Mr. Oberdorffer hastened to the precinct station and after some difficulty due to the fact that there are many Petes and he didn’t know his best friend’s last name finally learned where Pete was being held and hurried to see him to help if he could.
It turned out that Pete had already been tried and convicted and was past help for thirty days, although he gladly accepted a loan of ten dollars to enable him to buy cigarettes for that period.
However he managed to talk to Pete briefly and to learn, via the pad and pencil route, what had happened.
Shorn of misspellings, Pete’s story was that he had done nothing at all, the police had framed him; besides, he’d been a little drunk or he’d never have tried to shoplift razor blades from a dime store in broad daylight with Martians around. The Martians had enticed him into the store and had promised to act as lookout for him and then had ratted on him and called copper the moment he had his pockets full. It was all the fault of the Martians.
This pathetic story so irked Mrs Oberdorffer that, as of that very moment, he decided definitely to do something about the Martians. That very evening. He was a patient man but he had reached the limit of his patience.
Enroute home, he decided to break along standing habit and eat at a restaurant. If he didn’t have to interrupt his thinking to cook a meal for himself, he’d be off to a quicker start.
In the restaurant he ordered pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut and, while waiting for it to be brought to him, he started his thinking. But very quietly so as not to disturb other people along the counter.
He marshaled before him everything he’d read about Martians in the popular science magazines, and everything he’d read about electricity, about electronics and about relativity.
The logical answer came to him at the same time as the pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut. “lt’s got,” he told the waitress, “to be an anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator! That’s the only thing that will get them.” Her answer, if any, went unheard and is unrecorded.
He had to stop thinking while he ate, of course, but he thought loudly the rest of the way home. Once in his own place, he disconnected the signal (which was a flashing red light is lieu of a bell) so no tenant of the building could interrupt him to report a leaking faucet or a recalcitrant refrigerator, and then he started to build an anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator.
“We use this outboard motor for power,” he thought, suiting action to word. “Only the propeller it comes off and gives a generator to make the D.C. at—how many volts?” And when he figured that out, he stepped up the voltage with a transformer and then stepped it sidewise into a spark coil, and went on from there.
Only once did he encounter a serious difficulty. That was when he realized that he would need a vibrating membrane about eight inches in diameter. There was nothing in his workroom that would serve the purpose and since it was by then eight o’clock and all stores were closed he almost gave up for the evening.
But the Salvation Army saved him, when he remembered it. He went out and over to Clark Street, walked up and down until a Salvation Army lassie came along to make the rounds of the taverns. He had to get as high as an offer of thirty dollars to the cause before she would agree to part with her tambourine; it is well she succumbed at that figure for it was all the money he had with him. Besides, if she had not agreed he would have been strongly tempted to grab the tambourine and run with it, and that would in all probability have landed him in jail with Pete. He was a portly man, a slow runner, and short of wind.
But the tambourine, with the jangles removed, turned out to be exactly right for his purpose. Covered with a light sprinkling of magnetized iron filings and placed between the cathode tube and the aluminum saucepan which served as a grid, it would not only filter out the unwanted delta rays but the vibration of the filings (once the outboard motor was started) would provide the required fluctuation in the inductance.
Finally, a full hour after his usual bedtime, Mr. Oberdorffer soldered the last connection and stepped back to look at his masterpiece. He sighed with satisfaction. It was good. It should work.
He made sure that the airshaft window was open as high as it would raise. The subatomic vibrations had to have a way out or they would work only inside the room. But once free they would bounce back from the heaviside layer and, like radio waves, travel all around the world in seconds.
He made sure there was gasoline in the tank of the outboard motor, wound the cord around the spinner, prepared to pull the cord—and then hesitated. There’d been Martians in the room, off and on all evening but there was none present now. And he’d rather wait till one was present again before starting the machine, so he could tell right away whether or not it worked.
He went into the other room and got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and opened it. Took it back with him into the workroom and sat sipping it and waiting.
Somewhere outside a clock struck, but Mr. Oberdorffer being deaf, did not hear it.
There was a Martian, sitting right atop the anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator itself.
Mr. Oberdorffer put down his beer, reached over and pulled the cord. The motor spun and caught, the machine ran.
Nothing happened to the Martian.
“Take it a few minutes to build up potential,” Mr. Oberdorffer explained, to himself rather than to the Martian.
He sat down again, picked up his beer. Sipped it and watched and waited for the few minutes to pass.
It vas approximately five minutes after eleven o’clock, Chicago time, on the evening of August 19 th, a Wednesday.
2.
On the afternoon of August 19, 1964, in Long Beach, California, at four o’clock in the afternoon (which would have been six o’clock in the afternoon in Chicago, just about the time Mr. Oberdorffer reached home full of pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut, ready to start work on his anti-extraterrestrial et cetera), Margie Devereaux looked around the corner of the doorway into Dr. Snyder’s office and asked, “Busy, Doctor?”
“Not at all, Margie. Come in,” said Dr. Snyder, who was swamped with work. “Sit down.”
She sat down. “Doctor,” she said, a bit breathlessly. “I’ve an idea finally as to how we can find Luke.”
“I certainly hope it’s a good one, Margie. It’s been two weeks now.”
It had been a day longer than that. It had been fifteen days and four hours since Margie had gone up to their room to waken Luke from his nap and had found a note waiting for her instead of a husband.
She’d run with the note to Dr. Snyder and their first thought since Luke had had no cash except a few dollars that had been in Margie’s purse, had been the bank. But a call to the bank had brought them the information that he had drawn five hundred dollars from the joint account.
Only one further fact had come to light subsequently. Police, the following day, had learned that less than an hour after Luke’s call at the bank a man answering his description but giving a different name had bought a used car from a lot and paid one hundred dollars cash for it.
Dr. Snyder was not without influence at the police department and the entire Southwest had been circularized with descriptions of Luke and of the car, which was an old 1957 Mercury, painted yellow. Dr. Snyder himself had similarly circularized all mental institutions in the area.
“We agreed,” Margie was saying, “that the place he’d most likely go to would be that shack on the desert where he was the night the Martians came. You still think so?”
“Of course. He thinks he invented the Martians—says so in that note he left for you. So what’s more natural than that he’d go back to the same place, try to reconstruct the same circumstances, to undo what he thinks he did. But I thought you said you didn’t have the faintest idea where the shack is.”
“I still haven’t except that it’s within driving distance of L.A. But I just remembered something, Doctor. I remember Luke telling me, several years ago; that Carter Benson had bought a shack som
ewhere—near Indio, I think. That could be the one. I’ll bet it is.”
“But you called this Benson, didn’t you?”
“I called him, yes. But all I asked him was whether he’d seen or heard from Luke since Luke left here. And he said he hadn’t but promised to let me knew if he did hear anything. But I didn’t ask him if Luke had used his shack last March! And he wouldn’t have thought to volunteer the information, because I didn’t tell him the whole story or that we thought Luke might be going back to wherever he was last March. Because—well, it just never occurred to me.”
“Hmmm,” said Dr. Snyder, “Well, it’s a possibility. But would Luke use the shack without Benson’s permission?”
“He probably had permission last March. This time he’s hiding out, don’t forget. He wouldn’t want even Carter to know where he went. And he’d know Carter wouldn’t be using it himself—not in August.”
“Quite true. You want to phone Benson again, then? There’s the phone.”
“I’ll use the one in the outer office, Doctor. It might take a while to reach him, and you are busy, even if you say you aren’t.”
But it didn’t take long to reach Cater Benson after all. Margie was back within minutes, and her face vans shining.
“Doctor, it was Carter’s place Luke used last March. And I’ve got instructions how to get there!” She waved a slip of paper.
“Good girl! What do you think we should do? Phone the Indio police or—?”
“Police nothing. I’m going to him. As soon as I’m through with my shift.”
“Yon needn’t wait for that, my dear. But are you sure you should go alone? We don’t know how much his illness has changed and progressed, and you might find him—disturbed.”
“If he isn’t I’ll disturb him. Seriously, Doctor, don’t worry. I can handle him, no matter what.” She glanced at her wrist watch. “A quarter after four. If you really don’t mind my leaving now, I can be there by nine or ten o’clock.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to take one of the attendants with you?”
“Very sure.”
“All right, my dear. Drive carefully.”
3.
On the evening of the third day of the third moon of the season of kudus (at, as near as matters, the same moment Mr. Oberdorffer, in Chicago, was making inquiries in Bughouse Square about his missing friend) a witch doctor named Bugassi, of the Moparobi tribe in equatorial Africa, was called before the chief of his tribe. The chief’s name was M’Carthi, but he was no relative of a former United States senator of the same name.
“Make juju against Martians,” M’Carthi ordered Bugassi.
Of course he did not really call them Martians. He used the word gnajamkata, the derivation of which is: gna, meaning “Pygmy,” plus jam, meaning “green,” plus kat, meaning “sky.” The final vowel indicates a plural, and the whole translates as “green Pygmies from the sky.”
Bugassi bowed. “Make big juju,” he said.
It had damned well better be a big juju, Bugassi knew.
The position of a witch doctor among the Moparobi is a precarious one. Unless he is a very good witch doctor indeed, his life expectancy is short. It would be even shorter were it not quite rare for the chief to make an official demand upon one of his witch doctors, for tribal law decreed that one of them who failed must make a contribution of meat to the tribal larder. And the Moparobi are cannibals.
There had been six witch doctors among the Moparobi when the Martians came; now Bugassi was the last survivor. One moon apart (for taboo forbids the chief to order the making of a juju less than a full moon of twenty-eight days after the making of the last previous juju) the other five witch doctors had tried and failed and made their contributions.
Now it was the turn of Bugassi and from the hungry way M’Carthi and the rest of the tribe stared at him it appeared they would be almost as satisfied if he failed as if he succeeded. The Moparobi had not tasted meat for twenty-eight days and they were meat hungry.
All of Africa was meat hungry.
Some of the tribes, those who had lived exclusively or almost exclusively from hunting were actually starving. Other tribes had been forced to migrate vast distances to areas where vegetable foods, such as flits anal berries were available.
Hunting was simply no longer possible.
Almost all of the creatures man hunts for foods are fleeter of foot or of wing than he. They must be approached upwind and by stealth until he is within killing distance.
With Martians around there was no longer any possibility of stealth. They loved to help the natives hunt. Their method of helping was to run—or to kwim—well ahead of the hunter, awakening and alerting his quarry with gladsome cries.
Which made the quarry scamper like hell.
And which made the hunter return empty-handed from the hunt, ninety-nine times out of a hundred without having had the opportunity to shoot an arrow or throw a spear, let alone having hit something with either one.
It was a Depression. Different in type but at least as punishing in effect as the more civilized types of Depression that were rampant in the more civilized countries.
The cattle-herding tribes were affected too. The Martians loved to jump onto the backs of cattle and stampede them. Of course, since a Martian had no substance or weight, a cow couldn’t feel a Martian on its back, when the Martian leaned forward and screamed “Iwrigo ’m N’gari” (“Hi-yo, Silver”) in Masai at the top of his voice in the cow’s ear while a dozen or more other Martians were screaming “Iwrigo ’m N’gari” into the ears of a dozen or more other cows and bulls, the stampede was on.
Africa just didn’t seem to like the Martians.
But, back to Bugassi.
“Make big juju, he had told M’Carthi. And a big juju it was going to be, literally and figuratively. When, shortly after the green Pygmies had come from the sky, M’Carthi had called in his six witch doctors and had conferred long and seriously with them. He had tried his best to persuade or to order them to pool their knowledge so that one of them, using the knowledge of all six, could make the greatest juju that had ever been made.
They had refused and even threats of torture and death could not move them. Their secrets were sacred and more important to them than their lives.
But a compromise had been reached. They were to draw lots for their turns, a moon apart. And each agreed that if, and only if, he failed, he would confide all of his secrets, including and in particular the ingredients and incantations that went into his juju, before he made his contribution to the tribal stomach.
Bugassi had drawn the longest twig and now, five moons later, he had the combined knowledge of all of the others as well as his own—and the witch doctors of the Moparobi are famed as the greatest of all Africa. Furthermore, he had exact knowledge of every thing and every word that had gone into the making of the five jujus that had failed.
With this storehouse of knowledge at his fingertips, he had been planning his own juju for a full moon now, ever since Nariboto, the fifth of the witch doctors, had gone the way of all edible flesh. (Of which Bugassi’s share, by request, had been the liver, of which he had saved a small piece; well putrefied by now, it was in prime condition to be included in his own juju.)
Bugassi knew that his own juju could not fail, not only because the results to his own person were unthinkable if it did fail, but because—well, the combined knowledge of all of the witch doctors of the Moparobi simply could not fail.
It was to be a juju to end all jujus, as well as all Martians.
It was to be a monster juju; it was to include every ingredient and every spell that had been used in the other five and in addition was to include eleven ingredients and nineteen spells (seven of which were dance steps) which had been his own very special secrets, completely unknown to the other five.
All the ingredients were at hand and when assembled, tiny as most of them were individually, they would fill the bladder of a bull elephant, which was to
be their container. (The elephant of course, had been killed six months before; no big game had been killed since the Martians came.)
But the assembling of the juju would take all night, since each ingredient must be added with its own spell or dance and other spells and dances interspersed with the adding of ingredients.
Throughout the night no Moparobi slept. Seated in a respectful circle around the big fire, which the women replenished from time to time, they watched while Bugassi labored, danced and cast spells. It was a strenuous performance; he lost weight, they noticed sadly.
Just before dawn, Bugassi fell supine before M’Carthi, the chief.
“Juju done,” he said from the ground.
“Gnajamkata still here,” said M’Carthi grimly. They were very much still there; they had been very active all night, watching the preparations and joyfully pretending to help them; several times they had made Bugassi stumble in his dancing and once fall flat on his face by darting unexpectedly between his legs while he had danced. But each time he had patiently repeated the sequence so no step would be lost.
Bugassi raised himself on one elbow in the dirt. With the other arm he pointed to the nearest large tree.
“Juju must hang clear of ground,” he said.
M’Carthi gave an order, and three black bucks leaped to obey it. They tied a rope of woven vines around the juju and one of them shinned up the tree and passed the rope over a limb; the other two hoisted the juju and when it was ten feet off the ground Bugassi, who had meanwhile climbed painfully to his feet, called to them that it was high enough. They secured it there. The one in the tree came down and they rejoined the others.
Bugassi went over to the tree, walking as though his feet hurt (which they did) and stood under the juju, he faced the east, where the sky was gray now and the sun just under the horizon, and folded his arms.
Martians, Go Home Page 15