The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories

by Fredric Brown

  “I do, Myra. Please forgive me. But at least—you’re not definitely against marrying me? You’re not turning me down?”

  She shook her head slowly. Her eyes, staring at him, were very beautiful. “Then, Myra, let me explain why I am so late and so sudden in asking you. First I have been working desperately and against time. Do you know what I’ve been working on?”

  “Something to do with defense, I know. Some—device. And, unless I’m wrong you’ve been doing it on your own without the government backing you.”

  “That’s right,” Braden said. “The high brass wouldn’t believe my theories—and most other physicists disagreed with me too. But fortunately I have—did have—private wealth from certain patents I took out a few years ago in electronics. What I’ve been working on has been a defense against the A-bomb and the H-bomb—and anything else short of turning Earth into a small sun. A globular force field through which nothing—nothing whatever—can penetrate.”

  “And you…”

  “Yes, I have it. It is ready to flash into existence now around this building and to remain operative as long as I wish it to. Nothing can get through it though I maintain it for as many years as I wish. Furthermore this building is now stocked with a tremendous quantity of supplies—of all kinds. Even chemicals and seeds for hydroponic gardens. There is enough of everything here to supply two people for—for their lifetimes.”

  “But—you’re turning this over to the government, aren’t you? If it’s a defense against the H-bomb…”

  Braden frowned. “It is, but unfortunately it turns out to have negligible, if any, military value. The high brass was right on that. You see, Myra, the power required to create such a force field varies with the cube of its size. The one about this building will be eighty feet in diameter—and when I turn it on the power drain will probably burn out the lighting system of Cleveland.”

  “To throw such a dome over—well, even over a tiny village or over a single military camp would take more electric power than is consumed by the whole country in weeks. And once turned off to let anything or anybody in or out it would require the same impracticable amount of power to recreate the field.”

  “The only conceivable use the government could make of it would be such use as I intend to make myself. To preserve the lives of one or two, at most a few individuals—to let them live through the holocaust and the savagery to come. And, except here, it’s too late even for that.”

  “Too late—why?”

  “There won’t be time for them to construct the equipment. My dear, the war is on.”

  Her face grew white as she stared at him.

  He said, “On the radio, a few minutes ago. Boston has been destroyed by an atomic bomb. War has been declared.” He spoke faster. “And you know all that means and will lead to. I’m closing the switch that will put on the field and I’m keeping it on until it’s safe to open it again.” He didn’t shock her further by saying that he didn’t think it would be completely safe within their lifetimes. “We can’t help anyone else now—it’s too late. But we can save ourselves.”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry I had to be so abrupt about this. But now you understand why. In fact, I don’t ask you to marry me right away, if you have any doubt at all. Just stay here until you’re ready. Let me say the things, do the things, I should have said and done.”

  “Until now”—he smiled at her—“until now I’ve been working so hard, so many hours a day, that I haven’t had time to make love to you. But now there’ll be time, lots of time—and I do love you, Myra.”

  She stood up suddenly. Unseeingly, almost blindly, she started for the doorway.

  “Myra!” he called. He started around the desk after her. She turned at the door and held him back. Her face and her voice were quite calm.

  “I’ve got to go, Doctor, I’ve had a little nurse’s training. I’m going to be needed.”

  “But, Myra, think what’s going to happen out there! They’re going to turn into animals. They’re going to die horribly. Listen, I love you too much to let you face that. Stay, please!”

  Amazingly she had smiled at him. “Good-bye, Dr. Braden. I’m afraid that I’m going to have to die with the rest of the animals. I guess I’m crazy that way.”

  And the door had closed behind her. From the window he had watched her go down the steps and start running as soon as she had reached the sidewalk.

  There’d been the roar of jets overhead. Probably, he thought, this soon, they were ours. But they could be the enemy—over the pole and across Canada, so high that they’d escaped detection, swooping low as they crossed Erie. With Cleveland as one of their objectives. Maybe somehow they’d even know of him and his work and had made Cleveland a prime objective. He had run to the switch and thrown it.

  Outside the window, twenty feet from it, a gray nothingness had sprung into being. All sound from outside had ceased. He had gone out of the house and looked at it—the visible half of it a gray hemisphere, forty feet high and eighty feet broad, just big enough to clear the two-story almost cubical building that was his home and his laboratory both. And he knew that it extended forty feet into the earth to complete a perfect sphere. No ravening force could enter it from above, no earthworm crawl through it from below.

  None had for thirty years.

  Well, it hadn’t been too bad a thirty years, he thought. He’d had his books—and he’d read his favorite ones so often that he knew them almost by heart. He’d kept on experimenting and—although, the last seven years, since he’d passed sixty, he’d gradually lost interest and creativeness—he’d accomplished a few little things.

  Nothing comparable to the field itself or even his inventions before that—but there hadn’t been the incentive. Too slight a probability that anything he developed would ever be of use to himself or to anybody else. What good is a refinement in electronics to a savage who doesn’t know how to tune a simple radio set, let alone build one.

  Well, there’d been enough to keep him sane if not happy.

  He went to the window and stared through it at the gray impalpability twenty feet away. If only he could lower it and then, when he saw what he knew he would see, restore it quickly. But once down it was down for good.

  He walked to the switch and stood staring at it. Suddenly he reached up and pulled it. He turned slowly to the window and then walked, almost ran, to it. The gray wall was gone—what lay beyond it was sheerly incredible.

  Not the Cleveland he’d known but a beautiful city, a new city. What had been a narrow street was a wide boulevard. The houses, the buildings, were clean and beautiful, the style of architecture strange to him. Grass, trees, everything well kept. What had happened—how could it be? After atomic war mankind couldn’t possibly have come back this far, this quickly. Else all of sociology was wrong and ridiculous.

  And where were the people? As if in answer a car went by. A car? It looked like no car he’d ever seen before. Much faster, much sleeker, much more maneuverable—it barely seemed to touch the street, as though anti-gravity took away its weight while gyroscopes gave it stability. A man and woman rode in it, the man driving. He was young and handsome, the woman young and beautiful.

  They turned and looked his way and suddenly the man stopped the vehicle—stopped it in an incredibly short distance for the speed at which they’d been traveling. Of course, Braden thought—they’ve driven past here before and the gray dome was here and now it’s gone. The car started up again. Braden thought, they’ve gone to tell someone.

  He went to the door and outside, out onto the lovely boulevard. Out in the open he realized why there were so few people, so little traffic. His chronometers had gone wrong. Over thirty years they were off by hours at least. It was early morning—from the position of the Sun between six and seven o’clock.

  He started walking. If he stayed there, in the house that had been thirty years under the dome, someone would come as soon as the young couple who had seen had reported. And yes, whoever
came would explain what had happened but he wanted to figure it out for himself, to realize it more gradually than that.

  He walked. He met no one. This was a fine residential part of town now and it was very early. He saw a few people at a distance. Their dress was different from his but not enough so as to make him an object of immediate curiosity. He saw more of the incredible vehicles but none of their occupants chanced to notice him. They traveled incredibly fast.

  At last he came to a store that was open. He walked in, too consumed by excited curiosity by now to wait any longer. A young man with curly hair was arranging things behind the counter. He looked at Braden almost incredulously, then asked politely, “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “Please don’t think I’m crazy. I’ll explain later. Just answer this. What happened thirty years ago? Wasn’t there atomic war?”

  The young man’s eyes lighted. “Why, you must be the man who’s been under the dome, sir. That explains why you…” He stopped as though embarrassed.

  “Yes,” Braden said. “I’ve been under the dome. But what happened? After Boston was destroyed what happened?”

  “Space-ships, sir. The destruction of Boston was accidental. A fleet of ships came from Aldebaran. A race far more advanced than we and benevolent. They came to welcome us into the Union and to help us. Unfortunately one crashed—into Boston—and the atomics that powered it exploded, and a million were killed. But other ships landed everywhere within hours and explained and apologized and war was averted—very narrowly. United States air fleets were already en route, but they managed to call them back.”

  Braden said hoarsely, “Then there was no war?”

  “Of course not. War is something back in the dark ages now, thanks to the Galactic Union. We haven’t even national governments now to declare a war. There can’t be war. And our progress, with the help of the Union, has been—well, tremendous. We’ve colonized Mars and Venus—they weren’t inhabited and the Union assigned them to us so we could expand. But Mars and Venus are just suburbs. We travel to the stars. We’ve even…” He paused.

  Braden held tightly to the edge of the counter. He’d missed it all. He’d been thirty years alone and now he was an old man. He asked, “You’ve even—what?” Something inside him told him what was coming and he could hardly hear his own voice.

  “Well, we’re not immortal but we’re closer to it than we were. We live for centuries. I wasn’t much younger than you were thirty years ago. But—I’m afraid you missed out on it, sir. The processes the Union gave us work only on humans up to middle age—fifty at the very most. And you’re—”

  “Sixty-seven,” Braden said stiffly. “Thank you.”

  Yes, he’d missed everything. The stars—he’d have given almost anything to go there but he didn’t want to now. And Myra.

  He could have had her and they’d both still be young.

  He walked out of the store and turned his footsteps toward the building that had been under the dome. By now they’d be waiting for him there. And maybe they’d give him the only thing he’d ask of them—power to restore the force field so he could finish what was left of his life there under the dome. Yes, the only thing he wanted now was what he’d thought he wanted least—to die, as he had lived, alone.

  GREAT LOST DISCOVERIES I: INVISIBILITY

  Three great discoveries were made, and tragically lost, during the twentieth century. The first of these was the secret of invisibility.

  The secret of invisibility was discovered in 1909 by Archibald Praeter, emissary from the court of Edward VII to the court of Sultan Abd el Krim, ruler of a small state loosely allied to the Ottoman Empire.

  Praeter, an amateur but enthusiastic biologist, was injecting mice with various serums for the purpose of finding an injection which would cause mutations. When he injected his 3019th mouse, the mouse disappeared. It was still there; he could feel it in his hand, but he could not see a hair or claw of it. He put it carefully in a cage and two hours later it appeared again, unharmed.

  He experimented with increasing dosages and found that he could make a mouse invisible for up to twenty-four hours. Larger doses made it ill or torpid. He also learned that a mouse killed while invisible reappeared instantly at the moment of death.

  Realizing the importance of his discovery, he wired his resignation to England, dismissed his servants and locked himself in his quarters, and began to experiment with himself. Starting with a small injection that made him invisible for only a few minutes, he worked up until he found his tolerance was equal to that of mice; an injection that made him invisible for more than twenty-four hours also made him ill. He also found that although nothing of his body was visible, not even his dentures if he kept his lips closed, nudity was essential; clothing did not become invisible with him.

  Praeter was an honest and fairly well-to-do man, so he did not think of crime. He decided to return to England and offer his discovery to His Majesty’s government for use in espionage or war.

  But he decided first to allow himself one indulgence. He had always been curious about the closely guarded harem of the Sultan to whose court he had been attached. Why not have a close look at it from inside?

  Besides, something—some nagging thought that he couldn’t quite isolate—bothered him about his discovery. There was some circumstance under which… He couldn’t get beyond that point in his mind. An experiment was definitely in order.

  He stripped and made himself invisible for the maximum period. It proved simple to walk past the armed eunuchs and enter the harem. He spent an interesting afternoon watching the fifty-odd beauties at their daytime occupation of keeping themselves beautiful, bathing and anointing their bodies with scented oils and perfumes.

  One, a Circassian, especially attracted him. It occurred to him, just as it would have occurred to any man, that if he stayed the night—perfectly safe since he would be invisible until the following noon—he could keep her in sight to learn which room she slept in and, after the lights were out, join her; she would think the Sultan was favoring her with a visit.

  He kept her in sight and noticed the room she entered. An armed eunuch took his post at the curtained doorway, others at each of the other doorways to the sleeping rooms. He waited until he was sure she would be asleep and then, at a moment when the eunuch was looking down the hall and would not see the movement of the curtain, he slipped through it. The light had been dim in the hallway; here the darkness was utter. But he groped carefully and managed to find the sleeping couch. Carefully he put out a hand and touched the sleeping woman. She screamed. (What he had not known was that the Sultan never visited the harem by night but sent for one, or sometimes several, of his wives to visit his own quarters.)

  And suddenly the eunuch who had been outside was inside and had hold of him by the arm. The last thing he thought was that he now knew the one worrisome circumstance of invisibility: it was completely useless in pitch darkness. And the last thing he heard was the swish of the scimitar.

  GREAT LOST DISCOVERIES II — Invulnerability

  The second great lost discovery was the secret of invulnerability. It was discovered in 1952 by a United States Navy radar officer, Lieutenant Paul Hickendorf. The device was electronic and consisted of a small box that could be carried handily in a pocket; when a switch on the box was turned on, the person carrying the device was surrounded by a force field whose strength, as far as it could be measured by Hickendorf’s excellent mathematics, was as near as matters to infinite.

  The field was also completely impervious to any degree of heat and any quantity of radiation.

  Lieutenant Hickendorf decided that a man—or a woman or a child or a dog—enclosed in that force field could withstand the explosion of a hydrogen bomb at closest range and not be injured in the slightest degree.

  No hydrogen bomb had been exploded to that time, but at the moment he completed his device, the lieutenant happened to be on a ship, cruiser class, that was steaming across the Pacific Ocean
en route to an atoll called Eniwetok, and the fact had leaked out that they were to be there to assist in the first explosion of a hydrogen bomb.

  Lieutenant Hickendorf decided to get lost—to hide out on the target island and be there when the bomb went off, and also to be there unharmed after it went off, thereby demonstrating beyond all doubt that his discovery was workable, a defense against the most powerful weapon of all time.

  It proved difficult, but he hid out successfully and was there, only yards away from the H-bomb—after having crept closer and closer during the countdown—when it exploded.

  His calculations had been completely correct and he was not injured in the slightest way, not scratched, not bruised, not burned.

  But Lieutenant Hickendorf had overlooked the possibility of one thing happening, and that one thing happened. He was blown off the surface of the Earth with much more than escape velocity. Straight out, not even into orbit. Forty-nine days later he fell into the sun, still completely uninjured but unfortunately long since dead since the force field had carried with it enough air to last him only a few hours, and so his discovery was lost to mankind, at least for the duration of the twentieth century.

  GREAT LOST DISCOVERIES III — Immortality

  The third great discovery made and lost in the twentieth century was the secret of immortality. It was the discovery of an obscure Moscow chemist named Ivan Ivanovitch Smetakovsky, in 1978. Smetakovsky left no record of how he made his discovery or of how he knew before trying it that it would work, for the simple reason that it scared him stiff, for two reasons.

  He was afraid to give it to the world, and he knew that once he had given it even to his own government, the secret would eventually leak through the Curtain and cause chaos. The U.S.S.R. could handle anything, but in the more barbaric and less disciplined countries the inevitable result of an immortality drug would be a population explosion that would most assuredly lead to an attack on the enlightened Communist countries.