In the remote nebula of Messier 33, a gigantic nova, having unwittingly wrought destruction to a wholly unimportant speck of matter in an unimportant corner of the universe, subsided to a white-sequence star of normal size and normal, three-dimensional energies!
The End
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Palooka from Jupiter,
by Nat Schachner
Astounding, Feb. 1939
Short Story - 6886 words
Our green, sun-warmed Earth—menaced by a single man of Jupiter—
It was 5:45 p.m. on the northbound Lenox Avenue express, the very peak of the rush hour. Wearied stenographers clung to their straps, glaring with indignant intensity at equally wearied male bookkeepers who had preempted all the seats in the initial Wall Street sector and were now burying their noses in the sporting and comic sections of their newspapers, pretending not to see the aforesaid glares.
The train flung from side to side with the intensity of its homeward flight; the packed cattle within its stuffy confines flung obediently to the opposite side, in conformity with Newton’s well-known First Law of Motion. It was hot; it was smelly; and tempers, already frayed by the day’s work, hung on triggers.
A woman of rather definite obesity and the air of one who brooks no contradiction had managed to squeeze her bulk into a space where a knife blade might barely have been inserted. The meek little man on the right disappeared out of sight, completely overwhelmed by her bulging girth; the sweet young thing on the left essayed dulcet remonstrance.
“Some people,” she said acidly, “have a noive. For the nickel they drop in the slot they think the whole subway belongs to them. If I was a fat old slob like some people—”
The intruder twisted her elephantine form. A faint smothering sound came from the submerged little man on her right. “Listen, you skinny little guttersnipe,” she commenced venomously, “if I wasn’t no lady, I’d—”
The train gave an extra-special lurch. The professorial-looking man with the thick-lensed glasses had chosen that particularly unpropitious moment to let go his strap in order to emphasize a point with a crooked forefinger to the young man who swayed on a companion strap at his side.
He lost his balance, fell with a plop into the lap of the irate woman. She suspended her academic discussion of what she would do if she were not unfortunately a lady, to devote her entire time and attention to this new disturber of her placid peace.
“Say-y-y!” she shrilled. “Where d’ya get that stuff? I ain’t no couch for old billygoats who think just because this is a subway and I’m a lone, defenseless woman—”
Sampson T. Schley, internationally known scientist and heralded as the next winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, scrambled most undignifiedly to his feet, clutched at his strap again with a deathlike grip. His ears burned and his face suffused with blushes. Already necks were craning his way and snickers rose above the insistent grind of the wheels. Nor did it make matters better that Floyd Garrett, to whom he had been expounding at the very moment of the tragedy, the complex problem of the interstitial relations of two or more bodies coexistent in a simultaneous area, had a broad grin on his lean, sunburned young face.
“I . . . I’m extremely sorry, madam,” he gasped hastily. “But the train rounded a curve, and my inertia, you know, in strict accordance with Newton’s First Law of Motion, compelled me to—”
“Listen to him!” exclaimed the madam to the whole universe. “It ain’t enough he makes a play for me, he gotta add insults. Inoisha, hey? Where’s a cop?”
“But, madam!” Schley started helplessly, and stopped short with a smothered gulp. Floyd Garrett broke off an amused chuckle, blinked furiously. Was he seeing things?
The outraged face of the lady had disappeared from view. Her paunch, heaving with a just wrath, was semi-obliterated. A man was sitting in her lap, grinning up at them with the benign, peaceful expression of one who was wholly unaware that he was perched on the very rim of a volcano.
Floyd swore under his breath. He had not taken his eyes off the sputtering woman for even an instant. Schley had arched his body back as far as possible. There was a clear space in front of her. The train had not lurched, nor had the lights flickered from their steady glow.
Yet a man was sitting placidly in her lap, grinning up at him. He had materialized, so to speak, out of nowhere. Only a stir of wind, breathing freshly over Floyd’s face, convinced him that he was not dreaming. A volume of air, equal in volume to the tangible bulk that had displaced it, had pushed outward. The man—
Floyd blinked again. Schley’s blush of embarrassment had given way to a deathly pallor. The sweet young thing who had started the argument let out a shriek, and promptly fainted away. It was not a man—at least no such man as anyone in all that crowded train had ever seen before.
He was fat and solid and dark. In girth he billowed almost to the vast dimensions of the lady in whose embrace he had affectionately, if unaccountably, appeared. In height he lacked an inch or two of five feet. His nose was round and bulbous and glowed with a reddish phosphorescence. His eyes were equal saucers; there were no lids to veil their fishlike intensity. His thickish lips were parted in a toothless grin. It was not that age had divested him of those indispensable adjuncts to humanity’s happiness; there were no gums to prove that they had ever existed. His legs were decidedly curved and short; they dangled from their perch and missed the solid floor by inches.
His mountainous body was incased in a glittering, tight-fitting material of metallic-seeming scales, yet it gave with the softness and ease of silk to every movement of his limbs.
For one breathless moment the woman whose lap he had usurped sat rigid. Then anguished nature took its course. She let out a smothered scream. Her broad, red face, gasping for breath under the weight that crushed her down, appeared to one side. A stream of most unladylike imprecations poured from her lips.
“Get offa me, you so-and-so! Help! Ain’t there any gentlemen in this here car?”
The strange figure in her lap remained calmly seated. Her cries, her unavailing struggles against the undoubted solidity of his weight, did not move him.
Ordinarily, Floyd Garrett was an extremely chivalrous young man. He went out of his way to rescue kittens from the ministrations of scatter-brained young dogs; he would dance with the oldest and plainest wallflower at university functions, to the vast discontent of all the young things who had come prepared to cut out and carry off in triumph the extremely good-looking young instructor in biology.
But now he had frozen to unmoving paralysis at the sight of this strange being who had plopped into the lady’s lap.
Then it was that Sampson T. Schley rose to the heights. A strain of hidden gallantry welled to the surface. He forgot his own unfortunate contretemps; he forgot that the lady in question had accused him of unutterable things; he overlooked even the bizarre features of the man. His eyes flashed behind their thick, obscuring lenses with noble indignation.
“Get off that lady,” he sputtered. “You . . . you cad!”
The creature looked up at him. The grin widened. It was a pleasant grin—albeit toothless—it was even infectious.
“Why?” he demanded suddenly. “I find it quite comfortable here.”
His English was impeccable, yet grotesque. The syllables were all there, but the values were distorted; there were no accented beats; and—he lisped!
Professor Schley looked helplessly around. “Why?” he repeated. He was beyond his depth, floundering. “Because . . . uh . . . uh—”
Floyd repressed an irresistible desire to laugh. It was time to take a hand. But as he pressed forward, another passenger had already intervened. He was a burly brute, roughly clad, his mashed nose and cauliflower ears proclaiming the punch-drunk fighter.
“I’ll tell yuh why!” he growled. “Youse foreigners oughta go back where yuh came from.”
The stranger shifted his lidless gaze to his new interlocutor. “But I can’t,�
�� he said mildly. “At least, not yet.” He grinned engagingly. “You see,” he explained, “I’ve come from the planet you call Jupiter. A silly name, I must confess. And I can’t return until I’ve investigated your Earth and decided whether or not it is fit for colonization.”
Floyd stiffened in his tracks. Schley nervously adjusted his glasses. This was madness, yet—
Then things happened too fast for them to intervene. A passenger began to laugh hysterically. The submerged little man came up for air, took one look at the Jovian, said, “Oh, Lord!” in a dying tone, and burrowed back out of sight. The obese woman who was his unwilling cushion cried faintly: “Help! Get him off! He weighs a ton!”
The ex-fighter’s face had darkened. “A wise guy, huh!” he snarled, and let go a solid roundhouse for the side of the stranger’s head.
Floyd jerked forward. “Don’t do that!” he exclaimed sharply. But it was too late. The swing was already connecting.
The Jovian had not stirred. He had not attempted to duck. But his face suffused with a reddish glow. His already fiery nose blazed into a strange incandescence.
The heavy fist, packed with a pile-driver wallop, bounced back as though from armor plate. Scarlet sparks flew in all directions. The clenched fingers seemed to disintegrate, to leave but a stump behind.
“Owww!” shrieked the fighter in an agony of pain.
Instantly the car was in a panic. There was a mad dash for the doors. Someone pulled the emergency cord. The train shuddered, strained, and came to an abrupt stop. Screaming men and women piled on each other in their terrified rush to get away. In seconds the car was cleared—except for the Jovian, the woman on whom he sat, Floyd, Professor Schley, and the prize fighter, who was staring foolishly at the stumps of his fingers.
Slowly the stranger heaved to his short, ludicrously curved feet. His grin seemed painted on. But there was nothing funny about him now to Floyd or to the others. The red glare that enveloped him died down.
“I do not like to be hit,” he explained unnecessarily. “In Baridu—or Jupiter, as you call it—such things are not done. They are considered dreadful insults. As for the woman,” he turned with courteous gesture, “I am sorry. I did not realize that perhaps my weight might smother her. But she was so comfortable,” he sighed.
She did not hear. She was gone, pawing with screeching terror over the backs of the passengers who were unlucky enough to have been in her way. And after her, with a sudden howl, went the maimed prize fighter.
Lloyd said warily. “Did you . . . uh . . . mean what you just said?”
The creature nodded in some surprise. “Of course. We Jovians never lie. We have no such word in our vocabulary.”
“But where did you learn our tongue?”
He smiled happily. “I didn’t. I don’t know it even now.” He noted their incredulous looks. “You see,” he explained, “I carry a translator.” He flipped back the silvery scales of the high neck of his garment. A mesh of tiny wires was woven inside. Around the rim ran a series of green concavities that looked very much like flat suction cups.
“I set up an extremely high oscillating current,” he continued in that toneless lisp of his, “that has a particular affinity for the atmospheric waves caused by sound. A selective wall of vibration is erected against which both my speech and yours impinge. The current analyzes the speech waves into their universal constituents; synthesizes them immediately into the opposite speech. I am speaking in the tongue of Baridu, yet what filters through is the language to which you are accustomed. I hear your peculiar talk likewise in the purring syllables of my own planet. It is simple, is it not?” he finished with a toothless grin.
“Very!” said Dr. Schley in much bewilderment. “But come now, Mr. . . . uh—”
“Pilooki,” said the other promptly.
“Palooka!” Lloyd muttered under his breath.
The Jovian’s translator-beam was supersensitive. The creature’s bulbous nose lit up like a lantern. He nodded vigorously. “That’s it. Palooka!”
And so, until the end of his incredible stay, was the Jovian known to all and sundry. Fortunately, there was no Jovian counterpart or exact translation for this very expressive Earthian term.
But Dr. Schley did not even smile. It is doubtful whether he even knew that there was such a word in the great American slang. Besides, all his scientific curiosity had been aroused. “But come now, Mr. Palooka,” he repeated in a tone of remonstrance, “how was it possible for you to have translated yourself through some four hundred million miles of space like . . . er . . . this?”
The Jovian smiled commiseratingly. His nose, always phosphorescent, glowed like a signal lantern when he smiled. “The principle is most elementary,” he said. “We dissociate ourselves into our primal quanta states. These streams of pure energy are projected along a carefully plotted path in space to a focal point upon your planet. At the given focus, the quanta of energy interact and recapitulate the original pattern of our beings.
“Of course,” he added apologetically, “the determination of the terminal focal point requires rather delicate calculation. A trifle too far, and I might have found myself taking shape within unyielding rock; a trifle short, and I would have catapulted down through your very thin atmosphere with unfortunate results. That was why there was but a single volunteer for the scouting expedition—myself!”
Floyd’s jaw tightened. “And what,” he demanded carefully, “is the object of your exploration on Earth?”
Palooka looked surprised. His face was open, filled with almost infantile candor. “Why, I thought I told you!” he exclaimed. “I am to determine if this little planet of yours is fit for colonization by my people. You see, Baridu is all right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.”
“Eh, what’s that?” Schley ejaculated, blinking. “Jupiter is hundreds of times larger than Earth.”
The Jovian shook his head as to a child. “In size, yes. But not in inhabitable area. For a moment I thought you were rather intelligent people, but I see I must explain the obvious.”
“Of course we know Jupiter is a huge mass of liquid ammonia and mixed hydrocarbons,” Floyd said indignantly. “In fact, we were wondering where the devil you could possibly live on such a planet.”
Palookais lidless eyes grew rounder. His bulbous nose lit up with a beacon shine. “Good!” he crowed. “You do know something. Baridu in fact is as you describe it. But within that shifting ocean a smaller world swims. A world about the size of yours, and warmed by interior fires. An atmosphere of radioactive gases surrounds the core, reddish-brown in color, and so charged electrically as to repel to a safe distance the floods of ammoniacal liquid that threaten always to overwhelm us.”
“So that is the explanation of the Great Red Spot,” breathed Schley in great excitement. “Wait until the next meeting of the Academy—”
“If Baridu is the same size as Earth,” Floyd argued reasonably, “why look elsewhere?”
The Jovian sighed. His round face was ludicrously sorrowful. “We are a lazy folk,” he said in mournful accents. “Our protective blanket of activated atmosphere requires constant vigilance. The surrounding oceans of the greater planet seek always to break through.” He looked down at his squat, powerful body and his bowed legs with a comical expression. “The tremendous gravity holds us down. When we walk, we use up considerable energy. Work is a necessary function of our existence.”
He stared at them plaintively. “We do not like to work. We like to loll and take our ease. On Baridu we cannot. But here, on your slighter planet, with its lesser gravity, its unattended atmosphere, life would be easy, delightful.” He stretched his arms with anticipatory sybaritic pleasure. “We used to gather round our scanners and observe the green peacefulness of your Earth with envious longing.”
Dr. Schley gulped. “But what about the dignity of labor?” he exclaimed. “We work; all mankind works.”
“I do not understand that phrase,” Palooka replied. �
�There is nothing dignified about labor. It calls for strain and concentration; it takes up time that could be better employed in contemplation and the ecstasy of living. Hasn’t your planet enough of natural resources to support you all with a minimum of work?”
“Yes,” said Schley doubtfully.
“Then why must everyone toil?”
“It’s our setup,” Floyd explained. “There is enough to go around, but our system of distribution is badly adjusted. As a result, some have too much, and have that, leisure which you extoll; others must work long and painfully for the little they get.”
“You have given me an idea,” the Jovian replied with a sage nod. “It was our intention, if I found your world suitable for our race, to remove painlessly its present inhabitants. But if they like to toil, and are already accustomed to do so for the benefit of others, why should we not permit them to labor for us? Thereby we should be content, and so would they.”
His face lit up. “It is a most happy solution. I thank you both for this very welcome idea. You know,” he said with confiding candor, “you will laugh at me when you hear this. But I really felt uncomfortable at the thought that we would have to eliminate your race from the planet on which it had lived so long. Of course,” his mouth rounded with distaste, “some of your people, like that idiot who tried to hit me, or that beautifully plump person who objected to my presence in her lap, are not exactly pleasant in type; but I like you two.”
“Er . . . thanks,” declared Schley in some agitation, “but—”
When The Future Dies Page 21