pouch.
“Highest-paid fruit picker this side of Mars,” he told himself judicially. “And even at that I’m finishing this job too fast to suit Union Czar Gompert, the Slow-Down King.”
He looked back up at the black earth inside the bronze ring. “Ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent of them,” he told himself, “would agree I’m featherbedding. They think all space exploration is the biggest featherbed since the Pyramids. Or the railroads, anyhow. Air-clams! Troposphere-barnacles!” He grinned. “They’ve heard about space but they still don’t believe in it. They haven’t been out here to see for themselves that there isn’t any giant elephant under the earth, holding it up, and a giant tortoise holding up the elephant. If I say ‘planet’ and ‘spaceship’ to them, they still think ‘horoscope’ and ‘flying saucer’.”
As he turned toward the next cannister-bearing reed, his boot scuffed the crystal film, and a faint creaky whir traveled up the leg of his suit. It was an echo, from across the years, of his galoshes singing against the crusty Minnesota snow on a zero day.
BARBARA KATZ said, “Hey, check me, Mr. Kettering—I see a white light flashing near Copernicus.”
Knolls Kettering III, creaking a bit at the joints, took her place at the eyepiece. “You’re right, Miss Katz,” he said. “The Soviets must be testing signal flares, I imagine.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I never trust myself on moon-stuff—I keep seeing the lights of Luna City and Leyport and all the other science-fiction places.”
“Confidentially, Miss Katz, so do I! Now there’s a red flare.”
“Oh, could I see it?—But I hate making you get up and down. I could sit on your lap, if you wouldn’t mind—and if the stool would stand it.”
Knolls Kettering III chuckled regretfully. “I wouldn’t mind, and the stool might stand it, but I’m afraid the bone-plastic splice in my hip mightn’t.”
“Oh, gee, I’m sorry.”
“Forget it, Miss Katz—we’re fellow lensmen. And don’t feel sorry for me.”
“I won’t,” she assured him. “Why, I think it’s romantic being patched up that way, just like the old soldiers that run the space academies in the Heinlein and E. E. Smith stories.”
DON GUILLERMO WALKER finally had to admit to himself that the black glisten ahead was water—and the little lake, rather than the big one, for there at last were the lights of Managua twinkling no more than ten miles away. A new worry struck him: that he had cut his timing too fine. What if the moon came out of eclipse right now, pinpointing him for el presidente’s jets and AA guns, like a premature spotlight catching a stagehand in overalls making a dark-stage scenery change? He wished he were back doing second-rate summer stock near Chicago, or haranguing a “guns-south” Birch splinter group; or ten years old and putting on a backyard circus in Milwaukee, defying death by sliding down a slanting rusty wire from a height of nineteen feet.
That second memory gave him courage. Dead for a backyard circus…dead for a greaser city bombed! He revved the motor to its top speed, and the prop behind him drummed the lukewarm air a shade less feebly. “Guil-ler-mo ge-ron-imo!” Don Guillermo yelled. “La Loma, here I come!”
Chapter
Seven
PAUL HAGBOLT was paying only half attention to the speakers on the platform. The coincidence of the star photos and Doc’s notion about planets traveling through hyperspace had distracted him and set his imagination drifting. As if a big clock, that only he could hear, had
just now begun to tick (once a second, not five times like wrist watches and many spring clocks), he found himself becoming acutely aware of time and of everything around him—the huddled group of people, the level sand, the faint rattle of the toppling wavelets just beyond the speakers, the old, boarded-up beach houses, the hooded and red-blinking installations of Vandenberg Two thrusting up behind him, the dirt cliffs beyond the sea-grass, above all the mild night pressing in from the ends of space and making tiny everything but the globe of Earth and the dark moon and the glittering stars.
Someone addressed a question to Rama Joan. She smiled with her teeth at Beardy and then looked down at her audience, her gaze moving to each member in turn. The bulging green turban hid her hair, though she had the same pale complexion as Ann, and it emphasized the tapering of her thin face. She looked like a half-starved child herself.
Still without speaking, she gazed across the heavens and above her shoulder at the dark moon, then back at her audience.
Then she said very quietly, yet harshly: “What do any of us really know about what is out there? Far less than a man imprisoned from birth in a cell under the city would know of the millions in Calcutta or Hong Kong or Moscow or New York. I know some of you think advanced races will love and cherish us, but I judge the attitude of more advanced races toward man on the basis of man’s attitude toward the ant. On that basis I can tell you this much: there are devils out there. Devils.”
There was a low, grinding sound like steel clockwork being wound. Miaow stiffened in Margo’s arms, and the short hairs rose along her spine. Ragnarok had growled.
Rama Joan continued: “Among the stars, out there, there may be Hindus who won’t kill a cow and even Jains who whisk off whatever they sit on for fear of crushing an ant and who wear gauze over their lips to keep from swallowing a gnat, but those will be at most the rare exceptions. The rest will not strain at gnats. To us, they will be devils.”