by William Tenn
"Assume its function of—" he said at last. "Its function of serving! My dear fellow, do you realize this house has a sex?"
"Sex?" Paul moved aback, taken there by the thought. "You mean it can have lots of little bungalows?"
"Oh, not in the reproductive sense, not in the reproductive sense!" The plump doctor would have prodded him in the ribs if he hadn't started hurriedly up the stairs. "It has sex in the emotional, the psychological sense. As a woman wants to be a wife to a man, as a man searches for a woman to whom he can be an adequate husband—just so this house desires to be a home to a living creature who both needs it and owns it. As such it fulfills itself and becomes capable of its one voluntary act—the demonstration of affection, again in terms of the creature it serves. By the by, it also seems to be that theoretically happy medium in those disagreements on twentieth-century domestic arrangements with which you and Esther liven up the mess hall on occasion. Unostentatious love and imaginative service."
"Does at that. If only Es didn't make a habit of plucking my nerve-ends... Hum. Have you noticed how pleasant she's been today?"
"Of course. The house has made adjustments in her personality for your greater happiness."
"What? Es has been changed? You're crazy, Connor!"
"On the contrary, my boy. I assure you she was just as argumentative back in Little Fermi and on the way out here as she ever was. The moment she saw you, she became most traditionally feminine—without losing one jot of her acuity or subtlety, remember that. When someone like Esther Sakarian who has avoided the 'You are so right, my lord' attitude all her life acquires it overnight, she has had help. In this case, the house."
Paul Marquis dug his knuckles at the solid, reassuring substance of the basement wall. "Es has been changed by the house for my possible personal convenience? I don't know if I like that. Es should be Es, good or bad. Besides, it might take a notion to change me."
The older man looked at him with a deadly twinkle. "I don't know how it affects personalities—high-order therapeutic radiation on an intellectual level?—but let me ask you this, Paul, wouldn't you like to be happy at the agreeable alteration in Miss Sakarian? And, furthermore, wouldn't you like to think that the house couldn't affect your own attitudes?"
"Of course." Paul shrugged his shoulders. "For that matter, I am happy about Es getting some womanly sense in her head. And, come to think of it, I doubt if you or anyone else could ever convince me that the house could push mental fixations around like so much furniture. Whole thing's too ridiculous for further discussion."
Connor Kuntz chortled and slapped his thighs for emphasis. "Perfect! And now you can't even imagine that the wish for such a state of mind made the house produce it in you. It learns to serve you better all the time! Dr. Dufayel is going to appreciate this!"
"A point there. I don't go for advertising my peculiar residence and its properties—whatever they are—up and down the field of research medicine. Is there any way I can persuade you to lay off?"
Kuntz stopped his dignified little dance and looked up seriously. "Why, certainly! I can think of at least two good reasons why I should never again discuss your house with anyone but you or Esther." He seemed to consider a moment. "Rather, I should say there are six or seven reasons for not mentioning your house's existence to Dufayel or any other biologist. In fact, there are literally dozens and dozens of reasons."
—|—
Paul followed Connor Kuntz and Esther back to the copter, promising them he'd be in for duty the next morning. "But I'm going to spend my nights here from now on."
"Take it slow and easy," Esther warned. "And don't brood over Caroline."
"Don't worry." He nodded at the affectionately trembling structure. "Have to teach it a couple of things. Like not bouncing around after me when there's company. Es, think you'd like to share it with me? You'd get as much care and affection as I would."
She giggled. "The three of us—going down the beautiful years together in a perfect marriage. We won't need any servants, just you and I and the house. Maybe a cleaning woman once or twice a week for the sake of appearances if a real estate boom materializes and we have neighbors."
"Oh, we'll have neighbors all right," Paul boasted to include Connor Kuntz's suddenly whiter-than-usual face. "We'll become very rich once the new lode is traced to part of our property, and when Little Fermi is operating as the power city of the American continents we'll make another fortune selling the land for suburban development. And think of the research we'll be able to do in physics and bacteriology, Es, with the house supplying us with any equipment we can visualize!"
"You'll be very happy," Kuntz told them shortly. "The house will see to it that you're happy if it has to kill you—or, rather, your egos." He turned to the bacteriologist. "Esther, I thought you said yesterday that Paul would have to change a good deal before you could marry him. Has he changed, or has the house changed you?"
"Did I say that? Well, Paul hasn't exactly—But the house—"
"And how about that odd feeling you said the house gave you?" the doctor went on. "As if something were disconnecting wires in your brain and resplicing them according to a new blueprint? Don't you see that wiring blueprint belongs to Paul and the house is installing it?"
Paul had taken the girl in his arms and stood frowning at Kuntz. "I just don't like that idea, even if it is vaguely possible." His face cleared. "But it's vague enough to be impossible. Don't you think so, Es?"
She seemed to be struggling with an inner confusion that darted and shed sparks. "I... I don't know. Yes, I do. Impossible isn't the word for it! Why, I never heard of anything so completely—All your house wants to do is serve you. It's lovable and harmless."
"It isn't!" The physician was dancing up and down like a partridge in a net. "Admitted, it will only make psychological adjustments as required to resolve your serious inner conflicts, but remember, this house is a distinctly alien form of life. If it was ever completely controlled, the power was vested in creatures far superior to ourselves. There's danger enough, now, when it makes you think exactly as you want to think from moment to moment; but when it begins to feel the looseness of your mental reins—"
"Stow it, Connor!" Paul cut him off. "I told you I couldn't accept that line of thought. I don't want you to mention it again. It's plain ugly. Isn't it, darling?"
"And illogical." She smiled.
And Dr. Connor Kuntz was able merely to stand and think terrifying thoughts to himself.
Behind them, the house joyfully hummed a connubial snatch of Lohengrin.
Oh, glorious master, who will never want to leave—
While the copter wound upward into the sallow sky, and Esther waved at the dwindling figure below with the house skipping gayly to his side, Kuntz asked cautiously:
"If you two intend to go on any sort of honeymoon inside that place, you'll have to get a release from the company. That won't be easy."
She turned to him. "Why?"
"Because you signed a contract, and the government is backing the company on the contract. No out for either of you. Fact is, Paul may get into some trouble with his extended vacation."
Esther pondered it for a moment. "Yes, I see. And you know, Connor, with the house and all, I was sort of planning to leave the company permanently and take up residence right away. I'm pretty sure Paul feels the same way. I hope there won't be any trouble."
Then she laughed easily, and the angular frown lines disappeared from her face. "But I don't think there will be any trouble. I think everything will go smoothly. I just feel it."
Shocked, Connor Kuntz realized that this unusual display of "feminine intuition" from Esther Sakarian was correct. He thought:
The house will see to it that the government voids their contracts without any trouble, because the house wants to keep them happy. It will keep them happy, giving them anything they want—except the means to get away from it. This product of some gigantic imagination has two desires actually—the
desire to serve, and the desire to have a master. Having reacquired one after all these years, it will keep him, her, them, at any cost. But making adjustments in the world to keep them happy will be like knocking over the first in a row of dominoes; it will have to do more and more to keep the world from interfering.
Eventually this domestic utensil could control all humanity and make it jump at the vagrant whims of Paul Marquis and Esther Sakarian. All in the name of service! It has the power to do it, probably is nothing more itself than a collection of basic forces in temporary formful stasis. And if it does ever control the planet—why, there will be no more objection to it than Esther and Paul exhibit! This servile hunk of real estate is so far above us in capability, that it can run our world and make us think we like it. And to think I'm sitting next to one of the people whose most passing fancy could become my unalterable command! Horrible, horrible—
But by the time he had landed the copter at Little Fermi, Connor Kuntz no longer found the idea objectionable. He thought it quite in order that he could only do those things to which Paul and Esther did not object. Extremely natural, in fact.
AFTERWORD
My original reason for writing this story had little to do with science fiction as such or with making a living out of writing. I was trying to do a portrait of my two closest friends at the time, Judy Merril and Ted Sturgeon. When they saw the completed piece, they both said I had done a fine job on the other one, but I had missed completely on themselves.
I, though, felt it was a complete failure then, and I feel it is a complete failure now; I produce it here for whatever historical or personal-literary significance it might have.
To quote our great phrase-making President, Richard Milhous Nixon, let me make one thing perfectly clear: Judy and Ted never so much as contemplated marriage with each other. We were all three happily involved with different partners at the time—but I felt that bundling the two of them together helped increase dramatic tension which might in turn strengthen the portrait I was attempting.
A few last and completely minor notes. I am in the story in a sort of shadowy way: the reading matter and musical tastes I ascribe to the male protagonist were mine, rather than Sturgeon's; Connor Kuntz's character was based on that of L. Jerome Stanton, then the associate editor of Astounding Science Fiction (where the story eventually appeared), and the man who took Sturgeon practically out of the gutter and into his apartment when Ted came back to New York from the tropics after a bad writing slump and a painful divorce. And the house? The house was my attempt to write into existence the kind of living arrangement that Ted at the time seemed to be searching for, as he grappled with the problems of domesticity. He told me he felt it was the best part of the story. It is.
Written 1947——Published 1948
THERE WERE PEOPLE ON BIKINI, THERE WERE PEOPLE ON ATTU
One day the Earth found itself surrounded by spaceships.
These spaceships were enormous and completely alien in design; they were operated by power so tremendous that their approach had not even been suspected by a single astronomer in the northern or southern hemisphere. The ships had simply materialized in uncanny multitudes all about the planet; and there they remained, with no outward signs of activity, for about twenty hours.
On Earth, naturally, there was a good deal of activity—some of it frenzied. The nations buzzed back and forth to each other, ally reaching out with moist diplomatic hand to ally, foe asking tentative, wide-eyed question of foe.
Newspapers put out extras as fast as the presses could blink, and television networks presented stammering scientists—all kinds of scientists: nuclear physicists, botanists, field archaeologists, anatomy professors—in a tousled, bewildering succession. Aimless, ugly riots broke out; churches and revival tents overflowed with worried worshipers; the suicide rate went up sharply.
A boating party on Loch Ness swore in a group affidavit that they had been approached by a sea serpent forty-eight feet long. It informed them in impeccable English that it was a citizen of the star Arcturus and had arrived exactly two hours ago. It was pro-Labor and anti-vivisection.
Everywhere, men, women, and children shaded their eyes and stared hard at those areas of the sky most distant from the sun. Peepingly, they could discern the outlines of the strange craft, hanging like so many clusters of impossibly shaped grapes. In the dark sections of Earth, the spaceships glowed all night around their edges, throwing a thin network of yellow phosphorescence against the purple heavens.
People shuffled uneasily and asked their neighbors, their leaders, even strangers: "What does it mean? What do they want?"
Nobody had the slightest idea.
A radio-controlled space vehicle, built to explore the moons of Mars, was sent up for a close look at the spaceships. Shortly after it passed the outer limits of the atmosphere, it disappeared completely, and no trace of it was ever found again. A minute or so later, every single artificial satellite orbiting the Earth also disappeared. No explosions, no blast from a new kind of ray—just, there they all were one moment, and there they were not the next.
It became obvious that if the creatures in the spaceships wanted to conquer Earth, to enslave or exterminate its population, there was nothing to stop them. Mankind's most powerful countermeasures would function like a fly swatter putting down a dynamite explosion.
Nonetheless, nation after nation mobilized, airmen sat tensely in jet planes that were incapable of reaching one-hundredth the height of the spaceships, gun crews of antiaircraft units piled shells near their weapons and waited for their radar operators to give them usable target instructions. IBM sites, ABM sites, all ballistic missile sites, were put on red alert. Martial law was proclaimed in Greenland, at Cape Horn, in the Andaman Islands.
At the same time, men of good will all over Earth pointed out that the inhabitants of the spaceships were probably creatures of good will. Their technology was much, much more advanced than the best that humanity had—why shouldn't their sociology be equally advanced? If their machines were better, why shouldn't their ethics be better, too? Be intelligent, the men of good will suggested earnestly: if these alien creatures had the means to come upon Earth so suddenly, they could probably have overwhelmed it in the same flashing instant had they so desired. No, the men of good will decided at last, humanity had nothing to fear.
Humanity, stubbornly, continued to fear.
"All those spaceships. What do they want?"
There was a lot of activity in war colleges and government offices that day and night. Specialists in every field that in any way related to communications were collected by military press gangs and set to work at devices that might transmit or receive messages relative to the spaceships. Radio, blinker lights, even telepathy, were tried. Nothing worked. Panic grew.
At the end of twenty hours, each spaceship simultaneously disgorged five smaller craft. These floated down to the surface of the planet and, upon landing, began to blare out from loudspeakers mounted on their bows the identical message:
"Everybody off Earth!"
In Tibet, this message was blared in Tibetan; in Norway, in Norwegian; around Lake Chad, in all the numerous Chad dialects; in certain parts of the United States of America, "Everbody offen the Yurth! And naow!" The message was the same wherever the smaller craft landed, only it was spoken in the tongue and idiom peculiar to the region.
"Everybody off Earth!"
For about half an hour these words were screamed at the dumbfounded humans who had gathered around the odd vessels. Then, abruptly, and all over Earth at exactly the same moment, openings appeared in various parts of these ships, and metallic creatures with dozens of metallic tentacles came out. These creatures, it was apparent to men still able to use their imaginations, could be nothing but robots, mechanical servants of thinking individuals in the spaceships that still hovered miles upon empty hundreds of miles above the atmosphere.
The robots began to collect people.
They moved to
a group of people—they moved extremely fast—and reached out with their tentacles, grasping a human gently but firmly around the waist with each one. When every tentacle held a kicking, scratching, screaming human, each robot turned and marched back to its ship, repeating forcefully, though a trifle monotonously, "Everybody off Earth—everybody!"
The people were set down carefully in a kind of hold inside the ship, and the robot left, after snapping the aperture shut behind it. Then it gathered more people, one to each tentacle, and brought them, hysterical or fainting or rigid with terror, to the hold of its ship. As soon as the captives began to get crowded and uncomfortable, the vessel would dart upwards and be received into the larger ship from which it had come. There, the robots, still carefully, almost daintily, transferred the people in exactly the same fashion—one by one—to another, but much more immense hold in the mothership. This hold had been fitted with tiers of cots like those of a troop transport, and every cot held a blanket and pillow made of some unrecognizable soft white material. When the transfer was complete, the small ship and its crew of robots went down for another load.
All day, all night, the loading went on. In the holds of the large motherships, those humans already stowed huddled in groups and stared upwards distractedly. Every few minutes, the solid metal ceiling high above them developed an opening in the center, through which a bunch of wriggling, screeching people floated down. Then the ceiling melted together again and the new arrivals landed very gently on the rubbery floor, immediately asking frenzied questions of the older inhabitants.
What was going to be done with them? Why? Who was behind all this? Where were they going to be taken? Perhaps they were going to be eaten, and the vaulting hold that stretched enormously about them was a kind of extraterrestrial pantry?
No one knew. Most of them shivered, expecting the worst; a few speculated sanely; but no one knew.