The inner door opened and Moran came out. I didn’t wait any longer, but charged past him and the orderly. Leslie glanced up from his desk, annoyed.
“General—” My throat felt sandy.-“General, I may have the answer.”
“Eh?” He looked at me without much hope. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Muir. What do you mean?”
“I may have a way to get Butch to talk,” I said. The words stumbled over each other in my hurry.
Moran turned around and came back in. “What’s this?” he asked.
“I’ve got an idea, I tell you!” I shouted.
“Well?” Leslie ripped it out in a parade-ground voice. “Well, what is it?”
“Look,” I chatted, “Butch is sane, but—but—” That blasted stutter which always hits me when I get excited broke me off.
Moran raised his brows. “This is somewhat of an obsession with Mr. Muir, General,” he said. “He’ll go to any length to defend his notion, in the face of all the facts.”
“I’ve got a way to test it!” I yelled. Which was a lie, because I had no idea whether it was practical or not.
“Go ahead, then,” said Leslie. “Tell me.”
“I’ll have to get my wife here, and some other—”
“That’s impossible. She hasn’t been cleared.”
“Dammit, clear her, then!”
“That takes weeks,” said Moran. “By that time, we should have Butch back to normal anyway.”
“By that time Butch will really be insane!” I answered. “You’re the one with the obsession. Anything to get at his brain—but do you give a hoot in hell about getting at his mind?”
“Calm down!” Leslie stood up and barked his words. “Both of you! This is no time for personalities.”
Moran shrugged. “I tell you, the first surgical investigation is set for next Wednesday,” he declared. “Nobody could be cleared by that time.”
“You couldn’t postpone the work, could you?” I spoke to Leslie, almost begging.
He shook his head. “I’m afraid not Washington is in a hurry too, you know. The orders are definite. It’s too risky keeping Butch forever the way he is, and the rewards for success are too big and urgently needed.”
I sat down, feeling suddenly drained. “Never mind, then,” I mumbled. “Never mind.”
“Let’s have your idea,” said Leslie.
Moran smiled sarcastically and sat down too.
I told them.
“You’re nuts!” said Moran inelegantly. “It’s the most childish thing I ever—”
“What harm would it do to try?” I asked with bitterness.
“Or are you afraid it might succeed? Then you wouldn’t get your chance to—
“That will do, Mr. Muir!” rapped Leslie. He drummed on his teeth with a nervous forefinger. “It’s an—interesting—notion. Wild, but then this whole business is so crazy. . . . However, there’s still that matter of security clearance.”
“Bring them here anyway,” I said. “You can keep them here if it doesn’t work, till they’ve been checked.”
“That’s not so simple.” Moran’s tone grew condescending. “General Leslie has orders too, you know. Regulations—”
The soldier stood for a minute longer. The military mind! I thought again.
Suddenly he slammed his fist down on the desk. “By God, I’ll do it!”
“They’ll court-martial you!” yelled Moran.
“Yeah,” said Leslie. “And if it pans out, I’ll get by with a reprimand or something. If it doesn’t—to hell With it.”
Moran turned his back on us.
I held out my hand. “Sir,” I said, “may I apologize?”
Two days lately the big show went on the road. I hadn’t slept much, and it was with a certain grogginess that I watched the long train of cars draw into the yard. I needed a drink, badly.
The soldiers had been well rehearsed. You could see what they really wanted to do, but they snapped to attention with spine-breaking violence. A military band came out of one barrack and broke into a loud, brassy march. Civilians got down on their knees. I glanced up at the window of Butch’s room. We’d put him on a longer chain, so he could walk over to it, but I didn’t know if he was looking out or not. I prayed that he was.
Valerie stepped from the first car. She wore a skirt and blouse in the brightest colors and snuggest fit she’d been able to find. Her hair curled down to her shoulders, soft gold in the wintry sunlight. That’s my wife, I thought, and kowtowed to her. The slush was cold.
She stamped by me, cracking the whip she held in one hand. It tickled along my back, mischievously. I groveled lower. The band played louder. The soldiers saluted.
A girl was coming out of each of the other cars. Leslie’s agents had done a fine job, picking the most curvaceous, decorative, utterly female human beings they could find. I hoped they’d been able to match the other essential qualifications: courage, serenity, gentleness.
They swept past us in a blaze of hues. Most had put on jewelry for the occasion, it flashed in the light, there under the tall blue sky of Earth. Into the building they went, not deigning to notice us. Into the house and up the stairs and along the hall to Butch’s room.
Doc Urquhart’s tests yesterday had shown* that my guess about the cause of Butch’s furies was probably right; and on the basis of those results, we had not told the girls they had anything to fear, we had indeed stressed his complete harmlessness. But we could still be wrong. There could be more than one possible cause. We had men planted with guns, of course, ready to come in at the first shriek for help. But Butch could disembowel at least one with a sweep of his claws before they knew he meant to do it. Valerie, I thought, Valerie will go first. I know she will. Please, God, watch over her. Watch over all of us today.
We waited. And there was silence. There was a thousand years of silence.
General Leslie appeared at the front door. His elegant pants were wrinkled from kneeling before the women. His face had a strangeness about it. “Come along, Muir,” he said quietly. “They want you there too.”
I followed him into the house. The whole place had a wire-tight waiting over it. We didn’t see anyone as we went upstairs, until Moran stepped from one of the labs. His mouth was twisted.
“This is preposterous!” he said. “The beast’s just using the chance to disarm our suspicions. I won’t have it!”
“I’m the boss here,” said Leslie.
“You won’t be for long, when Washington hears—”
“Can we trust this bird not to upset the applecart?” I asked maliciously.
“Um, well—protective custody—” Leslie grinned and turned to the MP who was following us. “Conduct Dr. Moran to his quarters,” he ordered. “And see that he stays there.” Off they went. I had an idiotic desire to thumb my nose.
We continued down the hall to the hospital room. At its door, the sentry stood more rigid than he’d ever done for an inspection—but he caught my eye and winked at me. Leslie and I knelt again. We waited till Valerie noticed us and said coldly: “All right, come on in. I want you to take this chain off. Now!”
The room was a swirl of color and shapeliness and bright light voices chattering. Valerie sat on the edge of the bed. She was stroking ’Butch’s big fanged head. Another girl was bending over him, patting his shoulder, and a third was holding his left hand.
His right hand was clutching a pencil, and he was drawing a diagram of a planetary system.
Leslie, Doc, and I had to sneak into Valerie’s room. It wouldn’t do for Butch to see the slaves killing a fifth of Scotch with the boss. But we just had to celebrate.
“Hullo, property,” said my wife.
I grabbed her close and shut off her wisecracks in the best possible manner.
After a while, she said rather breathlessly: “I still -don’t get it. I still don’t see how you managed it. That briefing they gave us was really brief:”
I poured Scotch over ice cubes and said smugly: �
�Depends: on a number of things, darling. 'My main assumption Was that Butch is sane, only his sanity doesn’t quite correspond to ours. Could you expect identical behavior patterns in a creature from the stars? .No, hardly.
“But if he was sane, then he wouldn’t willingly have attacked those poor people. He must feel like hell About it. Which, incidentally, gives us a moral ascendancy that ought to make him very glad to co-operate with us—now that the dam’s been broken. But why, then, did he run amok?”
I took a long sip and went on: “I remembered that Sergeant Jones had been scared of Butch. It occurred to me that probably all those who were attacked had also been frightened. Those people in Maine—well, shucks, if you saw a thing like Butch on a dark night, wouldn’t you jump out of your pretty pink unmentionables? And a man here who knew his bad reputation might also get frightened at the thought of Working with a monster that could kill him.
“Remembering that Butch has a sense of smell as good as a dog’s, and that a dog can smell when you’re afraid and will often bite you on that account—well, it added up.”
“It’s a matter of high adrenalin output,” nodded Doc. “Fear or rage give you a different odor, even if your own nose can’t detect it. You should have seen how Butch reacted to a tiny whiff yesterday.frowned. “But why should the scent of adrenalin drive him into a homicidal fury, eh?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But here’s a guess. On his home world, his species has—or had once—a natural enemy which smelled strongly of adrenalin. You told me yourself, Doc, that his own glands don’t seism to produce that particular chemical.' Anyway, his lifeform acquired a built-in instinct to attack when it caught that scent.” Now I know that I was essentially right about this point.
“Could be,” said Doc. “We’ve got a lot of evolutionary hangovers ourselves that only cause us trouble now. The appendix, for instance,”
“Well,” I continued, “Butch knew he’d got himself In bad with our race. He wasn’t going to tell us anything, lest we try to strike back at his people in revenge or out of fear.” “He says he’ll talk in seventeen days,” Valerie told us. “Huh?” asked Leslie. “How—?”
“Sign language. Pictures. He got the idea across. He’s learned a fair amount of English, but for some reason he can’t speak till that period is up.”
We found out why, later. Butch’s religion, which he takes pretty seriously, requires silence for a given time in mourning for dead comrades. You can’t call him insane for sticking by those principles, any-more than you can call a Jew or a Moslem crazy for refusing to eat pork or a Catholic mad for going to considerable trouble to attend Mass. It’s important to him, that’s all. We’ve a lot of compulsions, like marital fidelity, which don’t make much sense to his mind.
We also found that my guess about the variance of ins sym-bology from ours had been right; it had taken him a long time to understand what we were trying to do with our diagrams, and how he should respond. By then he had decided it was hopeless to communicate.
“Well,” I said on this particular evening, “somehow he couldn’t talk to us, and he’d concluded we were his enemies in any event. So why should he try to co-operate with us in any way? It looked like an impasse, till I remembered that in all probability Butch had never seen a woman. Women aren’t likely to wander on lonely roads after dark, and once he’d been captured, he’d been in an exclusively masculine environment.. He may have overheard conversation about women, and has doubtless seen some pictures, but that Wouldn’t convey much to him.
“And he’s hermaphroditic, which makes it likely that all the higher life-forms on his planet are. Of course; he might have seen bisexual animals on* other worlds, but then again he might not. The fact that the spaceship did go out of control suggests, it’s an early model, that this may even be the first interstellar expedition of his race.
“So—why shouldn’t he assume that a woman, if he saw one, belonged to a different species from the men? It would be a natural idea. And if this other species were the real rulers of Earth, with us merely their slaves and peasants, they wouldn’t care much that a few males had been knocked off. They’d be furious that the inferior race had dared to lock up a visitor from space and maltreat him without telling them. As soon as they learned he was here, they’d come running to make amends.
“Since we didn’t tell the girls that Butch was dangerous, they didn’t fear him. I hope he takes the lack of adrenalin smell for a characteristic of the master race and therefore concludes he won’t always be getting into trouble with them. If that works out”—it did—“he’s going to fall all over himself trying to co-operate with you girls.”
Valerie ruffled my hair. “Sometimes,” she murmured, “I almost think there’s a brain underneath that mop.”
Leslie shifted awkwardly. “How long does this farce have to go on?” he asked.
“Oh, not too long, I suppose,” I answered. ‘Till the girls have won his trust, and talked to him, and gradually broken the news. Then he can start telling us how to build spaceships.”
“Yeah,” said Leslie. “And meanwhile he’s going to think men aren’t human!”
Valerie grinned at us. “Well,” she replied, “are they?”
THE PAUSE
Isaac Asimov
The white powder was confined within a thin-walled, transparent capsule. The capsule in turn was heat-sealed into a double strip of parafilm. Along that strip of parafilm were other capsules at six-inch intervals.
The strip moved. Each capsule in the course of events rested for one minute on a metal jaw immediately beneath a mica window. On another portion of the face of the radiation counter a number clicked out upon an unrolling cylinder of paper. The capsule moved on; the next took its place.
The number printed at 1:45 p.m. was 308. A minute later 256 appeared. A minute later, 391. A minute later, 477. A minute later, 202. A minute later, 251. A minute later, 000. A minute later, 000. A minute later, 000. A minute later, 000.
Shortly after 2:00 p.m. Mr. Alexander Johannison passed by the counter and the comer of one eye stubbed itself over the row of figures. Two steps past the counter he stopped and returned.
He ran the paper cylinder backward, then restored its position and said, “Nuts!”
He said it with vehemence. He was tall and thin, with big-knuckled hands, sandy hair and light eyebrows. He looked tired and, at the moment, perplexed.
Gene Oamelli wandered his way with the same easy carelessness he brought to all his actions. He was dark, hairy, and on the short side. His nose had once been broken and it made him look curiously unlike the popular conception of the nuclear physicist.
Damelli said, “My damned Geiger won’t pick up a thing, and I’m not in the mood to go over the wiring. Got a cigarette?”
Johannison held out a pack. “What about the others in the building?”
“I haven’t tried them, but I guess they haven’t all gone.”
“Why not? My counter isn’t registering either.”
“No kidding. You see? All the money invested, too. It doesn’t mean a thing. Let’s step out for a coke.”
Johannison said with greater vehemence than he intended, “No! I’m going to see George Duke. I want to see his machine. If ifs off—”
Damelli tagged along. “It won’t*be off, Alex. Don’t be an ass.”
George Duke listened to Johannison and watched him disapprovingly over rimless glasses. He was an old-young man with little hair and less patience.
He said, “I’m busy.”
“Too busy to tell me if your rig is working, for heaven’s sake?”
Duke stood up. “Oh, hell, when does a man have time to work around here?” His slide-rule fell with a thud over a scattering of ruled paper as he rounded his desk.
He stepped to a cluttered lab table and lifted the heavy gray leaden top from a heavier gray leaden container. He reached in with a two-foot long pair of tongs and took out a small silvery cylinder.
.Duke said
grimly, “Stay where you are.”
Johannison didn’t need the advice. He kept his distance. He had not been exposed to-any abnormal dosage of radioactivity over the past month but there was no sense getting any closer than necessary to “hot” cobalt.
Still using the tongs, and with arms held well away from his body, Duke brought the shining bit of metal that contained the concentrated radioactivity up to the window of his counter. At two feet, the counter should have chattered its head off. It didn’t.
Duke said, “Guk!” and let the cobalt container drop. He scrabbled madly for it and lifted it against the window again. Closer.
There was no sound. The dots of light on the scaler did not show. Numbers did not step up and up.
Johannison said, “Not even background noise.”
Damelli said, “Holy jumping Jupiter!”
Duke put the cobalt tube back into its leaden sheath, as gingerly as ever, and stood there, glaring.
Johannison burst into Bill Everard's office-with Damelli at his heels. He spoke for excited minutes, his bony hands knuckle-white on Everard’s shiny desk. Everard listened, his smooth, fresh-shaven cheeks turning pink and his plump neck bulging out a bit over his stiff, white collar.
Everard looked at Damelli and pointed a questioning thumb at Johannison. Damelli shrugged, bringing his hands forward, palms upward, and corrugating his forehead. Everard said, “I don’t see how they can all go wrong.” “They have, that’s all,” insisted Johannison. “They all went dead at about two o’clock. That’s over an hour ago now and none of them is back in order. Even George Duke can’t do anything about it. I’m telling you it isn’t the counters.” “You’re saying it is.”
“I’m saying they’re not working. But that’s not their fault There’s nothing for' them to work on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there isn’t any radioactivity in this place. In this whole building. Nowhere.”
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