by Lake, Jay
“You’re going to send the message now?”
Neither of the men bothered to reply, since the answer was self-evident. The bald man tested the air and power equipment of his suit, then turned to his partner a moment before sealing his helmet.
“You checked the sandcat’s power supply?”
“Yes, but you’d better take another look at it. I think the battery’s leaking.”
The bald man nodded and went out the airlock. Martin Devere watched in silence as the other man began to gather up his diagrams and plans and tie them into a neat bundle.
“I guess we can take it easy now, Pop. As soon as that telegram’s sent and I get this stuff burned, my partner and I are unemployed. Of course we’ll have to hang around a while longer in case they want us to shoot off Baby out there, but there’s nothing to that. In the meantime maybe I can help you dig up some more of those old pots and statues.”
Martin Devere seemed to be thinking. He watched as the tall man checked to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, then carried the bundle of plans over to the electronic oven.
“Baby. You mean your bomb, out there. You think you might actually shoot it off then.”
“Oh, maybe, maybe not.”
“Couldn’t they fire it from Earth by radio?” Devere asked.
“Nope. Somebody might try jamming.”
“Oh, I see.…”
Martin Devere was silent again until the tall man opened the oven and removed a bundle of gray ash. He dumped the ashes into a bucket and began stirring them with his hand.
“Something else I was wondering about,” Devere said. He began cleaning the fragment of ceramic again, his hands working in a slow circular motion.
“Supposing the United Governments find out where it—the bomb is. They might send a missile to blow it up.”
“Told you, Pop. Baby can out-run anything else that flies. Wouldn’t do them any good.”
“Yes, yes.… Still, the missile would hit Mars, wouldn’t it? I mean, it would destroy all this—the igloos, my diggings…”
The tall man gave a laugh.
“Don’t worry so much, Pop. We’d have plenty of time to get in the ship and clear out. We might even take you with us.”
“Still…” But the old man lapsed again into thought.
* * * *
An hour later, the short-range radio gave a shrill beep. The tall man went over and flipped the talk switch.
“Yeah?”
“Hello. Listen, I did something stupid.”
Martin Devere looked up at the sound of the bald man’s voice. Devere’s hands still held the piece of ceramic. He had polished it until a complex geometric design was visible, etched in reds and blues. It might have been equally a decoration or some mechanical diagram.
“Did you get the message sent?” the tall man asked.
“Yes, that part’s all right. I got to the ship and contacted headquarters. I think they’re going to deliver the ultimatum right away. Now we just wait for orders. The only thing is, the sandcat’s power went dead on me while I was halfway down a hill. It started to roll, and I forgot I was wearing a spacesuit. I jumped out. This low gravity fooled me too. I think I’ve broken my ankle, it hurts like hell.”
The tall man cursed in a low voice.
“All right, all right,” he said after a moment. “Just take it easy. I’ll have to come out and get you.”
“I think the sandcat is all right. Stupid of me to jump like that, wasn’t thinking. Better bring a spare battery with you.… Oh, and you’d better bring a light too. It will be getting dark in another half hour.”
“Okay, just wait for me. I’ll home in on your suit radio.”
The tall man switched off the receiver and went to his own suit locker. Martin Devere watched as he removed the holster and weapon from his hip. He pulled the heavy plastic trousers over his denim jumper and then buckled the gun back again before starting on the rest of the spacesuit.
“Nothing serious, I hope?” Martin Devere put the ceramic down carefully and picked up another object from a stack of artifacts.
“You heard, didn’t you? You any good at setting a broken ankle, Pop?”
“Oh, I could manage, I guess. Broke my arm down in the diggings once. Had to set it myself. Twenty years ago, I think it was. I’ve been more careful since then.” He gave a laugh. It started as a normal laugh, then broke to a senile giggle. Then his face was serious again. He carried the new artifact closer to the man with the gun.
“You know, I was telling you.… The Martians were vegetarians. They never made any weapons for hunting. They did know about explosives, though.”
“What’s that thing?” The tall man, struggling with the buckles of his breathing equipment, glanced at the object in Devere’s hands. It looked like badly corroded bronze, and consisted of a long tube with a large bulb at one end.
“This? Oh, this is some kind of a tool I found. I think it was a digging tool, used for breaking up rocks. They did build canals, you know.… As I was saying, they knew about explosives. This tool, for instance. It worked by means of a small, shaped charge inside this bulb here. The explosion was so well-focused that there was almost no recoil. A high-energy shock wave was emitted from the barrel—very effective at short range. But the most amazing thing about this tool is that the chemical explosive is still potent after lying underground for nearly a million years.…
“Oh, by the way. There’s nothing wrong with your sandcat’s battery. It was the motor I sabotaged.”
Then Martin Devere pointed the ancient digging tool at the tall man and blew him into two neat pieces.
* * * *
The Hermit of Mars never did get around to walking out to the space ship and using his visitor’s radio to tell Earth what had happened. He really intended to, but he forgot. The ultimatum that was delivered to the United Governments failed, of course, but no one knew exactly why until the next Earth-Mars conjunction.
The United Governments was prevailed on by the World Television Service to send out someone to interview the Hermit, if he were still alive.
That interview was unfortunate. It might have established Martin Devere as the world hero that he was, and he might have been awarded some kind of medal. As it went, his rude and insulting answers to the young man’s questions made him unpopular for years.
His last answer in the interview was the worst. The young man, already sweating, looked in desperation at the green crystal vase that Martin Devere insisted on holding in front of the television lens. (Back at the Institute, a dozen faces were flushing red with indignation as their owners realized what the old man had been holding back.)
“Tell me, Dr. Devere,” the young man asked. “You seem—er—a very modest man. Doesn’t it make you the least bit proud to know that you’ve saved the world?”
Martin Devere lowered his vase and gave the young man a puzzled look.
“You mean Earth? Tell me, why should I want to save that world?”
A MATTER OF MONSTERS, by Manly Banister
Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1954.
He was the most wretched looking being I ever saw. It was a cold, rainy night, and he slouched down the street five paces ahead of me. He had hunched his shoulders under his threadbare jacket, thrust hands deep into the pockets of his baggy pants. He had turned his coat collar up as an ineffective shield against the drizzle, and the brim of his hat was pulled down so that everything under it, down to his shoulders, was in deep shadow. The battered crown of his hat and his shoulders glistened wetly with rain and neon light.
He stopped just ahead of me and looked into the steaming glass of Dan’s Chili Parlor. His head was lifted, and the profile toward me. That was what stopped me. I’ve seen hungry tramps before—but I
had to get a better look at this one. At first, I thought it could have been a chromatic trick of the colored neon lights in Dan’s window, but then I knew what it was—the guy’s head was purple. More than that, it wasn’t a head such as you are accustomed to. It was a great blotchy thing, puffed and rift-ridden. It wasn’t recognizable as a human head, and it was purple—brilliant purple. I knew what I had to do.
I stepped up to him.
“Hungry, fella?”
He recoiled. He turned his face toward me. I almost vomited. The eyes were spongy yellow puffs in that hideously purple visage. He looked me over.
He saw a rather tall guy, thirtyish, with a floppy brown hat drenched with rain and pulled down low. I had on a tightly belted trench coat, and the light glinted oil my rain-spattered specs. I’m not much to look at, but at least my head doesn’t look like a rotten purple cabbage!
He nodded. His thin tongue—it was purple, too—licked tentatively from a slit in the purple horror of his face.
“Yeah,” he said dully, and if I ever heard a purple syllable, that one was it.
I jerked my head.
“Come on. Let’s put on the feed bag.”
There was nothing bashful about him, purple head or not. While we were waiting for our chili, I deliberately avoided looking at the guy. He was a monster, and the sight of him made me want to jump up and run. But there was another reason for not looking at him. He would be sensitive about that purple toadstool that masqueraded as his head. Under the pretext of wiping my specs with a handkerchief, I adjusted them just so, and I could see him fairly well without looking directly at him.
He wasn’t over twenty—a hell of an age to be afflicted with a knob like that on his shoulders! I knew that if he had any folks, they didn’t know he looked like this; he would never have let them know. They probably thought he was dead. And if he had ever had a girl, he didn’t have one now. He would know she couldn’t look at him, with his head all purple and puffed—and she wouldn’t know who he was, even if she saw him. That was the only merciful part of it. If he ever saw her on the street, he could walk right on by, and she would never know. But he would—
I knew what the purple knob was—and I knew who this boy was, too. That’s why I hadn’t walked on by. He wasn’t a tramp—far from it. He was what was left of a man who had been to the Venusian swamps, in the name of humanity—trying to clear the place for settlers from the over-populated Earth. He had been a spaceman and a member of the Planetary Frontier Corps, until he contracted the purple stuff that was a Venusian fungus disease—non-communicable but incurable.
He ate like a stranger to food—fast and gobbling. It seemed to me that the chili turned purple, too, as fast as he shoveled it into his mouth. I felt a queasy pitch and roll in the region of my stomach.
Sure the guy was hungry—he’d been out of the service at least two years. And it doesn’t take long to eat up the lousy three hundred bucks severance pay that goes with a medical discharge. He’d probably been eating out of garbage cans. What housewife could even look at him long enough to hand a sandwich out the kitchen door? What kind of a job could he take, with a head like that?
If he didn’t starve first, he could look forward to living maybe ten years—on the shots the medicos handed out at the spaceport sick bay. It took guts to report regularly for those—knowing that if you didn’t report, you’d die and be out of this rotten mess!
I felt a sudden warm thankfulness that I wasn’t like this poor kid. It helped to feel that way, with what I had to say to him.
He finished the last of his chili, gulped down a cup of steaming coffee and looked around like he was still hungry. I held up a finger to Dan.
“Pie!” I looked back at the purple-headed kid. “With ice cream—and bring some more coffee.”
When the kid finally wiped pie crust off his purple phiz on the back of his hand and leaned back in his chair, I offered him a cigarette. He took it with fingers that shook. Moisture oozed out of the yellow fungoid blobs of his eyes.
“Been having it tough, haven’t you?” I remarked lighting up for him.
“Tough enough.” He froze on those syllables and turned his head away.
“Can’t get a job, can you?” I continued callously.
He didn’t answer.
“Can you?”
He still didn’t answer. I said,
“Where you been getting your shots? “
“I’ve been getting them.”
“Not at the sick bay. You haven’t showed there for six months.”
“I got a friend—a doctor. He gives me the shots. I don’t need no space navy medico—”
I saw how he felt, and my heart bled.
I said, “Don’t blame the Navy doctors for that knot of yours. It don’t make no difference where you get your shots—you’ve just been holding me up, is all.”
He jerked up from the table, knocking his chair backward.
“Look—thanks for the meal. I’m going now.”
“You haven’t anywhere to go,” I said. “Sit down.”
The kid was in awful trouble with that head of his. I treated him rough, because he wouldn’t even have heard me if I’d used any other approach. He’d had that ugly purple head just long enough to realize the full depth of degradation it could bring him to, the full limit of utter aloneness to which he was subject—an outcast, unwanted by an uncaring world.
He scared you to look at him. Not scared as if you were afraid he might attack you—you knew he wouldn’t. It was a deeper fright than that you felt—a fright that rocked the underpinnings of your psychological makeup; that made your very mind want to curl up and go back to the womb for a fresh start.
I looked straight into his swollen, purple visage.
“You think you can’t share a table with me, because you’re prettier than I?” I asked. “You got to jump and run as soon as you’ve eaten? Sit down!”
He sat down. I was going to bust him wide open and he knew it, and somehow he was eager for it to happen. He didn’t know exactly how I’d do it, but I’d gotten that much across to him anyhow—that I would. I’d bust him wide open—and when I did, it would mean a lot to him. And he fell it coming.
I don’t mean I was going to hit him. What do you think I am? I was going to bust him wide open from that prison—that damnable purple prison—he’d locked himself into, and he was almost neighing with hope and anticipation.
“You got something for me!” He croaked.
“A job.”
He shrank inside his sodden, worn-out clothes. He dropped his purple head into his hands and sobbed. I waited until his shoulders stopped shaking.
“You won’t like this job,” I said.
He threw his head back, peered at me out of those frightful eyes of his.
“If it’s crooked—keep it!”
I grinned. I took a small notebook out from under my trench coat. I thumbed over a few pages.
“Huysman, George,” I read slowly. “Engine Cadet First Class. Is that you? ”
The purple scab twitched and fluctuated. He nodded.
“Serial Number S778—that’s a mighty low number, George!”
He gripped the table until his knuckles glowed white. He relaxed slowly.
“That was three years ago—when the Frontier Corps was just getting started.”
I said, “There’s almost a million in the Corps now. You were one of the first, George. That ought to mean something to you.”
The yellowish fungus of his eyes scrunched up into pulpy masses and oozed, so help me, purple tears—or maybe it was just because they were transparent they looked purple.
I added, “How long you been... purple, George?”
His voice was a low mumble. “Two years—three. Since my first trip.”
He stared blindly at me from inside that disgusting purple fungoid growth. “One trip... that’s all I got out of it—one trip!”
His voice began to rise and I shushed him.
“Would you like to make another trip, George—one more trip?”
He was quiet a long moment. “So that’s the job. But why just one more trip?”
“Because this is a trip you can’t come back from, George.”
The purple fungus of his face writhed hideously. I tensed with anxiety, then relaxed. That frightful expression was the kid’s version of a smile!
He said, “Where and when do I sign on?”
“You’re on, George,” I grinned. “You can go with me now. But first, I want you to do me a favor—”
I carefully manipulated the locks and disengaged the tri-dimensional anastigmat lenses of my specs from their seat in the front half of my solid silver cranium—the “seeing” part of my electronic eyes, without which I was blind as a bat. I passed them to him with my handkerchief.
“Before we go out, I’d appreciate your cleaning these up for me so I can see, George.”
* * * *
My boys welcomed George into our select little group. But from the first introduction, he was George Huysman no longer. He was Purple Top, and he liked that better—none of us wanted to be reminded of our names. Names meant we could have kinfolks, but our kinfolks didn’t have us. We were living dead—dead to the world that didn’t want us, or wouldn’t want us if it knew.
There were five of us—five broken jugs that had gone to the well too often. Iron Head—that’s what they call me, in spite of the fact my head’s made of silver, not iron. Iron rusts and the water on my brain would raise merry hell with an iron skull. I stuck my head into the flareback of an atomic converter. After that, I suffered what seemed like years of agony until I woke up with a brand-new, silver skull. It don’t hurt to have a silver head—after you get used to the idea you can’t grow hair on it.