There were, of course, no conventions; large groups of psychologists were as impractical as large groups for any other purpose. Large groups of people meant large groups of Martians and the sheer volume of interference made speaking impractical. Most P.F.A.M. members worked alone and reported by correspondence, received reams of reports of others and tried out on their patients a whatever ideas seemed worth trying.
Perhaps there was progress of a sort. Fewer people were going insane, at any rate. This may or may not have been, as some claimed, that most people insufficiently stable to stand up to the Martians had already found escape from reality in insanity.
Others credited the increasingly sensible advice that the psychologists were able to give to these still sane. Incidence of insanity had dropped, they claimed, when it was fully realized that it was safe, mentally, to ignore Martians only up to a point. You had to swear back at them and lose your temper at them once in a while. Otherwise the pressure of irritation built up in you as steam builds up pressure in a boiler without a safety valve, and pretty soon you blew your top.
And the equivalently sensible advice not to try to make ends with them. People did try, at first, and the highest percentage of mental casualties is believed to have been among this group. A great many people, men and women of good will, tried that first night; some of them kept on trying for quite a while. A few—saints they must haw been, and wonderfully stable people to boot—never did quit trying.
The thing that made it impossible was that the Martians moved around so. No single Martian ever stayed long in one place or in contact with one person, one family or one group. It just might have been possible, unlikely as it seems, for an extremely patient human being to have achieved friendly footing with a Martian, to have gained a Martian’s confidence, if that humans being had had the opportunity of protracted contact with a given Martian.
But no Martian was given, in that sense. The next moment, the next hour—at most the next day—the man of good will would find himself starting from scratch with a different Martian. In fact, people who tried to be nice to them found themselves changing Martians oftener than those who swore back at them. Nice people bored them. Conflict was their element; they loved it.
But we digressed from the P.F.A.M.
Other members preferred to work in small groups, cells. Especially those who, as members of the Psychological Front, were studying, or attempting to study, the psychology of the Martians. It is an advantage, up to a point, to have Martians around when one is studying or discussing them.
It was to such a cell, a group of six members, that Dr. Ellicott H. Snyder belonged, and it was due to meet that evening. And now he was pulling paper into the roller of his typewriter; the notes for the paper are finished. He wishes he could simply talk from the notes themselves; he likes to talk and detests writing. But there is always the possibility that Martian interference will make coherent talking impossible at a cell meeting and necessitate papers being passed around to be read. Even more important, if the cell members approve the content of a paper it is passed up to a higher echelon and given wider consideration, possibly publication. And this particular paper should definitely merit publication.
15.
Dr. Snyder’s paper began:
It is my belief, that the Martians’ one psychological weakness, their Achilles’ heel, is the fact that they are congenitally unable to lie.
I am aware that this point has been stated and disputed, and I am aware that many—and particularly our Russian colleagues—firmly believe that the Martians can and do lie, that their reason for telling the truth about our own affairs, for never once having been caught in a provable lie about terrestrial matters, is twofold. First, because it makes their tattling more effective and more harassing, since we cannot doubt what they tell us. Second, because by never being provably untrue in small things, they prepare us to believe without doubt whatever Big Lie about their nature and their purpose here they are telling us. The thought that there must be a Big Lie is one that would seem more natural to our Russian friends than to most people. Having lived for so long with their own Big Lie …
Dr. Snyder stopped typing, reread the start of his last sentence and then went back and x’d it out. Since, he hoped, this particular paper would be distributed internationally, why prejudice some of his readers in advance against what he was going to say.
I believe, however, that it can be clearly proved through a single logical argument that the Martians not only do not lie but cannot.
It is obviously their purpose to harass us as much as possible. Yet they have never made the one claim, the one statement, that would increase our misery completely past bearing; they have never once told us that they intend to stay here permanently. Since Coming Night their only answer, where they deign to answer at all, to the question, however worded, of when they intend to go home or how long they intend to stay is that it is “none of our business” or words to that effect.
For most of us the only thing that makes survival desirable is hope, hope that someday, whether tomorrow or ten years from now, the Martians will leave and we’ll never see them again. The very fact that their coming was so sudden and unexpected makes it seem quite possible that they’ll leave the same way.
If the Martians could lie, it is impossible to believe that they would not tell us that they intend to be permanent residents here. Therefore, they cannot lie.
And a very welcome corollary of this simple step in logic is that it become immediately obvious that they know their stay here is not permanent. If it were, they would not have to lie in order to increase our unhap-
A high-pitched chuckle sounded only an inch or two from Dr. Snyder’s right ear. He jumped a few inches, but very carefully didn’t turn, knowing it would put the Martian’s face unbearably close to his own.
“Ver-y clever, Mack, ver-y clever. And screwy as a bedbug, screwy as a bedbug.”
“It’s perfectly logical,” said Dr. Snyder. “It’s absolutely proved. You can’t lie.”
“But I can,” said the Martian. “Work on the logic of that a while, Mack.”
Dr. Snyder worked on the logic of that, and groaned. If a Martian said he could lie, then either he was telling the truth and he could lie, or else he was lying and—
There was a sudden shrieking laugh in his ear.
And then silence in which Dr. Snyder took the paper from his typewriter, manfully resisted the impulse to fold it so he could tear it into paper dolls, and tore it into small pieces instead. He dropped them into the wastebasket and then dropped his head in his hands.
“Dr. Snyder, are you all right?” Margie’s voice. “Yes, Margie.” He looked up and tried to compose his face; he must have succeeded for apparently she saw nothing wrong. “My eyes were tired,” he explained. “I was just resting there for a moment.”
“Oh. Well, I mailed the manuscript. And it’s still only four o’clock. Are you sure there’s nothing you want me to do before I take off.”
“No. Wait, yes. You might look up George and tell him to change the lock on Luke’s door. Put on an ordinary one, I mean.”
“All right. Finish your paper?”
“Yes,” he said. “I finished my paper.”
“Good. I’ll find George.” She went away and he heard the click of her heels on the stairs leading down toward the janitor’s quarters in the basement.
He stood, almost without effort. He felt terribly tired, terribly discouraged, terribly futile. He needed a rest, a nap. If he slept, and overslept to miss dinner or the cell meeting, it wouldn’t matter. He needed sleep more than he needed food or pointless argument with fellow psychiatrists.
He trudged wearily up the carpeted stairs to the second floor, started along the corridor.
Paused outside Luke’s door and found himself glaring at it. The lucky bastard, he thought. In there thinking or reading. And, if there were Martians around, not even knowing it. Not able to see them or hear them.
Perfectly
happy, perfectly adjusted. Who was crazy, Luke or everybody else?
And having Margie, too.
Damn him. He should throw him to the wolves, to the other psychiatrists, and let them experiment with him, probably make him as miserable as anybody else by curing him—or making him insane in some other and not so fortunate direction.
He should, but he wouldn’t.
He went on to his own room, the one he used here when he didn’t want to go home to Signal Hill, and shut the door. Picked up the telephone and called his wife.
“I don’t think I’ll be home tonight, dear,” he said. “Thought I’d better tell you before you started dinner.”
“Something wrong, Ellicott?”
“Just that I’m terribly tired. Going to take a nap and if I sleep through—well, I need the sleep.”
“You have a meeting tonight.”
I may miss that, too. If I do go to it, though, I’ll come home afterwards instead of back here.”
“Wery well, Ellicott. The Martians have been unusually bad here today. Do you know what two of them—”
“Please, dear. I don’t want to hear about Martians. Tell me some other time, please. Good-bye, dear.”
Putting down the phone, be found himself staring into a haunted face in the mirror, his own face. Yes, he needed sleep, badly. He picked up the phone again and called the receptionist, who also worked the switchboard and kept records. “Doris? I’m not to be disturbed under any circumstances. And if there are any callers, tell them I’m out.”
“All right, Doctor. For how long?”
“Until I call back. And if that isn’t before you go of duty and Estelle comes on, explain to her, will you? Thanks.”
He saw his face in the mirror again. Saw that his eyes looked hollow and that there was at least twice as much gray in his hair as had been there four months ago.
So Martians can’t lie, huh? he asked himself silently.
And there let him carry the thought to its horrible conclusion. If Martians could lie—and they could—then the fact that they did not claim they were staying here permanently wasn’t proof that they weren’t.
Perhaps they got more sadistic pleasure out of letting us hope so they could keep on enjoying our sufferings than by ending humanity by denying it hope. If everyone committed suicide or went insane, there’d be no sport for them; there’d be no one left to torment.
And the logic of that paper had been so simply beautiful and so beautifully simple…
His mind felt fogged now and for a moment he couldn’t remember where the flaw in it had been. Oh, yes. If someone says he can lie, he can; otherwise he’d be lying in saying be could lie, and if he is already lying—
He pulled his mind out of the circle before it made him dizzier. He took off his coat and tie and hung them over the back of a chair, sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes.
Lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.
Suddenly, a moment later, jumped almost three feet off the bed as two raucous and almost unbelievably loud Bronx cheers went off simultaneously, one in each ear. He’d forgotten his ear stopples.
He got up and put them in, lay down again. This time he slept.
And dreamed.
About Martians.
16.
The scientific front against the Martians wasn’t organized as was the psychological front, but it was even more active. Unlike the psych boys, who had their hands full with patients and could spare only stolen time for research and experimentation, the physical scientists were putting in full time and overtime studying the Martians. Research in every other direction was at a standstill. The active front was every big laboratory in the world.
Brookhaven, Los Alamos, Harwich, Braunschweig, Sumigrad, Troitsk and Tokuyama, to mention only a few.
Not to mention the attic, cellar or garage of every citizen who had a smattering of knowledge in any field of science or pseudoscience. Electricity, electronics; chemistry, white and black magic, alchemy, dowsing, biotics, optics, sonics and supersonics, typology, toxicology and topology were used as means of study or means of attach.
The Martians had to have a weakness somewhere. There just had to be something that could make a Martian say “Ouch.”
They were bombarded with alpha rays, with beta, gamma, delta, zeta, eta, theta and omega rays.
They were, when opportunity offered (and they neither avoided nor sought being experimentend on), caught in multi-million-volt flashes of electricity, subjected to strong and weak magnetic fields and to microwaves and macrowaves.
They were subjected to cold near absolute zero and to heat as hot as we could get it, which is the heat of nuclear fission. No, the latter was not achieved in a laboratory.
An H-bomb test that had been scheduled for April was, after some deliberation by authorities, ordered to proceed as planned despite the Martians. They knew all our secrets by then anyway so there was nothing to lose, And it was hoped that a Martian might be inspecting the H-bomb at close range when it was fired. One of them was sitting on it. After the explosion he kwimmed to the bridge of the admiral’s flagship, looking disgusted. “Is that the best you can do for firecrackers, Mack?” he demanded.
They were photographed, for study, with every kind of light anybody could think of: infrared, ultraviolet, fluorescent, sodium, carbon arc, candlelight, phosphorescence, sunlight, moonlight and starlight.
They were sprayed with every known liquid, including prussic acid, heavy water, holy water and Flit.
Sounds they made, vocal or otherwise, were recorded by every known type of recording device. They were studied with microscopes, telescopes, spectroscopes and iconoscopes.
Practical results, zero; nothing any scientist did to any Martian made him even momentarily uncomfortable. Theoretical results, negligible. Very little was learned about them that hadn’t been known within a day or two of their arrival.
They reflected light rays only of wave lengths within the visible spectrum (.0004 mm. to .00076 mm.). Any radiation above or below this band passed through them without being affected or deflected. They could not be detected by X-rays, radio waves or radar.
They had no effect whatsoever on gravitational or magnetic fields. They were equally unaffected by every form of energy and every form of liquid, solid or gaseous matter we could try on them.
They neither absorbed nor reflected sound, but they could create sound. That perhaps was more puzzling to scientists than the fact that they reflected light rays. Sound is simpler than light, or at least is better understood. It is the vibration of a medium, usually air. And if the Martians weren’t there in the sense of being real and tangible, how could they cause the vibration of air which we hear as sound? But they did cause it, and not as a subjective effect in the mind of the hearer for the sound could be recorded and reproduced. Just as the light waves they reflected could be recorded and studied on a photographic plate.
Of course no scientist, by definition, believed there to be devils or demons. Put a great many scientists refused to believe that they came from Mars—or, for that matter, anywhere else in our universe. Obviously they were a different kind of matter—if matter at all, as we understand the nature of matter—and must come from some other universe where the laws of nature were completely different. Possibly from another dimension.
Or, still more likely, some thought, they themselves had fewer or more dimensions than we.
Could they not be two-dimensional beings whose appearance of having a third dimension was an illusory effect of their existence in a three-dimensional universe? Shadow figures on a movie screen appear to be three-dimensional until you try to grab one by the arm.
Or perhaps they were projections into a three-dimensional universe of four- or five-dimensional beings whose intangibility was due somehow to their having more dimensions than we could see and understand.
17.
Luke Devereaux awoke, stretched and yawned, feeling blissful and relaxed on this, the third mo
rning of the week’s vacation he was taking after having finished Trail to Nowhere. The best-earned vacation he’d ever had, after finishing a book in five weeks flat. A book that would probably make him more money than any book he’d written to date.
No worries about his next book, either. He had the main points of the plot well in mind already and if it weren’t for Margie being so insistent that he take a vacation he’d probably be a chapter or so into it already. His fingers itched to get at the typewriter again.
Well, he’d made the bargain that he’d take a vacation only if Margie did too, and that made it a second honeymoon, practically, and just about perfect.
Just about perfect? he asked himself. And found his mind suddenly shying away from the question. If it wasn’t perfect, he didn’t want to know why it wasn’t.
But why didn’t he want to know? That was one step further removed from the question itself, but even so it was vaguely troubling.
I’m thinking, he thought. And he shouldn’t be thinking, because thinking might spoil everything somehow. Maybe that was why he’d worked so hard at writing, to keep from thinking?
But too keep from thinking what? His mind shied again.
And then he was cut of the half-sleep and was awake, and it came back to him.
The Martians.
Face the fact you’ve been trying to duck, the fact that everybody else still sees them and you don’t. That you’re insane—and you knew you aren’t—or that everybody else is.
Neither makes sense and yet one or the other must be true and ever since, you saw your last Martian over five weeks ago you’ve been ducking the issue and trying to avoid thinking about it—because thinking about such a horrible paradox might drive you nuts again like you were before and you’d start seeing—
Martians, Go Home Page 12