The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  Then, in February, the Chief and I had to take Emmie Bostwick up to Denver to check out an anonymous assassination warning, which turned out to be baseless. We had an early supper and headed back, praying that the roads would all be dry and open. We did have bad weather for the first two hours; then it cleared and before we knew it the traffic was all passing us, trying to make up time.

  Our first hint of trouble came around 10 o’clock, when the feeling came to me. I thought, “Jesus, not again!”—still seeing that wildcat in my mind’s eye. Then, to my relief, Emmie started breathing hoarsely, as she always does when one of her impressions starts coming through. “I get a great big car like, or maybe it’s a bus,” she told us. “It’s full of men, just men. They—oh, they scare me! Something’s gonna happen! One of ’em’s up front, where he oughtn’t be, up past the—I guess it’s wire—and—oh, no, no! Don’t you do it! Oh, Chief Sam, he’s goin’ to do something to the driver—with a knife! And—” She shuddered and was silent. “Man! I’m sure glad that’s gone,” she muttered finally.

  Chief Sam soothed her, and we drove on. It was a full hour before we saw the traffic block, the blue lights, ambulances, wreckers, all clustered around an overpass. I swung our own light down against the windshield, and on the shoulder we passed the long halted line. We stopped behind a knot of police cars. Sam and I got out. The freeway for a hundred yards was strewn with shattered metal, torn metal, twisted metal, metal charred out of all recognition, shattered glass, and—well, other things. Above it all, there was a great gap in the railing of the overpass.

  We found Tod Welles there, in charge. He filled us in. “At least, Colonel,” he told Sam, “it’s not a one-car deal, so you don’t have to worry, but it’s really going to be a bugger to clean up. The bus—”

  The bus had been state owned, on its way from Andriess Hospital, maximum security for the criminally insane, loaded with more than thirty of their hopeless cases—all kinky killers who had killed again inside, or tried to. They were being moved to a special new even-more-maximum facility, and one of them—though nobody could figure how—had gotten to the driver and cut his throat—

  Sam and I looked at one another, thinking of Emmie.

  —and the bus had plunged straight down into the path of a truck and trailer loaded with steel pipe, trying to make 90 miles an hour. It was like being hit by an express train—

  Welles gestured at the road. “Two survivors,” he told us. “One guard, one prisoner. About a dozen of the bodies are sort of in one piece. The rest have all been through the shredder. And now it’s fixing up to snow.” He gestured at a few flakes that had started falling. “We’ll be lucky to get the big hunks found and the road opened before a storm hits.”

  The wrecker crews were hauling and pushing metal off the highway; the ambulance men, some carrying stretchers, some with baskets, were going about their grimmer business.

  Welles kept looking at his watch. “At least,” he said, “it’s not like we were dealing with real people, except the driver and the guards. Those bastards were subhuman, every damn one of ’em. No loss.” He shrugged. “Hell, what we can’t find of them the big rigs’ll take care of.”

  Chief Sam and I looked at each other once again, and I knew that he and I were thinking the same thing, and I could feel gooseflesh all along my arms.

  Then he took Tod Welles aside, and spoke to him quietly and very seriously; and we left him there after we’d said goodnight.

  “What’s he going to do?” I asked, as we walked back.

  “He’s going to stay till every piece is found—each ear, each finger-bone, each scrap of flesh. He doesn’t understand, but he’ll do what I asked him to.” He drew a deep breath. “Garry,” he said, “there are some things we mustn’t take a chance on. Not ever.”

  WITHOUT (GENERAL) ISSUE

  Gentlemen, you have summoned me to explain to your committee why I, as commander-in-chief, absolutely will not permit women officers as members of Space Force First Contact teams.

  Very well, I shall tell you.

  It goes back to when I was a new lieutenant, fresh out of the Academy, assigned to my first team. There were five of us: Captain Arkleigh, the C.O.; Jameson and Clavijo, both techs; myself; and Hildreth, our telepath. Then, of course, there was Hildreth’s symbiote, a gray cat named Richelieu. As I’m sure you know, in those days we were forced to depend even more on telepaths than we are today, and they always relied partly on their animals. Cats and dogs are telepathically sensitive on primitive levels normally closed to humans, and they in turn can communicate what they sense to us, or at least to telepaths adequately trained.

  Our probes had reported a fantastic mishmash of electronic emissions from the seventh planet of a star called Alpha-Poronis—if you want, I can pinpoint it for you on the star charts.

  That will not be necessary? Thank you, gentlemen.

  Naturally, everybody at Headquarters was very excited because it was accepted that structured electronic activity on what had to be communications frequencies meant technological progress of a very high order, and our team was ordered to go and introduce ourselves to the civilization producing it.

  We orbited the planet, which was astoundingly Earth-like—a 17.682 similarity factor, to put it in present-day terms—and sent in a lander. We had seen nothing to indicate that our new friends had achieved either space flight or space weaponry, but we kept electronic silence on their known frequencies as a precaution.

  At any rate, nobody bothered the lander, and for some days it kept sending us its pictures, reports, and analyses. It had come down on what I can only describe as a meadow, even if the grass wasn’t really grass as we know it, and the surrounding trees weren’t really trees. You know how extraterrestrial vegetation usually differs from ours, just strange enough to be subtly disturbing. But there was nothing—absolutely nothing—dangerous to man. The air was breathable; the bacteria were too alien to affect us; there were no signs of predators or anything poisonous; several of the vegetable growths analyzed by the lander actually turned out to be “probably edible.” The only living creatures observed were spheroid. They looked like grayish-green puffballs, and they moved by just rolling around, pushing themselves with small anatomical jets—just farting along, if you’ll forgive my use of the term.

  But that wasn’t all they could do. They were able to extrude usable tentacles, stand up on them, manipulated objects and, so it appeared, each other. They were also able to extrude what I can only call eye-things, in clusters of two to a dozen. They differed in size from eight or ten inches to about three to four feet, and they were busy as bird dogs, rolling, and getting up to their tentacles, and dancing around to touch each other. Not only that, but some distance away the lander’s cameras showed us definite structures, with what seemed to be woven roofs and transparent mesh walls.

  There was no doubt about it. They were intelligent, and they seemed to be more or less civilized. Arkleigh gave the order, and we went down, hovering just long enough to get the lay of the land. At one end of the meadow, there was a wide stream, and it was so pretty that he decided to set down beside it. Had it not been for the much-too-green sky, the place would have looked just like home.

  From then on, we went by the book. The puffballs looked up as we landed, eyed us for a moment or two, and went back to what they’d been doing. Obviously, they didn’t take our vessel for a Chariot of the Gods out of space.

  “All right,” Arkleigh said. “Hildreth, let Richelieu out.”

  We were all anxious to see what would happen, and we had our noses glued to the ports as Hildreth opened the hatch and let down the catwalk.

  Richelieu took a good, hearty sniff of the nice, clean alien air, hoisted his tail, let out an exuberant meow! and walked out majestically. Twenty feet from the catwalk he paused, surveying the scene.

  Now, abruptly, ever
ything changed. The puffballs stopped simultaneously. All together, they extruded their eye-things. They stood up on their tentacles. All together, they danced forward, forming a semicircle around us. They were all looking at Richelieu.

  “Getting anything, Hildreth?” Arkleigh asked.

  “Sir,” Hildreth whispered excitedly. “They—they’re admiring him. Watch him! He knows it. Cats love admiration—”

  Delicately, Richelieu lifted a paw, stuck out his pink tongue, and started to wash.

  “No doubt about it?”

  “None, sir. None at all. I can almost feel it myself.”

  “Then out you go!” Arkleigh told him.

  Richelieu broke off washing. He had seen that the banks of the stream were sandy, and he hadn’t had a chance to dig into fresh sand since our takeoff. He stalked over to it, sniffed, dug his hole, squatted over it, did his business, filled the hole in enthusiastically, and took a long drink of the water.

  In the meantime, Hildreth had followed him out.

  “Can you contact them?” Arkleigh called to him.

  “Sir, I’ve been trying to, but they pay no attention. I’m pretty sure they aren’t telepathic. But I’m getting impressions from them. Not very clear ones. It’s about like trying to read the mind of a porpoise. But they’re aware of me, and—well, they admire me too. They think I’m wonderful!”

  “Better be careful, Joe” Clavijo called out. “They’ll be forming a fan club.”

  “Shut up!” Arkleigh told him. “Hindreth, do you get any danger signals—anger, fear, hunger, hostility?”

  “None at all, sir.”

  Well, gentlemen, again we went by the book. We all filed out. After all, we had side-arms.

  We lined up next to Hildreth, and Arkleigh stepped forward.

  “Take me to your leader!” whispered Clavijo, and the Captain told him again to shut up.

  The puffballs were coming closer and closer, holding each other’s tentacles like a ring of schoolgirls holding hands—closer and closer—

  “Still no hostility?” Arkleigh asked anxiously.

  “Absolutely not!” Hildreth told him.

  And that’s when it happened.

  Gentlemen, this has been classified “TOP SECRET” ever since, and I trust that no word of it will get beyond this committee. All I felt was an infinitesimal instant of unendurable tension—and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back—on my bare back, gentlemen—and my head felt like a bursting balloon. Slowly, I made myself look around. We were all on our backs, Captain Arkleigh, and Jameson and Clavijo, and I, and Hildreth. And we were all naked—all except Richelieu, who at least still had his fur coat on.

  Jameson looked at me with one bloodshot eye. “Bill,” he gasped, “wh—what happened? Where are we?”

  I looked around. We were lying in the middle of what was only too clearly a cage of some sort of translucent fibers, roofed with a similar stuff closely woven. The cage was about 20’ by 30’, or perhaps a bit more, and one corner of it was occupied by an eight-foot-square sandbox. It was surrounded by a whole crowd of puffballs, all standing up on their tentacles and pushing in for a really good look.

  “Where are we?” Jameson repeated hysterically.

  “I think,” I told him, “we’ve landed in what the locals use for a zoo.”

  Gentlemen, we were there for more than two years. In the back wall of the cage, they’d put a crawl-through door that led into a sort of cave, but it was kept closed during business hours, so our only privacy was at night. Of course, at first we did our best to communicate with our captors, but it was utterly useless. They used no verbal symbols. They used no visual symbols. We concluded that they were living computers, living electronic devices. They chattered by touching tentacles or by using whatever passed for their CB bands. But when we tried to get through to them by scratching a Pythagorean theorem on the floor of the cage, or demonstrating our knowledge of universal mathematical truths, all they did was hold up the tinier puffballs so they could see better.

  Of course, we tried to escape—but we soon learned our lesson. When we put any strain on those fibers—any at all—we got another jolt of whatever had knocked us out the first time.

  They fed us—not too badly if you like strange raw vegetables and occasionally raw fish from the river—there seem to be fish everywhere—and they gave us plenty of fresh water and cleaned the sandbox out every night. And, gentlemen, how would you like to use a goddam catbox for your sanitary purposes, especially with a few hundred puffballs watching you with their unwinking eyes? Because Richelieu had been first out, they must have taken him for our leader and assumed we’d all do as he did.

  It may seem funny to you here and now, but it sure as hell wasn’t funny to us. We could see our spaceship, untouched in the distance, and Hildreth didn’t make things any better by assuring us that the puffballs simply adored us—I guess like kids adore the monkey-islands in our own zoos.

  I will say Hildreth never gave up. He kept right on trying to get through to them, and doing his best to catch what they were thinking, but all he could ever latch onto were bits of what he called parallel emotions, like a sort of fondness for each other and their littler puffballs, and that stupid business about how they loved us.

  How did we pass the time? Gentlemen, we told stories. We made up games, as well as we could without so much as a scrap of paper or a stick or a stone. We have each other IQ tests. We shared our knowledge of this and that, or did our best to.

  And we were bored—bored almost to extinction. We tried hard to keep up our spirits and each other’s. Catbox and all, with hair to our shoulders and beards to our middles, we still tried to maintain man’s dignity. But more and more often we found dark despair overwhelming us. The only reason none of us tried to commit suicide was because there was nothing to do it with.

  Then one morning we came out of our cave, and without warning they zapped us again, and when we came to we were back in the meadow. They had dressed us as well as they could. They had given us back all our equipment. And they had formed their semicircle around us just as they had when we landed.

  We did not say good-bye. As fast as we could, we followed Richelieu back into the ship, and—hardly being able to wait to get at our razors—battened down all the hatches and took off.

  What was that, Senator? What does all this have to do with my refusing to allow women on First Contact missions?

  The answer is everything. Hildreth was able to tell us why the puffballs had let us go free. As I said, their emotions were just enough like our own for him to perceive them.

  They had let us go free because they were sorry for us. They had concluded that we were awfully unhappy because we refused to breed in captivity.

  My God, gentlemen, don’t you realize that if we’d had women aboard we’d still be there?

  MATING SEASON

  Each evening after supper, all the nice people who lived at Mrs. Weatherbleak’s came down into the parlor for an hour or two. Old Judge Ullbright limped in across the Turkey carpet with his Law Review under his arm. Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Puny sat themselves stiffly side by side on the red davenport. George Giele opened the door for Miss Luckmeyer, who taught music at the Junior High School, and followed her over to the bamboo love-seat by the fireplace. Finally, having supervised the clearing of the table, Mrs. Weatherbleak came in herself, smiled at everyone over the faded velvet of her bosom, and signalled to George that the television set could be turned on.

  On that first Tuesday in July, though, there was a difference. In the doorway, Mrs. Weatherbleak stopped dead still. Her smile quivered over the custard creases of her face, and set there, pointing its corners at the spots of rouge which, like bobbing buoys, told where her vanished cheekbones lay. She cocked her head to listen in the hall.

  There was no sound except
the broken-bellows breathing of the Judge. Something, they knew, was up. This had not happened since poor Mrs. Peterson had passed away, nested among her long-unopened trunks—or, at least, since that odd boy down the street had set the palm on fire.

  Mrs. Weatherbleak raised a warning finger. She closed the door silently. She giggled, a dry Tin Woodman sound. “Oh, oh,” she said, “you can’t imagine it. It’s our Miss Visser. She’s engaged. She told me so herself. She’s going to marry Mr. Margolis.”

  They stirred, expressing their appreciation through the eloquence of creaking oak and leather, and bound bamboo, and horsehair muffled springs.

  The Judge coughed thickly, and nodded, and held his spectacles up to his big, veined nose.

  Miss Luckmeyer glanced down at her own body, tightly girdled so that it might not betray the schooled severity of her narrow face. It’s high time,” she said.

  Mr. Hiram Puny snickered nervously.

  Mrs. Hiram Puny unlocked the fingers of her little hands, and let them clasp her knees, and sniffed. “Live and let live,” she addressed the air. “I think it’s nice. I think we should do something nice for them, anyway.”

  George Giele fiddled with the bunch of keys in his vest pocket, and nudged Miss Luckmeyer ever so slightly.

  And Mrs. Weatherbleak, savoring these grace notes, crossed the room to her own high-crowned chair, sighed herself into its accustomed valleys, and reached out for her copy of Lucille. “I told them to drop in, the both of them. Just for this once, of course—I made that clear. I’m sure it ought to be, well, interesting.”

  “I think it’s very nice of you indeed,” said Mrs. Hiram Puny.

  Mrs. Weatherbleak opened the book at random on her lap. “I promised her I wouldn’t say a word,” she giggled. “We’ll all pretend it’s still a big surprise.”