Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  “I see. You understand the trip would be brief. We must depend on the space-warp continuum, which will be effective for only six more days. We would have to leave at once.”

  “It’s my vacation,” Jerome said. “I can do what I want.”

  When he stepped down on Mars, all of the big wheels were waiting. The Chairman of Lions Interplanetary, the Editor of Martian Digest, the head of the Future Voters’ League, and others. The welcoming address was delivered by the President of the Solar Council.

  “In conclusion,” he said, “at this first meeting of the dominant cultures of the planetary system, may I extend to you, Jerome of Earth, the keys to our cities and the hearts of our people, in the fervent hope—”

  Jerome had taken a pair of clippers from his pocket and was trimming his nails. “Likewise,” he said.

  “—in the fervent hope,” said the President, “that the civilizations we represent may gain by this association some insight—”

  “Looks like a mighty nice little planet you’ve got here,” Jerome said.

  After the ceremonies there was a small banquet at the Palace with some informal entertainment, and somewhat later Jerome was installed in the visitor’s suite. He slept well.

  The next morning he was treated to a gala patio breakfast with the Royal Martian Ballet performing on the terrace below. “You are surprised to feel so much at home,” said the President, smiling. “You see, we have been listening to your radio for many years, and so have learned your language, your customs, your likes and dislikes.—”

  “I like my eggs over easy,” Jerome said. “But these are OK.” He poked at them politely with his fork. “Anyhow, it’s a change.”

  “We have planned so long for this occasion,” said the President, “to show you our way of life, only to find our time so short—”

  “Why don’t we just drive around for a while,” said Jerome. “If you got a car?”

  They visited the Bureau of Statistical Research and Loving Kindness and the Criminal Building, and Jerome left his footprints in concrete at the Santorium of the Daughters of the Martian Revolution.

  “Actually,” said the President, “the Revolution never amounted to much, but these ladies are the daughters of it, and they’re quite well to do. Now this afternoon—”

  “As long as it’s my vacation,” said Jerome, “let’s take in a ball game.”

  “First of all there is the Memorial Service of the Young Republicans’ Club and then—” He paused. “A ball game, you say. Yes.” He seemed to be thinking. “Very well, then, suppose we begin by having a bite of lunch.”

  There were fourteen courses, with appropriate wines and Solar Cola, so the luncheon was rather long. Long enough for the Martian Engineers and the Royal Construction Corps to erect a triple-decked stadium, and for two baseball teams to learn the game by means of microwave hypnosis. And for 120,000 volunteer fans to receive a short treatment of mass-suggestion. Jerome and the President arrived at the park and took their seats. The umpire dusted off home plate, the first baseman took a chew of tobacco, the batter knocked the dirt out of his spikes and the game began.

  In the first inning there was a triple play and a triple steal. One of the managers was thrown out and the umpire was hit by a pop-bottle. Jerome frowned. “I only wish Cleo was here,” he said.

  “You miss her a great deal,” said the President.

  “She never did see an ump get flattened,” he said. “Not from this close anyhow.”

  In the second inning, there was an inside-the-park grand slam home run, the third baseman made a triple error, and Jerome caught a pop foul. “Pretty fair seats,” he said.

  Returning to the Palace, the President outlined the rest of the day’s schedule. “We’re having a cocktail party in your honor,” he said, “followed by a state dinner and the premiere of a new opera. Then a reception and a masked ball—”

  “I thought I’d turn in early tonight,” Jerome said. “Have a sandwich and a beer in my room and read the baseball almanac awhile.”

  “A sandwich and a beer in your room,” said the President, “I see. Well, there should be beer in the icebox. If there’s any special kind of sandwich you’d like we can stop at a delicatessen—”

  “No special kind,” Jerome said. The car turned in at the Palace.

  The second morning was as busy as the first. The Tri-Centennial Military Review and Air Command Proceedings took up most of it so there was barely time to visit the Museum of Metaphysics and Household Design before lunch.

  “This afternoon,” said the President over the soup, “we have a program of unusual interest—”

  “Who’s pitching?” Jerome asked.

  The royal construction Corps was forced to call on its civilian reserve to help rebuild the stadium it had torn down the night before. No one on Mars had considered the possibility that anybody would want to see more than one baseball game.

  Driving home after the game, the President smiled. “Nothing wrong with a little relaxation, is there? Especially since tomorrow is going to be our big day. Something like your Independence Day: the Annual Opening of the Canals, address by the Philosopher-in-Chief, Dedication of the Five Hundredth Congress of Scientific—”

  “Sounds great,” said Jerome. “Be playing a double-header, I presume?”

  “—of Scientific and Cultural Evalua—” The President paused. “A double-header, you say. Well, yes—naturally. If you’ll excuse me a moment I have to make a phone call.” He was in time. They had only ripped out the first three rows of seats.

  Returning to the Palace the third day, Jerome seemed restless. “Nice of you to ask me up,” he said, “and all, but I’d better be getting home.”

  “There are still two days,” the President said. “It will be years before conditions will enable us to communicate with Earth again. There is much we have to give you: a cure for the common cold—the formula for universal peace—plans for a thirty-five inch color TV set the average boy can build for ten dollars—”

  “I wouldn’t mind staying on,” Jerome said, “I’d like to see that little southpaw pitch tomorrow, but I got to get home. I promised Cleo I’d pick up the laundry, for one thing—”

  “We had envisioned an exchange program,” said the President, “of specialized personnel. Some of us going to Earth—some of you coming here.”

  “We could use a left-handed pitcher,” Jerome said. “Probably we could give you a pretty good third baseman.”

  The President nodded. “At a moment like this there isn’t very much I can say.”

  The trip to Earth was uneventful. Jerome was glad to be home. He hurried up to the apartment. Cleo was sitting in the same chair, watching the game.

  “What inning?” he asked.

  “Last of the third, no score,” she said. “Been away?”

  “Yeah.” He settled down on the couch. “Newcombe pitching, huh?”

  She nodded. “Got his fast ball working pretty good. Where’d you go—Canarsie?”

  “Mars,” he said. He started to unlace his shoes. “Campy’s thumb bother him any?”

  “Still got it taped, but he’s swinging OK.” She unwrapped a stick of gum. “What’s it like up there—nice?

  “Yeah,” he said. “seemed like a pretty good crowd, what I saw of them. What did Reese do last time up?”

  “Grounded to short,” she said. “Why don’t you come to the meeting Thursday—the Current Events Club? Give a little talk about them?Might be interesting.”

  Jerome went up to the set and adjusted the dial. “Talk about who?”

  “Now you got it too dark,” she said. “Talk about these friends you went to see. Up to Mars. They worth while getting to know?”

  Jerome shook his head slowly. “Can’t hit the curve ball,” he said.

  NO SHOULDER

  TO CRY ON

  by Hank Davis

  Wouldn’t it be simply splendid if someone older and wiser than you could hand you the solution to your probl
ems on a platinum platter (why settle for mere silver?) and then you could live happily ever after. But happiness is relative and other things are, as well.

  While it didn’t solve any of my problems in 1968 when this story appeared in Analog—for one thing, I was expecting to be drafted any time, and, a few months later I was—the check from Condé Nast was very welcome, and more important, I had sold a story to John W. Campbell, the man who had practically created the field of modern science fiction before I was even born. I wish that had been the first of other stories for Campbell’s magazine, but in three years and two months, his death brought the end of an era. This story, of course, is not in the same league as the Olympian stories he published by Heinlein, Sturgeon, van Vogt, Leinster, Williamson, Asimov, et glorious al., and I would write it differently now, but it did appear in Campbell’s magazine, and, barring time travel, they (forgive me, Ira Gershwin) can’t take that away from me.

  ***

  Hank Davis is an editor emeritus at Baen Books. While a naïve youth in the early 1950s (yes, he’s old!), he was led astray by sf comic books, and then by A. E. van Vogt’s Slan, which he read in the Summer 1952 issue of Fantastic Story Quarterly while in the second grade, sealing his fate. He has had stories published mumble-mumble years ago in Analog (the one in this book), If, F&SF, and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series. (There was also a story sold to The Last Dangerous Visions, but let’s not go there.) A native of Kentucky, he currently lives in North Carolina to avoid a long commute to the Baen office.

  The ship purred as it bored a tunnel through space; purred like a pampered and petted kitten.

  It is, I was thinking, a hell of a noise for a spaceship to make.

  A spaceship should roar like all the enraged lions that have ever walked the Earth, roaring fortissimo and in unison. It should spew flame burning more brightly than any tiger in any jungle—even Blake’s bright burner.

  This spaceship, however, spurned the more flamboyant traits of feline heritage and purred like an enormous kitten.

  If it weren’t for the purring, I thought, I wouldn’t know that we were moving—the purring and the violet shift.

  My shirt had been white when I left Earth. It now appeared to be a delicate violet hue. The field which allowed the ship to cheat Einstein and cover light-years in a matter of days shifted all light within the ship slightly toward the violet end of the spectrum. During the first few days of flight the shift had been irritating, giving me an irrational feeling that something was wrong with my eyes. I had compulsively rubbed my eyes until they were red and throbbing.

  Now I scarcely noticed the shift. But I couldn’t get used to the purring.

  Maybe I associated it with cats. But that shouldn’t have bothered me. Cats to me were like spinach. Some people love the stuff and some people hate it. I’m apathetic.

  I’m edgy because of what Arthon said yesterday, I decided. I’m just reading something sinister into what he said. It’s silly to get cold feet just as mankind’s salvation comes out of the skies at the eleventh hour, I told myself. There’s no reason to be afraid. There should be an end to fear now that there will be no atomic doom.

  There had been the usual bumper crop of brushfire wars, some smoldering, some flaming brightly, all to the background music of rattling sabers. Dangerous, merrily blazing little brushfire wars in a world of deadly thermonuclear inflammables. There had been the arms race, more crowded than ever by the entry of Venezuela with its own A-bomb.

  But there had also been visitors from interstellar space. Before the moon bases had been developed beyond the level of extraterrestrial summer camps, before man had gone to Mars in person, the stars had come to see him. And brought hope.

  The old argument: we have scarcely begun to crawl in space, but look how far we have come in killability. Before we can send our own carcasses—and not some electronic gimmick, some glorified and hopped-up selfie camera—in person to Mars, we are able to sterilize the globe. If we can keep from blowing our collective brains out for just a little longer, we might even reach the Kuiper belt, chilly outpost of the sun’s domain.

  But to go beyond Pluto and reach the stars would require time; much time. To survive long enough to graduate from the solar system surely would require that we find the magic formula for peace; the therapy to prevent Terracide.

  And, similarly, wouldn’t visitors from extrasolar systems have found the key to pacem in terris; or, rather, extraterris?

  Scant surprise, then, that everybody was ecstatic over the arrival of live and kicking, unbombed and unirradiated neighbors from Out There. Those who had advocated a hard line in foreign policy, consequently being villified as warmongers, were happiest of all, for it is a hard and lonely thing to advocate a necessary evil.

  Immediately, all parties concerned got down to work on each other’s languages. They learned ours before we learned theirs, naturally. They had more teachers than we did. When said language exchange had been reasonably well accomplished, and all the “hello there” rituals had been suffered through, the first questions from our side was, in essence, “How can eight point nine billion—and more on the way—highly belligerent people coexist on the same eight thousand-mile-diameter life raft without one or more groups of passengers capsizing the shaky thing and drowning one and all?”

  The answer, again in essence, was: “We would have to study your history and culture in depth to determine what factors are responsible for any differences between our civilization and yours with respect to war or anything else, and the time required would be prohibitive; would put us so far behind schedule that our home planets would be concerned. Why not let us ferry experts of your planet to our planets and let them study our civilizations at their leisure? When they have determined the causes of differences in our civilizations, we will return them to Earth.”

  It made sense. If a group of people, all with the same IQ, were placed on an island as children and allowed to grow up with no contact with the outside world, would they ever develop the concept of intelligence? Could a man who grew up on a flat plain conceive of either mountains or valleys without seeing them? If the aliens had never slaughtered each other en masse, would it ever occur to them that there was anything unusual about the peaceful state of affairs, any more than we think it unusual that a man can’t fly by wiggling his ears? If that man who had grown up on a plain ever wanted to learn all the various techniques involved in mountain climbing, he would have to go to where the mountains are.

  Which was why I, Howard M. Nelson, Esq., Ph.D. in political science, and wearer of a white shirt that happened to look violet at the moment, happened to be on a purring spaceship hurtling through space at several hundred times the speed of light.

  My mother didn’t raise her boy to be a spaceman, I thought. I didn’t look the part. An astronaut is as near to physical perfection as flesh born of mere man and woman can be, has the reflexes of a cougar with hypertension, has stamina enough to get out and carry the ship back home, should the rockets fail. This was common knowledge—so common that it had passed into the exalted category of things that “everyone knows.” Yet here I was, receding hairline, advancing waistline and all, flying farther and faster than any of the smiling young spacefarers of Projects Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, et al.

  Aside from some mild panic at takeoff, which had been overwhelmed by the greater fear that I would show the panic and make a fool of myself, all had gone well until yesterday. I had been talking to Arthon, the pilot and entire crew of the ship, and he had hit me between the eyes with an umpteen hundred megaton firecracker—one of the ones that my little thirty-seven light year jaunt could cover, hopefully, with cobwebs.

  “There is so much that we can learn from you,” I had said. “It’s a shame that there is no way we can repay you.”

  “The reverse is that which is true,” he had replied. “That which we can learn from you is greater than that which you can learn from us.”

  Feeling as if a gallon of ice water had bee
n poured into my BVDs, I had said, “Oh, gee. Yeah, sure. Uh.” We he-men always have a little trouble speaking our minds; especially when hit with brain-scrambling firecrackers like the aforementioned.

  “Pardon? Perhaps I have not the mastery of your language which I thought was mine,” Arthon had said, his features clouded with very human concern.

  By now, I had re-erected the façade behind which we humans, masters of Earth, spend our lives hiding. “But you are so much more advanced than we, what can we possibly teach you?”

  “You underestimate your people and in a way that is unjust, Howard,” he replied, smiling a very human smile. “As for what that is known by you that can benefit us”—sorrow flowed across his face and spilled over into his voice—“I think that that will be left as a surprise for the time which will be that of arrival.”

  Judging from his new mood, the surprise would be as cheery as an unexpected visit by Jack the Ripper.

  Now, some twenty-four hours later and about thirty minutes from arrival, I was in a very calm state of hysteria. Dammit, why had Arthon looked like Gloom & Doom, Inc. when he told me that there was much that we Earthside primitives could teach his side—which consisted of some fifty-odd inhabited planets in a loose federation.

  Arthon had been very chummy during the trip. He looked very human except for his light blue fur and prehensile tail. He was more human on the inside than the administrators back at my university. I had thought that we were becoming fast friends, as the Rover Boys would say. . . . Maybe he was going to have to throw me to the lions when we arrived and he was regretting it.

  But what could they learn from us?

  Maybe we had followed up pathways of discovery that they had neglected. The American Indians were around for a long time without inventing the wheel.

  Suppose they developed their space drive without ever developing atomic power.