Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  "I'm captain of this spaceship, Ronnie Smith," insisted the taller of the two youngsters. "You gotta do like I say. We're the first guys on this planet, see? We got cut off from the ship by the monsters and we only got another half hour of oxygen left. We gotta shoot our way back. Let's go, Lieutenant Smith."

  "Ah, you're always the captain," muttered Lt. Smith mutinously, though inaudibly under his F.A.O. Schwartz plastic helmet. The two Earthlings advanced cautiously across the parking lot in the rear of the apartment building, mowing down the aliens like flies with their atomic ray guns.

  "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah. See me get that one, Smith?" screamed the captain murderously. "Right in the belly, look at the guts. Ah-ah-ah-ah. Big spiders, about twenty feet tall. There's some more. Make every shot count, Smith. We gotta make the ship before they do."

  "I just blasted five of 'em with one shot," bragged Lt. Smith, leveling his pistol at a particularly large alien and watching it dissolve.

  Fighting their way desperately across the parking lot the spacemen finally made the Smith family car in safety. "Blast off immediately, Lt. Smith," ordered the captain. The rocket wavered for a minute and rose. "Wait a minute, Smith. I seen Rocky Morgan do this once in a comic book. No member of the Space Patrol lets an alien get away alive. We got to kill 'em all. Head back and we'll get the rest of 'em with the hydrogen artillery." Accordingly the ship swept low over the strange planet. "Ah-ah-ah-ah." Twin sheets of imaginary flame burst from the rocket and the remainder of the faltering spider-monsters perished horribly.

  Shaking her head, Mrs. Mimms spun the Master Selector until the screen went blank. An avid space traveler herself (she was especially fond of a nice Lunar trip at vacation time), the negative implications of this childish violence had a depressing effect on Mrs. Mimms. She noted the incident down in her notebook and starred it for special attention.

  Like any woman in any century, Mrs. Mimms had an infallible remedy for cheering herself up. She went shopping. By economizing on her expense account she found it possible to afford a tiny luxury now and then. Mrs. Mimms bought a badly needed blouse and some facial cream. She also bought some groceries and a newspaper. After a modest meal, she found that she had an hour before her babysitting assignment. Opening the newspaper to the sports page, she indulged in one of the amusements common among Certified Priority Operators. Glancing down the list of tomorrow's daily-double she checked the names of horses to win, place and show. Mrs. Mimms made her selections merely by the sound of the names. She then turned a knob marked Tomorrow and dialed about with the Master Selector until the image of a man reading a newspaper appeared on the screen. She waited until he turned to the sports page before seeing how she had done. She had done poorly. Only one winner out of seven races. Of course, using the Destiny apparatus itself for personal gain was a violation of the Direct Influencing of Personal Fate Clause and was sufficient reason for losing her CPO ticket.

  When Mrs. Mimms returned from babysitting it was after midnight. A cup of tea at her elbow, she sat down before the screen. There was a party just breaking up in the far building. Some people above her were watching the late show on TV. A couple on her own floor were arguing about money but the argument seemed to be nearly over and Mrs. Mimms did not intrude further. Suddenly the pilot marked URGENT started flashing and the blurs on the screen sharpened into a young man and woman seated across from each other in the apartment where the party had been. Half-finished drinks and ash trays full of stubs lay about. Husband and wife were both slightly drunk and being very frank with each other.

  "I don't know how we got off on this," remarked the man. "Whenever George gets a couple of drinks in him he starts popping off about politics and the fate of the world. He doesn't know a damn thing about either."

  "Well, at least he's optimistic," the young woman said, kicking off her shoes.

  "You can say that again! Fifty years from now, according to George, we'll all be living in plastic houses with three helicopters in each garage. There won't be any unemployment, we'll have a four-day week, atomic energy'll be doing all the heavy work, mankind'll have realized the futility of war, everything'll be just hunky-dory. Nuts! Guys like George make me sick."

  "But good Lord, honey, if everyone felt like you there wouldn't be any world. Maybe things won't be perfect but life's got to go on."

  "Go on to what?" muttered the husband, polishing off his watery highball. "--To a great big beautiful cloud of atomic fallout, that's what. Don't laugh either, because everything points that way and you know it. Sputniks and ICBMs zooming around, both sides stockpiling like crazy, half the world scrapping as it is. It's just a question of who tosses the first match and then blooie! Hell, Julie, it's not that I don't want another kid. It's just that I don't think it's fair to create human life and turn it loose in this--this holocaust."

  The young woman got up and sat on the arm of his chair and stroked his hair. "Oh Bill, honey, it's wrong to think like that. Don't you see how wrong it is?" Suddenly she wrinkled her nose at him and whispered some words in his ear. They were in the special baby-language which had sprung up around the first child.

  Then she said tipsily: "A baby is such a tiny thing."

  "Yeah," said her husband, "you feed them and take care of them and watch them grow and it's swell. Just like the fatted calf. Then you flip open the evening paper and wonder whether they'll have the good luck to die in their beds at a ripe old age. I tell you I'm honestly frightened of where we're going...."

  * * * * *

  There were tense little crow's feet about Mrs. Mimms' eyes as she cleared the screen. She reached immediately for the telephone and dialed a number. A couple of seconds later the Resident Destinyworker's voice said, "Hello?"

  "George, this is Althea. I'm sorry to be calling so late but I have a Condition Twelve case."

  George Kahn's voice was instantly alert. "Male?"

  "Yes, and a good Third Intensity. Here are the coordinates if you want to rerun it yourself." Mrs. Mimms read some figures off the dials. "I'm authorized a week's night-teleportation but I only have the standard equipment of course. You have the Viele apparatus over there, haven't you?"

  "Yes, but frankly, Althea, even with the Viele we're limited in what we can do. I don't have to tell you that's getting pretty close to Direct Influence. I tampered with it myself a couple of years ago and got a stiff reprimand from Central."

  "But, George, this is a Twelve. A serious one. The files at Central are full of Anti-Population Projectographs. All that might-have-been talent that's lost in every Time Zone! Think what might have happened if we hadn't interfered in the Voltaire case! Why we might even have lost Darwin himself if Mr. Wentworth hadn't insisted on three nights of the Viele for Darwin's parents."

  "Well, yes," admitted the Resident Destinyworker. "All right, Althea, I'll give him a week's dream kinesis if you insist but just remember the Sophistication Curve in the Twentieth. You'll probably have to supplement it with some work of your own."

  "Thank you George, I will."

  "And Althea--"

  "Yes?"

  "You sound tired. Get a good night's rest. The Mid-Twentieth's a tough Zone and the Chief would not want one of his best CPO's taking on more than she can handle. Personally, I think you ought to ask him for a nice soft assignment in the Future Division next trip."

  Mrs. Mimms smiled. "I'll leave the glamor to the youngsters, George, they're much better at it. Besides," she added, "there isn't any tea there."

  Again, Mrs. Mimms would have liked a cup, but she was much too tired to prepare it.

  * * * * *

  Three weeks after Mrs. Mimms' arrival at the Greenlawn Apartments, the superintendent was repairing a leaky faucet on the top floor. The housewife watched him as he gave the nut a final twist with his wrench and stood up.

  "Thanks for coming up and looking at it so soon, Mr. Seely," she said. "How are Mrs. Seely and the children?"

  "Good Mrs. Dorne, real good, thanks. Especially the kids after t
hat new TV show came on."

  "Oh?" said Mrs. Dorne. "Which one is that?"

  "It ain't on no more," said the super, "but, boy, while it lasted the kids sure got a kick out of it. That little Charlotte of mine, she's going to be a real egghead."

  "Well what kind of a show was it?"

  "Reading," said the super. "Just reading. I ain't sure what they called it, but I know there wasn't no sponsor. Maybe that's why it lasted only two weeks or so. Some kind of test show I guess it was."

  "I guess we missed it listening to something else. What channel was it on?"

  "Now that you mention it I'm darned if I remember," Chuck Seely said. "The kids just come home from school one night and parked in front of the TV like always and instead of the westerns and like that here's this guy, just reading. It lasted about an hour every night, we couldn't drag the kids away. Me and the wife got in the habit watching it too."

  "Was it Charles Laughton? He has a reading program."

  "It wasn't him. I never saw the guy before, but what a voice! No commercials, no scenery, no nothin' except this guy reading. Something different every night, too. Stuff like Dickens and famous writers like that. I never heard a voice like this guy had, you couldn't stop listening. Then you know what he'd do at the end of the show?"

  "What?"

  "He'd tell the kids to go get a pencil and write down the names of more books to get at the library. And you know what? The kids do it. That Charlotte, the other night she brings home some Shakespeare stories for kids by a guy named Lamb. She makes me read 'em to her, too. Get a load o' me reading Shakespeare. I got to admit they're pretty good stories. That Charlotte's going to be a real egghead."

  "We usually have our TV on around supper time. It's funny we missed it."

  "I checked TV Guide but it was not listed," said the super. "It was some kind of test show. I guess this guy couldn't find a sponsor."

  * * * * *

  A week after this incident Betty Randolph picked up the telephone and said, "Hello?" It was Dot on the ground floor. Ed had phoned earlier and said he'd be a little late. Betty felt relaxed and just in the mood for some woman talk.

  "Dot, you'll never guess where we were last night," she said. "We saw My Fair Lady, imagine! Don't you envy me?"

  There was a gasp at the other end of the line. "Betty Randolph, you didn't! We've been on the waiting list for six months. Where in the world did you get tickets?"

  "That's the weird part of it. A messenger just delivered them to Ed in the office one morning. They were in a plain envelope marked 'Mr. Randolph' and a card inside said 'Hope you enjoy them--George.' Ed thinks the messenger made a mistake and got the wrong building or something because Ed's the only Randolph there. Anyway, by the time Ed opened the envelope the messenger was gone. There wasn't anything to do but use the tickets of course."

  "Of all the luck! Maybe you and Ed've got a fairy Godmother or something. What'd you do for a sitter?"

  "Oh, we were nearly insane finding one. Jane and Tina were busy and we knew you were away for the weekend. Fortunately we phoned this Mrs. Mimms and she was available. Kenneth loved her."

  "Isn't she nice? That woman's a wonder with children. Dicky and Sue are as good as gold when she's around and she always seems to be free when you want her. She's so cheap, too, I don't see how the woman lives."

  "Glory we had a good time!" sighed Betty. "We had drinks and filet mignon at a nice little place near the theater and forgot all about kids for a while. It was like going on a date again. I had on my red-and-gold dress I haven't worn for months and Ed kept telling me how cute I looked...."

  * * * * *

  "Zoom, zoom," the captain kept saying. The spaceship swooped in for a landing on the crimson Martian sands. Captain Bobby Taylor took up a position before the air-lock and briefed his second-in-command, Ronnie Smith. "We're surrounded by enemy aliens, Smith," announced Captain Taylor. "Better break out the death-ray pistols. Our mission is to destroy every metal monster on this planet. Look at 'em come! They got eight legs and sixteen wire arms...."

  "Ah, cut it out, Bobby. I ain't playing science-fiction with you any more. It ain't like you say at all."

  "What's it like then, wise guy? I suppose you been to Mars."

  "Maybe I ain't," said Lt. Smith. "Anyways I know somebody that has."

  "Yeah? Who?"

  "Mrs. Mimms. She babysits with me when Mom and Dad go out. She's been all over in space. Venus and all them other planets. She says there ain't any monsters on any of 'em. There ain't nuthin on Mars except a little bitty grass and a lot of scientists from Earth."

  "Mad scientists?" asked Captain Taylor hopefully.

  "Nah, just scientists. She says we oughta forget about monsters and play the right way. You know, like with atomic reactors and radar communication and growing new kinds of food for Earth colonies."

  "Ah I don't believe it. She'd hafta be from someplace in the future. She'd hafta come here by time machine or something, wouldn't she?"

  "That's what she did," Lt. Smith informed the captain. "She showed me pictures to prove it. Pictures of her last vacation on the moon. You oughta see what they done to the place. She's from the future, all right."

  "Then she ain't supposed to tell anybody about it, is she?"

  Lt. Smith waved his hand airily. "She says it's OK to tell kids because grownups wouldn't believe it anyway. Get your mother to let her sit for you next time. She'll show you the pictures if you ask her. Heck, it's no fun playing monsters now."

  "Well, look," said Captain Taylor magnanimously, "supposing I let you be Captain today. You can pretend any kind of stuff you want."

  "OK," said the new Captain, and immediately postulated a gigantic atomic reactor on the planet Pluto.

  * * * * *

  The doctor had said Julie should not, but she had another cup of coffee anyway. She drank it and then lit a cigarette. Immediately she felt a twinge of the morning sickness and wisely snubbed it out in the ashtray. She was so happy it almost didn't hurt at all. I'm pregnant again, she thought, that's the important thing. Julie hugged herself and thought again of Mrs. Mimms and her tea leaves. It was the silliest thing, she told herself, you didn't base important decisions on tea leaves. Not tea leaves. It was right after the week Bill had been having those queer dreams that they'd decided, well, to go ahead. Julie remembered Bill's face as he sat on the edge of her bed describing one of the dreams to her as she laid there.

  "It was vivid as hell, honey," Bill had said. "Maybe I ought to give up eating cheese sandwiches at night or something. It's like dreaming on the installment plan. Every time I'm someplace different and some guy in a weird suit is showing me around. Last night I could swear it was somewhere in New York, only the buildings were a lot taller and there were kind of triple-decker ramp things with nutty-looking cars on them and the people all wore tight-fitting clothes. Then all of a sudden we were down on what looked like the Battery and the guy showed me a big cookie-shaped thing out in the harbor with planes that looked like flying saucers landing and taking off from it. Hell, maybe it's going to be George Humphry's kind of world after all a couple of hundred years from now."

  * * * * *

  Then a night or two later they'd gone out to a movie. She'd been lucky to get Mrs. Mimms to sit with Georgie. After they got back Mrs. Mimms had made some tea--real tea she'd brought from her own apartment. When she offered to tell their fortunes in the leaves, Julie began to giggle ... until she saw Bill was taking it perfectly seriously. Maybe it was the quiet way Mrs. Mimms had discussed their futures over the brown leaves, as if she'd been there herself. Funny old duck. Wonderful with Georgie, though; and the other girls swore by her. Bill hadn't batted an eye when she predicted it would be a girl this time, and perfectly healthy and all right.

  Julie peeked into the bedroom where Georgie was sleeping and pulled the blanket up under his chin. "According to Mrs. Mimms, my lad, you'll be getting a baby sister soon," she whispered. Bill had changed lately. Not so gloomy
somehow, nicer. But tea leaves, for Heaven's sake, they couldn't have anything to do with....

  She stopped trying to figure it out because the nausea returned. This time it was bad and she had to run for the bathroom.

  * * * * *

  The crisp directive--Zonally disguised as a contemporary telegram--was forwarded to Mrs. Mimms on a Monday night. Although it bore the Resident Destinyworker's address, it had come of course directly from the Chief's office for the code word DESTWORK headed the message. Decoded, it read:

  URGENT YOU CLOSE OUT PRESENT ASSIGNMENT IN DAY OR TWO. CONDITION 16 IN 22ND CENTURY APPROACHING CRISIS. IMPORTANT ALL AVAILABLE PERSONNEL BE CONCENTRATED. PICK-UP AT POINT OF ENTRY ACCORDING TO PROCEDURE. BRIEFING TO COME FROM KEY RESIDENTS. ALL VACATIONS AND LEAVES-OF-ABSENCE HEREWITH CANCELLED.

  Mrs. Mimms sighed. It was always this way she reflected. Central was perpetually short of experienced help. The younger Destinyworkers, fresh from the colleges, always wanted to traipse off into the future where nothing practical ever got done. Oh, they argued, you could always read about the past if you wanted to and, anyway, since Direct Influence on Historic Continuum was strictly forbidden, what was the good of wandering around in musty yesterdays? Mrs. Mimms however knew better and so did every other member of the small cadre of qualified CPO's. A good CPO, a dedicated one, could always find loopholes in the Destiny Code. The past could be shaped in little ways even if the organization was powerless to stop major catastrophes.

  At any rate orders were orders and Mrs. Mimms began to consider the practical side of leaving Greenlawn. Packing was no problem. All CPO's were required to be Translation Alert in half an hour if necessary, inclusive of destroying all telltale evidence such as notes, papers, etc. Her apparatus was in perfect working order and the rent for that month was paid. Mrs. Mimms passed over these details quickly. She was thinking: it was invariably the priorees who suffered in emergency conversions.

  The case book labeled ACTIVE was open on the table. There were two full pages alone of babysitting appointments she would have to cancel not to speak of the more serious cases, some of which were Second and Third Intensity. A heavy discouragement settled over Mrs. Mimms as she sat down at the apparatus to check certain images as they came and went on the screen. The Nortons, who hadn't been out for weeks, were fighting again; that date would have to be canceled. The delinquent attitude developing in the Bradley youngster was going to rob the world of a great scientist unless Mr. Bradley's business got back on its feet and he could spend more time with his son; Mrs. Mimms had a simple campaign mapped out for this, but it would take time--more time than she had left. Then there was the cocktail party the Haskells had been planning for weeks and Frank Haskell's boss was going to be there; Mrs. Mimms had left that date open especially because Frank's mother who had promised to take the kids overnight was going to be sick and they'd have to get someone to help her. And that teenage picnic--there would be trouble unless she, and not someone else, were chaperoning it.