Honeymoon in Hell

by Fredric Brown

  “Well,” Bill said. “I’m a research biologist. It would be hardly modest for me to say I’m tops in my field. What’s up?”

  “A spaceship hasxjust landed in Central Park.”

  “You don’t say,” said Bill.

  “I’m calling from the field of operations; we’ve run phones in here, and we’re gathering specialists. We would like you and some other biologists to examine something that was found inside the—uh—spaceship. Grimm of Harvard was in town and will be here and Winslow of New York University is already here. It’s opposite Eighty-third Street. How long would it take you to get here?”

  “About ten seconds, if I had a parachute. I’ve been watching you out of my window.” He gave the address and the apartment number. “If you can spare a couple of strong boys in imposing uniforms to get me through the crowd, it’ll be quicker than if I try it myself. Okay?”

  “Right. Send ’em right over. Sit tight.”

  “Good,” said Bill. “ What did you find inside the cylinder?” There was a second’s hesitation. Then the voice said, “Wait till you get here.”

  “I’ve got instruments,” Bill said. “Dissecting equipment. Chemicals. Reagents. I want to know what to bring. Is it a little green man?”

  “No,” said the voice. After a second’s hesitation again, it said, “It seems to be a mouse. A dead mouse.”

  “Thanks,” said Bill. He put down the receiver and walked back to the window. He looked at the Siamese cat accusingly. “Beautiful,” he demanded, “was somebody ribbing me, or—”

  There was a puzzled frown on his face as he watched the scene across the street. Two policemen came hurrying out of the tent and headed directly for the entrance of his apartment building. They began to work their way through the crowd.

  “Fan me with a blowtorch, Beautiful,” Bill said. “It’s the McCoy.” He went to the closet and grabbed a valise, hurried to a cabinet and began to stuff instruments and bottles into the valise. He was ready by the time there was a knock on the door.

  He said, “Hold the fort, Beautiful. Got to see a man about a mouse.” He joined the policeman waiting outside his door and was escorted through the crowd and into the circle of the elect and into the tent.

  There was a crowd around the spot where the cylinder lay. Bill peered oyer shoulders and saw that the cylinder was neatly split in half. The inside was hollow and padded with something that looked like fine leather, but softer. A man kneeling at one end of it was talking.

  “—not a trace of any activating mechanism, any mechanism at ally in fact. Not a wire, not a grain or a drop of any fuel. Just a hollow cylinder, padded inside. Gentlemen, it couldn't have traveled by its own power in any conceivable way. But it came here, and from outside. Gravesend says the material is definitely extra-terrestrial. Gentlemen, I’m stumped.”

  Another voice said, “I’ve an idea, Major.” It was the voice of the man over whose shoulder Bill Wheeler was leaning and Bill recognized the voice and the man. with a start. It was the President of the United States. Bill quit leaning on him.

  “I’m no scientist,” the President said. “And this is just a possibility. Remember the one blast, out of that single exhaust hole? That might have been the destruction, the dissipation of whatever the mechanism or the propellant was. Whoever, whatever, sent or guided this contraption might not have wanted us to find out what made it run. It was constructed, in that case, so that, upon landing, the mechanism destroyed itself utterly. Colonel Roberts, you examined that scorched area of ground. Anything that might bear out that theory?”

  “Definitely, sir,” said another voice. “Traces of metal and silica and some carbon, as though it had been vaporized by terrific heat and then condensed and uniformly spread. You can’t find a chunk of it to pick up, but the instruments indicate it. Another thing—”

  Bill was conscious of someone speaking to him. “You’re Bill Wheeler, aren’t you?”

  Bill turned, “Professor Winslow!” he said. “I’ve seen your picture, sir, and I’ve read your papers in the Journal. I’m proud to meet you and to—”

  “Cut the malarkey,” said Professor Winslow, “and take a gander at this.” He grabbed Bill Wheeler by the arm and led him to a table in one corner of the tent.

  “Looks for all the world like a dead mouse,” he said, “but it isn’t. Not quite. I haven’t cut in yet; waited for you and Grimm. But I’ve taken temperature tests and had hairs under the mike and studied musculature. It’s—well, look for yourself.”

  Bill Wheeler looked. It looked like a mouse all right, a very small mouse, until you looked closely. Then you saw little differences, if you were a biologist.

  Grimm got there and—delicately, reverently—they cut in. The differences stopped being little ones and became big ones. The bones didn’t seem to be made of bone, for one thing, and they were bright yellow instead of white. The digestive system wasn’t too far off the beam, and there was a circulatory system and a white milky fluid in it, but there wasn’t any heart. There were, instead, nodes at regular intervals along the larger tubes.

  “Way stations,” Grimm said. “No central pump. You might call it a lot of little hearts instead of one big one. Efficient, I’d say. Creature built like this couldn’t have heart trouble. Here, let me put some of that white fluid on a slide.” Someone was leaning over Bill’s shoulder, putting uncomfortable weight on him. He turned his head to tell the man to get the hell away and saw it was the President of the United States. “Out of this world?” the President asked quietly.

  “And how,” said Bill. A second later he added, “Sir,” and the President chuckled. He asked, “Would you say it’s been dead long or that it died about the time of arrival?” Winslow answered that one. “It’s purely a guess, Mr. President, because we don’t know the chemical make-up of the thing, or what its normal temperature is. But a rectal thermometer reading twenty minutes ago, when I got here, was ninety-five three and one minute ago it was ninety point six. At that rate of heat loss, it couldn’t have been dead long.” “Would you say it was an intelligent creature?”

  “I wouldn’t say for sure, Sir. It’s too alien. But I’d guess —definitely no. No more so than its terrestrial counterpart, a mouse. Brain size and convolutions are quite similar.” “You don’t think it could, conceivably, have designed that ship?”

  “I’d bet a million to one against it, Sir.”

  It had been mid-afternoon when the spaceship had landed; it was almost midnight when Bill Wheeler started home. Not from across the street, but from the lab at New York U., where the dissection and microscopic examinations had continued.

  He walked home in a daze, but he remembered guiltily that the Siamese hadn’t been fed, and hurried as much as he could for the last block.

  She looked at him reproachfully and said “Miaouw, miaouw, miaouw, miaouw—” so fast he couldn’t get a word in edgewise until she was eating some liver out of the icebox.

  “Sorry, Beautiful,” he said then. “Sorry, too, I couldn’t bring you that mouse, but they wouldn’t have let me if I’d asked, and I didn’t ask because it would probably have given you indigestion.”

  He was still so excited that he couldn’t sleep that night. When it got early enough he hurried out for the morning papers to see if there had been any new discoveries or developments.

  There hadn’t been. There was less in the papers than he knew already. But it was a big story and the papers played it big.

  He spent most of three days at the New York U. lab, helping with further tests and examinations until there just weren’t any new ones to try and darn little left to try them on. Then the government took over what was left and Bill Wheeler was on the outside again.

  For three more days he stayed home, tuned in on all news reports on the radio and video and subscribed to every newspaper published in English in New York City. But the story gradually died down. Nothing further happened; no further discoveries were made and if any new ideas developed, they weren’t g
iven out for public consumption.

  It was on the sixth day that an even bigger story broke— the assassination of the President of the United States. People forgot the spaceship.

  Two days later the prime minister of Great Britain was killed by a Spaniard and the day after that a minor employee of the Politburo in Moscow ran amuck and shot a very important official.

  A lot of windows broke in New York City the next day when a goodly portion of a county in Pennsylvania went up fast and came down slowly. No one within several hundred miles needed to be told that there was—or had been—a dump of A-bombs there. It was in sparsely populated country and not many people were killed, only a few thousand.

  That was the afternoon, too, that the president of the stock exchange cut his throat and the crash started. Nobody paid too much attention to the riot at Lake Success the next day because of the unidentified submarine fleet that suddenly sank practically all the shipping in New Orleans harbor.

  It was the evening of that day that Bill Wheeler was pacing up and down the front room of his apartment. Occasionally he stopped at the window to pet the Siamese named Beautiful and to look out across Central Park, bright under lights and cordoned off by armed sentries, where they were pouring concrete for the anti-aircraft gun emplacements.

  He looked haggard.

  He said, “Beautiful, we saw the start of it, right from this window. Maybe I’m crazy, but I still think that spaceship started it. God knows how. Maybe I should have fed you that mouse. Things couldn’t have gone to pot, so suddenly without help from somebody or something.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Let’s dope it out, Beautiful. Let’s say something came in on that ship besides a dead mouse. What could it have been? What could it have done and be doing?

  “Let’s say that the mouse was a laboratory animal, a guinea pig. It was sent in the ship and it survived the journey but died when it got here. Why? I’ve got a screwy hunch, Beautiful.”

  He sat down in a chair and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. He said, “Suppose the superior intelligence— from Somewhere—that made that ship came in with it. Suppose it wasn’t the mouse—let’s call it a mouse. Then, since the mouse was the only physical thing in the spaceship, the being, the invader, wasn’t physical. It was an entity that could live apart from whatever body it had back where it came from. But let’s say it could live in any body and it left its own in a safe place back home and rode here in one that was expendable, that it could abandon on arrival. That would explain the mouse and the fact that it died at the time the ship landed.

  “Then the being, at that instant, just jumped into the body of someone here—probably one of the first people to run toward the ship when it landed. It’s living in somebody’s body—in a hotel on Broadway or a flophouse on the Bowery or anywhere—pretending to be a human being. That make sense, Beautiful?”

  He got up and started to pace again.

  “And having the ability to control other minds, it sets about to make the world—the Earth—safe for Martians or Venusians or whatever they are. It sees—after a few days of study—that the world is on the brink of destroying itself and needs only a push. So it could give that push.

  “It could get inside a nut and make him assassinate the President, and get caught at it. It could make a Russian shoot his Number 1. It could make a Spaniard shoot the prime minister of England. It could start a bloody riot in the U. N., and make an army man, there to guard it, explode an A-bomb dump. It could—hell, Beautiful, it could push this world into a final war within a week. It practically has done it.”

  He walked over to the window and stroked the cat’s sleek fur while he frowned down at the gun emplacements going up under the bright floodlights.

  “And he’s done it and even if my guess is right I couldn’t stop him because I couldn’t find him. And nobody would believe me, now. He’ll make the world safe for Martians. When the war is over, a lot of little ships like that—or big ones— can land here and take over what’s left ten times as easy as they could now.”

  He lighted a cigarette with hands that shook a little. He said, “The more I think of it, the more—”

  He sat down in the chair again. He said, “Beautiful, I’ve got to try. Screwy as that idea is, I’ve got to give it to the authorities, whether they believe it or not. That Major I met was an intelligent guy. So is General Keely. I—”

  He started to walk to the phone and then sat down again. “I’ll call both of them, but let’s work it out just a little finer first. See if I can make any intelligent suggestions how they could go about finding the—the being—”

  He groaned. “Beautiful, it’s impossible. It wouldn’t even have to be a human being. It could be an animal, anything. It could be you. He’d probably take over whatever nearby type of mind was nearest his own. If he was remotely feline, you’d have been the nearest cat.”

  He sat up and stared at her. He said, “I’m going crazy, Beautiful. I’m remembering how you jumped and twisted just after that spaceship blew up its mechanism and went inert. And, listen, Beautiful, you’ve been sleeping twice as much as usual lately. Has your mind been out—

  “Say, that would be why I couldn’t wake you up yesterday to feed you. Beautiful, cats always wake up easily. Cats do.”

  Looking dazed, Bill Wheeler got up out of the chair. He said, “Cat, am I crazy, or—”

  The Siamese cat looked at him languidly through sleepy eyes. Distinctly it said, “Forget it ”

  And halfway between sitting and rising, Bill Wheeler looked even more dazed for a second. He shook his head as though to clear it.

  He said, “What was I talking about, Beautiful? I’m getting punchy from not enough sleep.”

  He walked over to the window and stared out, gloomily, rubbing the cat’s fur until it purred.

  'He said, “Hungry, Beautiful? Want some liver?”

  The cat jumped down from the windowsill and rubbed itself against his leg affectionately.

  It said, “Miaouw.”

  NATURALLY

  Henry Blodgett looked at his wrist watch and saw that it was two o’clock in the morning. In despair, he slammed shut the textbook he’d been studying and let his head sink onto his arms on the table in front of him. He knew he’d never pass that examination tomorrow; the more he studied geometery the less he understood it. Mathematics in general had always been difficult for him and now he was finding that geometry was impossible for him to learn.

  And if he flunked it, he was through with college; he’d flunked three other courses in his first two years and another failure this year would, under college rules, cause automatic expulsion.

  He wanted that college degree badly too, since it was indispensable for the career he’d chosen and worked toward. Only a miracle could save him now.

  He sat up suddenly as an idea struck him. Why not try magic? The occult had always interested him. He had books on it and he’d often read the simple instructions on how to conjure up a demon and make it obey his will. Up to now, he’d always figured that it was a bit risky and so had never actually tried it. But this was an emergency and might be worth the slight risk. Only through black magic could he suddenly become an expert in a subject that had always been difficult for him.

  From the shelf he quickly took out his best book on black magic, found the right page and refreshed his memory on the few simple things he had to do.

  Enthusiastically, he cleared the floor by pushing the furniture against the walls. He drew the pentagram figure on the carpet with chalk and stepped inside it. He then said the incantations.

  The demon was considerably more horrible than he had anticipated. But he mustered his courage and started to explain his dilemma.

  “I’ve always been poor at geometry,” he began . . . “You’re telling me ” said the demon gleefully.

  Smiling flames, it came for him across the chalk lines of the useless hexagram Henry had drawn by mistake instead of the protecting pentagram.


  VOODOO

  Mr. Decker’s wife had just returned from a trip to Haiti— a trip she had taken alone—to give them a cooling off period before they discussed a divorce.

  It hadn’t worked. Neither of them had cooled off in the slightest. In fact, they were finding now that they hated one another more than ever.

  “Half,” said Mrs. Decker firmly. “I’ll not settle for anything less than half the money plus half the property.”

  “Ridiculous!” said Mr. Decker.

  “Is it? I could have it all, you know. And quite easily, too. I studied voodoo while in Haiti.”

  “Rot!” said Mr. Decker.

  “It isn’t. And you should be glad that I am a good woman for I could kill you quite easily if I wished. I would then have all the money and all the real estate, and without any fear of consequences, A death accomplished by voodoo can not be distinguished from a death by heart failure.”

  “Rubbish!” said Mr. Decker.

  “You think so? I have wax and a hatpin. Do you want to give me a tiny pinch of your hair or a fingernail clipping or two—that’s all I need—and let me show you?”

  “Nonsense!” said Mr. Decker.

  “Then why are you afraid to have me try? Since 1 know it works, I’ll make you a proposition. If it doesn’t kill you, I’ll give you a divorce and ask for nothing. If it does, I’ll get it all automatically.”

  “Done!” said Mr. Decker. “Get your wax and hatpin.” He glanced at his fingernails. “Pretty short. I’ll give you a bit of hair.”

  When he came back with a few short strands of hair in the lid of an aspirin tin, Mrs. Decker had already started softening the wax. She kneaded the hair into it, then shaped it into the rough effigy of a human being.

  “You’ll be sorry,” she said, and thrust the hatpin into the chest of the wax figure.

  Mr. Decker was surprised, but he was more pleased than sorry. He had not believed in voodoo, but being a cautious man he never took chances.