EVIL EARTHS, page 16
to wit the crew of the Starship Enterprise, are always the
Good People who defeat the Bad People (who live on
other planets). Who knows, it may be because even unsophisticated
viewers find this simplistic line-up hard to
swallow that the hero of the show has become big-eared
Mr. Speck who, not being human, is slightly more credibly
cast as Totally Good.
"Dr. Who" has always been aimed at a iuvenile audience.
Yet its approach to externalised evil is intrinsically
more sophisticated (however crude the sets!). The aliens
opposing Dr. Who are always predatory and vile and cold,
and moreover generally look it; they reach their epitome
in the Daleks, a loathsome symbiosis of robots and foetus-like
homunculi, whose command "Exterminate" became
a catchword for a generation of school-children. But
Earthmen in "Dr. Who" are never represented as
unmiti
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gated Goodies. There is invariably a faction of wicked
men which stands to gain from an alien invasion, and with
Whom Dr. Who and his amateur band also have to cope.
This arrangement is based on historical precedent as
well as psychological observation. The British conquered
India by just such methods as the Daleks use, by dividing
ind ruling.
At first, aliens in sf appeared singly, as rare creatures
fo be marvelled at or as apparitions bringing us news of
our perfectability or our insignificance. It was H. G. Wells
who changed all that. The War o! the Worlds brought the
Martians down on us in droves, and they've been troubling
us ever since. Mutants have never been able to
marshall their ranks to the same extent. They generally
appear singly, like Philip Dick's Golden Man, to represent,
perhaps, the dangerous outcast in society.
In Fritz Leiber's story, dangerous outcasts there are in-deedI
It is not the meek that inherit his Earth.
The jocular aliens in Lafferty's tale represent a special
sort of invasion of Earth, getting into the History as well
as the Geography. This eccentric little story is to be
prized, not least for its meditative ending.
As for the long William Term story, it is a pleasure to
anthologise it here. I have tried and failed to get it into
print in anthologies before (it appeared originally in
Ga/axy, where nobody turned a hair, but English publishers
have revealed themselves to have dainty stomachs). Here
it is, in all its ghastly glory.
In one respect, it stands as representative of all those
invasion-of-Earth stories which we have enjoyed since
Welis's War o! the Worlds. Tenn's invading aliens, the
Eoti, are sufficiently nasty to gratify all tastes. Insect-like,
completely without understanding of or interest in other
species, they come buzzing in from beyond Pluto to
take over the entire solar system, including Earth. Battle
after baffle is fought; and the Eoti can replenish themselves
faster than the terrestrials. Which is the reason for
the story--and the reason for Earth's having to invent a
gruesome sort of alien life to help out its defences. Like
all of Tenn's stories, it is soundly built on logic, with just a
dash of sneaky madness to it. And, in this case, a whiff of
decay.
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In.the gravest crisis ever to hit Earth, every man was expected
to do his duty, not once but again and again and
again. To death--and beyond. No wonder some oI them
made a stink about itl
DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN
by William Tenn
i stqod in front of the junkyard's outer gate and felt my
stomach turn over slowly, grin, dingly, the way it had when
I saw a whole terrestrial subfleet--close to 20,000 men--blown
to bits in the Second Battle of Saturn more than
eleven years ago. But then there had been shattered fragments
of ships in my visiplate and imagined screams of
men in my mind; there had been the expanding images of
the Eoti's box-like craft surging through the awful, drifting
wreckage they had created, to account for the icy
sweat that wound itself like a flat serpent around my fore
head and my neck.
Now there was nothing but a large, plain building, very
much like the hundreds of other factories in the busy suburbs
of Old Chicago, a manufacturing establishment surrounded
by a locked gate and spacious proving grounds--the
Junkyard. Yet the sweat on my skin was colder and
the heave of my bowels more spastic than it had ever been
in any of those countless, ruinous battles that had created
this place.
All of which was very understandable, I told myself.
What I was feeling was the great-grandmother hag of all
fears, the most basic rejection and reluctance of which my
flesh was capable. It was understandable, but that didn't
help any. I still couldn't walk up to the sentry at the gate.
I'd been almost all right until I'd seen the huge square
107
can against the fence, the can with the slight stink coming
out of it and the big colorful sign on top:
DON'r WASTE WASTE
PLACE
ALL WASTE HERE
remember-
WHATEVER IS WORN CAN BE SHORN
WHATEVER IS MAIMED CAN BE RECLAIMED
WHATEVER IS USED CAN BE RE-USED
PLACE ALL WASTE HERE
--Conservation Police
I'd seen those square, compartmented cans and those
signs in every barracks, every hospital, every recreation
center, between here and the asteroids. But seeing them,
now, in this place gave them a different meaning. I wondered
if they had those other posters inside, the shorter
ones. You know: "We need all our resources to defeat the
enemy--and GARBAGE IS OUR BIGGEST NATURAL
RESOURCE." Decorating the walls of this particular
building with those posters would be downright
ingenious.
Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed .... I flexed
my right arm inside my blue jumper sleeve. It felt like a
part of me, always would feel like a part of me. And in a
couple of years, assuming that I lived that long, the thin
white scar that circled the elbow joint would be completely
invisible. Sure. Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed. All
except one thing. The most important thing.
And I let less like going in than ever.
And then I saw this kid. The one from Arizona Base.
He was standing right in front of the sentry box, paralyzed
just like me. In the center of his uniform cap was a
brand-new, gold-shiny Y with a dot in the center: the insignia
of a sling-shot commander. He hadn't been wearing
it the day before at the briefing; that could only mean the
commission had just come through. He looked real young
and real scared.
I remembered him from the briefing session. He was
the one whose hand had gone up timidly during the question
period, the one who, when he was recognized, had
half risen, worked his month a couple of times and finally
108
blurted out: "Excuse me, sir, but they don't--they don't
ù smell at all bad, do they?"
There had been a cyclone of laughter, the yelping
laughter of men who've felt themselves close to the torn
edge of hysteria' all afternoon and who are damn glad that
someone has at last said something that they can make
believe is funny.
And the white-haired briefing officer, who hadn't so
much as smiled, waited for the hysteria to work itself out,
before saying gravely: "No; they don't smell bad at all.
Unless, that is, they don't bathe. The same as you gentlemen."
That shut us up. Even the kid, blushing his way back
into his seat, set his jaw stiffly at the reminder. And it
wasn't until twenty minutes later, when we'd been dis'
missed, that I began to feel the ache in my own face from
ù the unrelaxed muscles there.
The same as you gentlemen ....
I shook myself hard and walked over to the kid. "Hello,
Commander," I said. "Been here long?"
He managed a grin. "Over an hour, Commander. I
caught the eight-fifteen out of Arizona Base. Most of the
other fellows were still sleeping off last night's party. I'd
gone to bed early: I wanted to give myself as much time
to get the feel of this thing as I could. Only it doesn't seem
to do much good."
"I know. Some things you can't get used to. Some things
you're not supposed to get used to."
He looked at my chest. "I guess this isn't your first
sling-shot command?"
My first? More like my twenty-first, son! But then I remembered
that everyone tells me I look young for my
medals, and what the hell, the kid looked so pale under
the ch------ "No, not exactly my first. But I've never had
a blob crew before. This is exactly as new to me as it is to
you. Hey, listen, Commander: I'm having a hard time,
too. What say we bust through that gate together? Then
the worst'Il be over."
The kid nodded violently. We linked arms and marched
up to the sentry. We showed him our orders. He opened
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the gate and said: "Straight ahead. Any elevator on your
left to the fifteenth floor."
So, still arm in arm, we walked into the main entrance
of the large building, up a long flight of steps and under
the sign that said in red and black:
HUMAN PROTOPLASM RECLAMATION CENTER
THIRD DISTRICT FINISHING PLANT
There were some old-looking but very erect men walking
along the main lobby and a lot of uniformed, fairly
pretty girls. I was pleased to note that the most of the
girls were pregnant The first pleasing sight I had seen in
almost a week.
We turned into an elevator and told the girl, "Fifteen."
She punched a button and waited for it to fill up. She
didn't seem to be pregnant. I wondered what was the
matter with her.
l'd managed to get a good grip on my heaving imagination,
when I got a look at the shoulder patches the other
passengers were wearing. That almost did for me right
there. It was a circular red patch with the black letters
TAF superimposed on a white (7-4. TAF for Terrestrial
Armed Forces, of course: the letters were the basic insignia
of all rear-echelon outfits. But why didn't they use
G-I, which represented Personnel? G-4 stood for the Supply
Division. Supply!
You can always trust the TAF. Thousands of morale
specialists in all kinds of ranks, working their educated
heads off to keep up the spirits of the men in the fighting
perimeters--but every damn time, when it comes down to
scratch, the good old dependable TAF will pick the ugliest
name, the one in the worst possible taste.
Oh, sure, I told myself, you can't fight a shattering,
noquarter interstellar war for twenty-five years and keep
every pretty thought dewy-damp and intact. But not Supply,
gentlemen. Not this place--not the. lnnkyard. Let's at
least try to keep up appearances.
Then we began going up and the elevator girl began
announcing floors and I had lots oI other things to think
about.
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"Third floor--Corpse Reception and Classification,"
the oerator sang out.
"Fifth floor--Preliminary Organ Processing."
"Seventh floor--Brain R.onstitutiou and Neural
Alignment."
"Ninth floor---Cosmetics, Elementary Reflexes, and
Muscular Control."
At this point, I forced myself to stop listening, the way
you do when you're on a heavy cruiser, say, and the rear
engine room gets flicked by a bolt from an Eoti scrambler.
After you've been around a couple of times when it's happened,
you learn to sort of close your ears and say to
yourself, "I don't know anybody in that damned engine
room, not anybody, and in a few minutes everything will
be nice and quiet again." And in a few minutes it is. Only
-.trou.ble is that then, like as not, you'll be part of the detail
that's ordered into the steaming place to scrape the
ù guck off the alls and get the lets firing again.
Same way now. Just as soon as I had that girl's voice
blocked out, there we were on the fifteenth floor ("Final
Interviews and Shipping") and the kid and I had to get
out.
He was real green. A definite sag around the knees,
shoulders sloping forward like his clavicle had curled.
Again I was grateful to him. Nothing like having some,-body
to take care of.
"Come on, Commander," I whispered. "Up and at 'em.
Look at it this way: for characters like us, this is pracfi-caily
a family reunion."
It was the wrong thing to say. He looked at me as ff I'd
punched his face. "No thanks to you for the reminder,
Mister," he said, "even ff we are in the same boat." Then
he walked stiffly up to the receptionist.
I could have bitten my tongue off. I hurried after him.
"I'm sorry, kid," I told him earnestly. 'Whe words just
slid out of my big mouth. But don't get sore at me; hell,
I had to listen to myseff say it too."
He stopped, thought about it, and nodded. Then he
gave me a smile. "O.K. No hard feelings. It's a rough
war, isn't it?"
I smiled back. "Rough? Why, if you're not careful, they
tell me, you can get killed in it."
111
The receptionist was a soft little blonde with two wedø
ding rings on one hand, and one wedding ring on the
other. From what I knew of current planet-side customs
that meant she'd been widowed twice.
She took our orders and read jauntily into her desk
mike: "Attention Final Conditioning. Attention Final
Conditioning. Alert for immediate shipment the following
serial numbers: 70623152, 70623109, 70623166, and
70623123. Also 70538966, 70538923, 70538980, and
70538937. Please route through the correct numbered
sections and check all data on TAF AGO forms 362 aa
per TAF Regulation 7896, of 15 June, 2145. Advise
when available for Final Interviews."
I was impressed. Almost exactly the same procedure aa
when you go to Ordnance for a replacement set of stra
exhaust tubes.
She looked up and favored us with a lovely smile.
"Your crews will be ready ia a moment. Would you have
a seat, gentlemen?"
We had a seat gentlemen.
After a while, she got up to take something out of a
