Connoisseur's SF

by Tom Boardman

  “Aw, I can’t. I got to—”

  “Come on!”

  I shrugged. Job or no, this was Barney’s bailiwick, not mine. He’d cover me.

  He held the door open and said, like a mind reader, “I’ll cover you.”

  He went down the ramp and climbed in and skimmed off.

  “Where are we going?”

  But he wouldn’t say. He just drove.

  Nightingale’s a beautiful place. The most beautiful of them all, I think, even Sigma. It’s run by the U.E., one hundred per cent; this is one planet with no local options, but none. It’s a regular garden of a world and they keep it that way.

  We topped a rise and went down a curving road lined with honest-to-God Lombardy poplars from Earth. There was a little lake down there and a sandy beach. No people.

  The road curved and there was a yellow line across it and then a red one, and after it a shimmering curtain, almost transparent. It extended from side to side as far as I could see.

  “Force-fence,” Barney said and pressed a button on the dash.

  The shimmer disappeared from the road ahead, though it stayed where it was at each side. We drove through and it formed behind us, and we went down the hill to the lake.

  Just this side of the beach was the cosiest little Sigman cabana I’ve seen yet, built to hug the slope and open its arms to tire sky. Maybe when I get old they’ll turn me out to pasture in one half as good.

  While I was goggling at it, Barney said, “Go on.”

  I looked at him and he was pointing. There was a man down near the water, big, very tanned, built like a space-tug. Barney waved me on and I walked down there.

  The man got up and turned to me. He had the same widespaced, warm deep eyes, the same full, gentle voice. “Why, it’s the Purser! Hi, old friend. So you came, after all!”

  It was sort of rough for a moment. Then I got it out. “Hi, Mr Costello.”

  He banged me on the shoulder. Then he wrapped one big hand around my left biceps and pulled me a little closer. He looked uphill to where Barney leaned against the monowheel, minding his own business. Then he looked across the lake, and up in the sky.

  He dropped his voice. “Purser, you’re just the man I need. But I told you that before, didn’t I?” He looked around again. “We’ll do it yet, Purser. You and me, we’ll hit the top. Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  He walked ahead of me towards the beach margin. He was wearing only a breech-ribbon, but he moved and spoke as if he still had the armoured car and the six prowlers. I stumbled after him.

  He put a hand behind him and checked me, and then knelt. He said, “To look at them, you’d think they were all the same, wouldn’t you? Well, son, you just let me show you something.”

  I looked down. He had an anthill. They weren’t like Earth ants. These were bigger, slower, blue, and they had eight legs. They built nests of sand tied together with mucus, and tunnelled under them so that the nests stood up an inch or two like on little pillars.

  “They look the same, they act the same, but you’ll see,” said Mr Costello.

  He opened a synthine pouch that lay in the sand. He took out a dead bird and the thorax of what looked like a Caranho roach, the one that grows as long as your fore-arm. He put the bird down here and the roach down yonder.

  “Now,” he said, “watch.”

  The ants swarmed to the bird, pulling and crawling. Busy. But one or two went to the roach and tumbled it and burrowed around. Mr Costello picked an ant off the roach and dropped it on the bird. It weaved around and shouldered through the others and scrabbled across the sand and went back to the roach.

  “You see, you see?” he said, enthusiastic. “Look.”

  He picked an ant off the dead bird and dropped it by the roach. The ant wasted no time or even curiosity on the piece of roach. It turned around once to get its bearings, and then went straight back to the dead bird.

  I looked at the bird with its clothing of crawling blue, and I looked at the roach with its two or three voracious scavengers.

  I looked at Mr Costello.

  He said raptly, “See what I mean? About one in thirty eats something different. And that’s all we need. I tell you, Purser, wherever you look, if you look long enough, you can find a way to make most of a group turn on the rest.”

  I watched the ants. “They’re not fighting.”

  “Now wait a minute,” he said swiftly. “Wait a minute. All we have to do is let these bird-eaters know that the roach-eaters are dangerous.”

  “They’re not dangerous,” I said. “They’re just different.”

  “What’s the difference, when you come right down to it? So we’ll get the bird-eaters scared and they’ll kill all the roach-eaters.”

  “Yes, but why, Mr Costello?”

  He laughed. “I like you, boy. I do the thinking, you do the work. I’ll explain it to you. They all look alike. So once we’ve made ’em drive out these he pointed to the minority around the roach—they’ll never know which among ’em might be a roach-eater. They’ll get so worried, they’ll do anything to keep from being suspected of roach-eating. When they get scared enough, we can make ’em do anything we want.”

  He hunkered down to watch the ants. He picked up a roach-eater and put it on the bird, I got up.

  “Well, I only just dropped in, Mr Costello,” I said.

  “I’m not an ant,” said Mr Costello. “As long as it makes no difference to me what they eat, I can make ’era do anything in the world I want.”

  “I’ll see you around,” I said.

  He kept on talking quietly to himself as I walked away. He was watching the ants, figuring, and paid no attention to me.

  I went back to Barney. I asked, sort of choked, “What is he doing, Barney?”

  “He’s doing what he has to do,” Barney said.

  We went back to the monowheel and up the hill and through the force-gate. After a while, I asked, “How long will he be here?”

  “As long as he wants to be.” Barney was kind of short about it.

  “Nobody wants to be locked up.”

  He had that odd look on his face again. “Nightingale’s not a jail.”

  “He can’t get out.”

  “Look, chum, we could start him over. We could even make a purser out of him. But we stopped doing that kind of thing a long time ago. We let a man do what he wants to do.”

  “He never wanted to be boss over an anthill.”

  “He didn’t?”

  I guess I looked as if I didn’t understand that, so he said, “All his life he’s pretended he’s a man and the rest of us are ants. Now it’s come true for him. He won’t run human anthills any more because he will never again get near one.”

  I looked through the windshield at the shining finger that was my distant ship. “What happened on Borinquen, Barney?”

  “Some of his converts got loose around the System. That Humanity One idea had to be stopped.” He drove a while, seeing badly out of a thinking face. “You won’t take this hard, Purser, but you’re a thick-witted ape. I can say that if no one else can.”

  “All right,” I said. “Why?”

  “We had to smash into Borinquen, which used to be so free and easy. We got into Costello’s place. It was a regular fort. We got him and his files. We didn’t get his girl. He killed her, but the files were enough.”

  After a time I said, “He was always a good friend to me.”

  “Was he?”

  I didn’t say anything. He wheeled up to the receiving station and stopped the machine.

  He said, “He was all ready for you if you came to work for him. He had a voice recording of you large as life, saying ‘Sometimes a man’s just got to be by himself.’ Once you went to work for him, all he needed to do to keep you in line was to threaten to put that on the air.”

  I opened the door. “What did you have to show him to me for?”

  “Because we believe in letting a man do what he wants to do, a
s long as he doesn’t hurt the rest of us. If you want to go back to the lake and work for Costello, for instance, I’ll take you there.”

  I closed the door carefully and went up the ramp to the ship.

  I did my work and when the time came, we blasted off. I was mad. I don’t think it was about anything Barney told me. I wasn’t especially mad about Mr Costello or what happened to him, because Barney’s the best Navy psych doc there is and Nightingale’s the most beautiful hospital planet in the Universe.

  What made me mad was the thought that never again would a man as big as Mr Costello give that big, warm, soft, strong friendship to a lunkhead like me.

  Jack Finney

  Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air

  Hey, quit zoomin’ your hands through the air, boy—I know you was a flier! You flew good in the war, course you did; I’d expect that from a grandson of mine. But don’t get to thinking you know all about war, son, or flying machines either. The war we finished in sixty-five is still the toughest we’ve fought, and don’t you forget it. It was a big war fought by big men, and your Pattons and Arnolds and Stilwells—they were good, boy, no denying it—but Grant, there was a general. Never told you about this before, because t was swore to secrecy by the general himself, but I think it’s all right, now; I think the oath has expired. Now, quiet, boy! Put those hands in your pockets and listen!

  Now, the night I’m talking about, the night I met the general, I didn’t know we’d see him at all. Didn’t know anything except we were riding along Pennsylvania Avenue, me and the major, him not saying where we were going or why, just jogging along, one hand on the reins, a big black box strapped to the major’s saddle in front and that little pointy beard of his stabbing up and down with every step.

  It was late, after ten, and everyone was asleep. But the moon was up, bright and full through the trees, and it was nice—the horses’ shadows gliding along sharp and clear beside us, and not a sound in the street but their hoofs, hollow on the packed dirt. We’d been riding two days, I’d been nipping some liberated applejack—only we didn’t say “liberated” then; we called it “foraging”—and I was asleep in the saddle, my trumpet jiggling in the small of my back. Then the major nudged me, and I woke up and saw the White House ahead. “Yessir,” I said.

  He looked at me, the moon shining yellow on his epaulets, and said, real quiet, “Tonight, boy, we may win the war. You and I.” He smiled, mysterious, and patted the black box. “You know who I am, boy?”

  “Yessir.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m a professor. Up at Harvard College. Or was, anyway. Glad to be in the army now, though. Pack of fools up there, most of them; can’t see past the ends of their noses. Well, tonight, boy, we may win the war.”

  “Yessir,” I said. Most officers higher than captain were a little queer in the head, I’d noticed, majors especially. That’s how it was then, anyway, and I don’t reckon it’s changed any, even in the Air Force.

  We stopped near the White House at the edge of the lawn and sat looking at it—a great big old house, silvery white in the moonlight, the light over the front door shining out through the porch columns onto the driveway. There was a light in an east window on the ground floor, and I kept hoping I’d see the President, but I didn’t. The major opened his box. “Know what this is, boy?”

  “Nosir?”

  “It’s my own invention, based on my own theories, nobody else’s. They think I’m a crackpot up at the School, but I think it’ll work. Win the war, boy.” He moved a little lever inside the box. “Don’t want to send us too far ahead, son, or technical progress will be beyond us. Say ninety years or so from now, approximately; think that ought to be about right?”

  “Yessir.”

  “All right.” The major jammed his thumb down on a little button in the box; it made a humming sound that kept rising higher and higher till my ears began to hurt; then he lifted his hand. “Well,” he said, smiling and nodding, the little pointy beard going up and down, “it is now some ninety-odd years later.” He nodded at the. White House. “Glad to see it’s still standing.”

  I looked up at the White House again. It was just the same, the light still shining out between the big white columns, but I didn’t say anything.

  The major twitched his reins and turned. “Well, boy, we’ve got work ahead; come on.” And he set off at a trot along Pennsylvania Avenue with me beside him.

  Pretty soon we turned south, and the major twisted around in his saddle and said, “Now, the question is, what do they have in the future?” He held up his finger like a teacher in school, and I believed the part about him being a professor. “We don’t know,” the major went on, “but we know where to find it. In a museum. We’re going to the Smithsonian Institution, if it’s still standing. For us it should be a veritable storehouse of the future!”

  It had been standing last week, I knew, and after a while, off across the grass to the east, there it was, a stone building with towers like a castle, looking just the same as always, the windows now black and white in the moonlight. “Still standing, sir,” I said.

  “Good,” said the major. “Reconnaissance approach, now,” and we went on to a cross-street and turned into it. Up ahead were several buildings I’d never noticed before, and we went up to them and swung down off our horses. “Walk between these buildings,” the major said, leading his horse. “Quiet, now; we’re reconnoitring.”

  We crept on, quiet as could be, in the shadows between the two buildings. The one to the right looked just like the Smithsonian to me, and I knew it must be a part of it; another building I’d never seen before. The major was all excited now, and kept whispering. “Some new kind of weapon that will destroy the whole Rebel Army is what we’re looking for. Let me know if you see any such thing, boy.”

  “Yessir,” I said, and I almost bumped into something sitting out there in the open in front of the building at the left. It was big and made entirely out of heavy metal, and instead of wheels it rested on two movable belts made of metal; big flat plates linked together.

  “Looks like a tank,” said the major, “though I don’t know what they keep in it. Keep moving, boy; this thing is obviously no use on a battlefield.”

  We walked on just a step, and there on the pavement in front of us was a tremendous camion, three times bigger than any I’d ever seen, before in my life. It had an immense long barrel, wheels high as my chest, and it was painted kind of funny, in wavy stripes and splotches, so that you could hardly see it at first in the moonlight that got down between the buildings. “Look at that thing!” the major said softly. “It would pulverize Lee in an hour, but I don’t know how we’d carry it. No,” he said, shaking his head, “this isn’t it. I wonder what they’ve got inside, though.” He stepped up to the doom and peered in through the glass, shading his eyes with his hand. Then he gasped and turned to me.

  I went up beside him and looked through the glass. It was a long, big building, the moonlight slanting in through the windows all along one side; and all over the floor, and even hanging from the ceiling, were the weirdest-looking things I ever saw. They were each big as a wagon, some bigger, and they had wheels, but only two wheels, near the front; and I was trying to figure that out when the major got his voice back.

  “Aircraft, by God!” he said. “They’ve got aircraft! Win the war!”

  “Air what, sir?”

  “Aircraft. Flying machines. They fly through the air. Don’t you see the wings, boy?”

  Each of the machines I could see inside had two things; sticking out at each side like oversize ironing boards, but they looked stiff to me, and I didn’t see how they could flap like wings. I didn’t know what else the major could be talking about, though. “Yessir,” I said.

  But the major was shaking his head again. “Much too advanced,” he said. “We could never master them. What we need is an earlier type, and I don’t see any in here. Come on, boy; don’t straggle.”

  We walked on, leading t
he horses, towards the front of the other building. At the doors we peeked in, and there on the floor, with tools and empty crates lying around as though they’d just unpacked it, was another of the things, a flying machine. Only this was far smaller, and was nothing but a framework of wood like a big box kite, with little canvas wings, as tire major called them. It didn’t have wheels, either, just a couple of runners like a sled. Lying propped against a wall, as though they were just ready to put it up, was a sign. The moonlight didn’t quite reach it, and I couldn’t read all the words, but I could make out a few. “World’s first,” it said in one place, and farther down it said, “Kitty Hawk”.

  The major just stood there for maybe a minute, staring like a man in a trance. Then he murmured to himself, “Very like sketches of da Vinci’s model; only apparently this one worked.” He grinned suddenly, all excited. “This is it, boy,” he said. “This is why we came.”

  I knew what he had in mind, and I didn’t like it. “You’ll never break in there, sir,” I said. “Those doors look mighty solid, and I’ll bet this place is guarded like the mint.”

  The major just smiled, mysterious again, “Of course it is, son; it’s the treasure house of a nation. No one could possibly get in with any hope of removing anything, let alone this aircraft—under ordinary circumstances. But don’t worry about that, boy; just leave it to me. Right now we need fuel.” Turning on his heel, he walked back to his horse, took tire reins, and led him off; and I followed with mine.

  Off some distance, under some trees, near a big open space like a park, the major set the lever inside his black box, and pressed the button. “Back in eighteen sixty-four, now,” he said then, and sniffed. “Air smells fresher. Now, I want you to take your horse, go to garrison headquarters, and bring back all the petrol you can carry. They’ve got some for cleaning uniforms. Tell them I’ll take full responsibility. Understand?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Then off with you. When you come back, this is where I want you to meet me.” The major turned and began walking away with his horse.