The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  Today he showed us many pictures of other mans and of their cities and structures. Man is a thin-skinned and almost hairless animal. This man of ours goes almost naked, but that is apparently because of the desert heat. Normally a man makes up for his absence of hair by wearing a sort of artificial fur of varying shapes known as clothes. To judge from the pictures shown us by the man, this is true only of the male of the species. The female never covers her bare skin in any way.

  Examination of these pictures of females shown us by our man fully confirms our theory that the animal man is a mammal.

  The display of pictures ended with an episode still not quite clear to us. Ever since our arrival, the man has been worrying and talking about something apparently lost—something called a kitten. The thought pattern was not familiar enough to permit us to gather its nature, until he showed us a picture of the small white beast which we had first met, and we recognized in his mind this kitten-pattern. He seemed proud of the picture, which showed the beast in its ritual with the ball, but still worried, and asked us, according to Trubz, if we knew anything of its whereabouts. Transcription:

  YOUWOULDNTANYOFYOUBIGBUGSKNOWWHATTHEDEVIL’SBECOME OF THAT KITTEN, WOULD YOU?

  Thereupon Lilil arose in his full creative pride and led the man to the place where we had met the kitten. The corpse was by now withered in the desert sun, and I admit that it was difficult to gather from such a spectacle the greatness of Lilil’s art, but we were not prepared for the mans, reaction.

  His face grew exceedingly red, and a fluid formed in his eyes. He clenched his digits and made curious gestures with them. His words were uttered brokenly and exceedingly difficult to transcribe. Trubz has not yet conjectured their meaning but the transcription reads:

  YOU DIDTHAT?TO APOOR, HARMLESS LITTLE KITTEN? WHY, YOU—[10]

  His attitude has not been the same toward us since. Trubz is working on the psychology of it.

  Murvin to Falzik:

  Tell Trubz to work on the major psychological problem. Your backers are getting impatient.

  Falzik to Murvin:

  I think that last report was an aspect of it. But I’m still puzzled. See what you can make of this one.

  Report of First Interplanetary Expedition, presented by Falzik, specialist in reporting:

  Tonight Halov and Trubz attempted to present the great psychological problem to the man. To present such a problem in our confusion of thoughts, language, and gesture is not easy, but I think that to some extent they succeeded.

  They stated it in its simplest form: Our race is obsessed by a terrible fear of extinction. We will each of us do anything to avoid his personal extinction. No such obsession has ever been observed among the minute mammalian pests of our planet.

  Now, is our terror a part of our intelligence? Does intelligence necessarily imply and bring with it a frantic clinging to the life that supports us? Or does this terror stem from our being what we are, rather than mammals? A mammal brings forth its young directly; the young are a direct continuation of the life of the old. But with us a half dozen specialized individuals bring forth all the young. The rest of us have no part in it; our lives are dead ends, and we dread the approach of that black wall.

  Our psychologists have battled over this question for generations. Would another—say, a mammalian—form of intelligent life have such an obsession? Here we had an intelligent mammal. Could he answer us?

  I give the transcription of his answer, as yet not fully deciphered: ITHINKIGETWHATYOUMEAN.ANDITHINKTHEANSWERISALITTLEOF BOTH.OK,SOWE’REINTELUGENTMAMMALS.WEHAVEMOREFEAROFDEATH THANTHEUNINTFLUGENTLIKErHEPOORLITTLEKITTENYOUBUTCHERED; BUTCERTAINLYNOTSUCHADOMINANTOBSESSIONASIGATHERYOURRACE HAS.

  Trubz thinks that this was an ambiguous answer, which will not satisfy either party among our specialists in psychology.

  We then proposed, as a sub-question, the matter of the art. Is it this same psychological manifestation that has led us to develop such an art? That magnificent and highest of arts which consists in the extinction with the greatest aesthetic subtlety of all other forms of life?

  Here the mans reactions were as confusing as they had been beside the corpse of the kitten. He said:

  SO THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO SNOWPUSS? ART . . . ! ART, YOU CALL IT, YET! AND YOU’VE COME HERE TO PRACTICE THAT ART ON THIS WORLD? I’LL SEE YOU FRIED CRISP ON BOTH SIDES ON HADES’ HOTTEST GRIDDLE FIRST!

  Trubz believes that the extremely violent emotion expressed was shock at realization of the vast new reaches of aesthetic experience which lay before him.

  Later, when he thought he was alone, I overheard him talking to himself. There was something so emphatically inimical in his thought patterns that I transcribed his words, though I have not yet had a chance to secure Trubz’s opinion on them. He beat the clenched digits of one forelimb against the other and said:

  SO THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE UP TO! WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT. BUT HOW? HOW . . . ? GOT IT! THOSE PICTURES I TOOK FOR THE PUBLIC HEALTH CAMPAIGN . . .

  I am worried. If this attitude indicated by his thought patterns persists, we may have to bring about his extinction and proceed at once by ourselves. At least it will give Lilil a chance to compose one of his masterpieces.

  Final Report of the First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition, presented by Falzik, specialist in reporting:

  How I could so completely have misinterpreted the mans thought patterns I do not understand. Trubz is working on the psychology of it. Far from any hatred or enmity, the man was even then resolving to save our lives. The First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition owes him a debt that it can never repay.

  It was after sunup the next day that he approached us with his noble change of heart. As I describe this scene I cannot unfortunately give his direct words; I was too carried away by my own emotions to remember to transcribe. Such phrases as I attribute to him here are reconstructed from the complex of our intercourse and were largely a matter of signs and pictures.

  What he did first was to show us one of his pictures. We stared at it and drew back horrified. For it represented a being closely allied to us, almost to be taken for one of us, meeting extinction beneath a titanic weapon wielded by what was obviously the characteristic five-digited forelimb of a man. And that forelimb was many, many times the size of the being resembling us.

  “I’ve been keeping this from you,” he informed us. “I’ll admit I’ve been trying to trap you. But the truth is: I’m a dwarf man. The real ones are as much bigger than me as you are bigger than the kitten. More, even. And their favorite pastime—only they call it a sport, not art—is killing bugs like you.”

  We realized now what should have struck us before—the minute size of his structure compared with those which we had seen before. Obviously he spoke the truth—he was a dwarf specimen of his race.

  Then he produced more pictures—horrible, terrifying, monstrous pictures, all showing something perturbingly like us meeting cruel extinction at the whim of a man.

  “I’ve just been keeping you here,” he said, “until some real members of my race could come and play with you. They’d like it. But I haven’t got the heart to do it. I like you, and what you told me about your art convinces me that you don’t deserve extinction like that. So I’m giving you your chance: Clear out of here and stay away from this planet. It’s the most unsafe place in the universe for your kind. If you dread extinction, stay away from the third planet!”

  His resolve to spare our lives had made him happy. His face kept twisting into that grimace which we had learned to recognize as a sign of mans pleasure. But we hardly watched him or even listened to him. Our eyes kept returning with awful fascination to those morbidly terrifying pictures. Then our thoughts fused into one, and with hardly a word of farewell to our savior we sped back to the ship.

  This is our last report. We are now on the temporary base established on the satellite and will return as soon as we have recovered from the shock of our narrow escape. Lilil has achieveci a new composition wi
th a captive pergut from the ship which has somewhat solaced us.

  Murvin to First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition:

  You dopes! You low mammalian idiots! It’s what comes of sending nothing but specialists on an expedition. I tried to convince them you needed a good general worker like me, but no. And look at you!

  It’s obvious what happened. On our planet, mammals are minute pests and the large intelligent beings are arthropodal hexapods. All right. On the third planet things have worked out the other way round. Bugs, as the man calls our kin, are tiny, insignificant things. You saw those pictures and thought the mans were enormous; actually they meant only that the bugs were minute!

  That man tricked you unpardonably, and I like him for it. Specialists . . . ! You deserve extinction for this, and you know it. But Vardanek has another idea. Stay where you are. Develop the temporary base in any way you can. We’ll send others to help you. We’ll build up a major encampment on that side of the satellite, and in our own sweet time we can invade the third planet with enough sensible ones to counteract the boners of individual specialists.

  We can do it, too. We’ve got all the time we need to build up our base, even if that man has warned his kind—who probably wouldn’t believe him anyway. Because remember this always, and feel secure: No being on the third planet ever knows what is happening on the other side of its satellite.

  Public Eye

  The great criminal lawyer had never looked so smugly self-satisfied, not even just after he had secured the acquittal of the mass murderer of an entire Martian family.

  “Yes, gentlemen,” he smirked, “I will gladly admit that this century has brought the science—one might almost say the art—of criminalistics to its highest peak. Throughout the teeming billions of the system, man continues to obey his primal urge to murder; yet for fifty years your records have not been blotted, if I may indulge in such a pen-and-ink archaism, by one unsolved murder case.”

  Fers Brin shifted restlessly. He was a little too conscious of the primal urge to murder in himself at the moment. It was just as well that Captain Wark chose that point to interrupt the florid speech.

  “Mr. Mase,” the old head of the Identification Bureau said simply, “I’m proud to say that’s true. Not one unsolved murder among damned near seventy billion people, on nine planets and God knows how many satellites and asteroids; but I’d hate to tell you how many unconvicted murderers.”

  “Who needs to tell him?” Brin grunted.

  “Oh come now,” Dolf Mase smiled. “I’m hardly responsible for all of them. Ninety per cent or so, I’ll grant you; but there are other lawyers. And I’m not at all sure that any of us are responsible. So long as the system sticks to the Terran code, which so fortunately for criminals was modeled on Anglo-American concepts rather than on the Code Napoleon . . .”

  Captain Wark shook his grizzled head. “Uh-uh. We’ll keep on sticking to the idea that if justice is bound to slip, it’s better to free the guilty than convict the innocent. But it kind of seems to us, Mr. Mase, like you’ve been pushing this ‘free the guilty’ stuff a little far.”

  “My dear Captain!”

  The patronizing tone was too much for Brin. “Let’s cut the politeness, Mase. This is a declaration of war. Let’s have it out in the open. Captain Wark represents everything that’s official and sound and inescapable. And me—well, as the best damned public eye in the business, I represent everything that’s unofficial and halfjetted and just as inescapable. And we’re feeding it to you straight. Your quote legal unquote practice amounts to issuing a murder license to anybody with enough credits. You’ve got three choices: A, you retire; B, you devote that first-rate mind of yours to something that’ll benefit the system; C, the Captain and I are going to spend every minute off duty and half of ’em on hunting for the one slip you’ve made some time that’ll send you to the asteroid belt for life.”

  Dolf Mase shrugged. “I wish you a long life of hunting. There’s no slip to find. And no!” he protested as Captain Wark began to speak. “Spare me the moral lecture which I can already read, my dear captain, in those honest steely eyes of yours. I have no desire to devote myself to the good of the system, nor to the good of anyone save Dolf Mase. Such altruism I leave to my revered if somewhat, as you would say, Mr. Brin, ‘half-jetted’ brother. I suffered enough from his starveling nobility in my younger days—I too declared war, first on him and then on the rest of the seventy billion . . . Good day, gentlemen—and may tomorrow find waiting in my office a sextuple sex slayer!” With this—and a gust of muted laughter—Dolf Mase left the Identification Bureau.

  “You’ve got to hand it to him,” Fers Brin chuckled in spite of himself, as he contemplated the closing panel. “He picked the most unpronounceable damned exit line I ever heard.”

  “And he pronounced it,” the Captain added morosely.

  “He never slips,” Fers murmured.

  The phone buzzed and Captain Wark clicked his switch.

  The face on the screen bore an older, gentler version of the hawk-beaked, cragbrowed Mase features which had so recently been sneering at them. The voice too had the Mase resonance and formality, without the oversharp bite.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” said Lu Mase. “Deeply though I regret what I heard, I confess that I needed to hear it.”

  “It’s like I told you, Professor,” said the Captain. “He’s always hated you and the cream of it all, to him, was making you think that he did his job for the sake of justice.”

  Fers moved into phone range. “And now that you know, what follows?” he demanded. “There’s bound to be something somewhere. The devil himself isn’t perfect in deviltry.”

  On the screen Professor Mase’s eyes seemed to stare unseeing at the infinite array of microbooks which lined his study. “There was that time when Dolf was young . . . He’d convinced me that he’d changed . . . And of course you’d have to study the statute of limitations.”

  “We’ll have the best men in the system on it tomorrow,” Wark assured him hastily. “Just a minute. I’ll turn on the scriber and you can give me the details.”

  “He’s my brother, Captain,” Mase said softly.

  “Which means how much to him?” Fers snapped.

  “Still . . . I’ll be in your office tomorrow at nine, Captain.”

  The screen went dark.

  Fers began a little highly creative improvisation in the way of cursing, not unaided by his habit of drinking with space pilots.

  But Captain Wark was more sanguine. “What’s another day, Brin, when we’ve got the war launched at last? That was a first-rate job you did of fast-talking the Professor into listening in—and the brilliant Dolf Mase fell into the good old trap of thinking a phone’s off when its screen’s dead.”

  “He didn’t fall,” Fers corrected. “He didn’t care. He’s so proud of what a big bad villain he is, he’s glad to tell the world—but he forgot we might pipe it through to the one man whose opinion of him mattered. There was the slip; now when we learn this past secret . . . Hell!” he remarked to the clock. “I’m on another of those damned video interviews in fifteen minutes. See you tomorrow—and we’ll start cleaning up the system.”

  The interviewer, Fers observed regretfully, should have had better sense than to succumb to this year’s Minoan fashions, especially for broadcast. But maybe it was just as well; he could keep his mind on her conversation.

  “Now first of all, Mr. Brin, before you tell us some of your fascinating cases— and you don’t know how thrilled I am at this chance to hear all about them—I’m sure our watchers would like to hear something about this unusual job of yours. Just what is a public eye?”

  Fers began the speech he knew by heart. “We aren’t so uncommon; there must be a hundred of us here on Terra alone. But we don’t usually come into the official reports; somehow lawyers and judges are apt to think we’re kind of—well, unconventional. So we dig up the leads, and the regular boys take over from there.”
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  “Has this system been in use long?”

  “About a hundred years or so. It got started in sort of a funny way. You probably know that the whole science of crime detection goes back only a few centuries— roughly to about the middle of the Nineteenth. By around another century, say in Nineteen Fifty, they knew scientifically just about all the basic principles we work on; but the social and political setup was too chaotic for good results. Even within what was then the United States, a lot of localities were what you might call criminalistically illiterate; and it wasn’t until the United Nations got the courage and the sense to turn itself into the World Federation that criminalistics began to get anywhere as the scientific defense-weapon of society. After the foundation of the W.F.B.I., man began to be safe, or nearly so, from the atavistic wolves—which, incidentally, are something I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of unless we start mutating.”

  “Oh, Mr. Brin, you are a cynic. But how did the public eyes start? You said it was funny.”

  “It was. It all came out of the freak chance that the head of W.F.B.I. a hundred years ago—he was the legendary Stef Murch—had started out in life as a teacher of Twentieth Century literature. He wrote his thesis on what they used to call whodunits—stories about murder and detectives—and if you’ve ever read any of that damned entertaining period stuff, you know that it was full of something called private eyes—which maybe stood for private investigator and maybe came from an agency that called itself The Eye. These characters were even wilder than the Mad Scientists and Martians that other writers then used to dream up; they could outdrink six rocketmen on Terra-leave and outlove an asteroid hermit hitting Venusberg. They were nothing like the real private detective of the period—oh yes, there were such people, but they made their living finding men who’d run out on their debts, or proving marital infidelity.”