Collected Short Fiction, page 543
He stopped, flinching, when he saw the woman looking at his nose. Her eyes fell, as if out of pity, but in a moment she spoke.
“I . . . I do hope you’ll let us help you, Mr. Gray.” She hesitated again, her plump face flushed, and he began to hate her. “I’ve a brother in the city who’s a plastic surgeon,” she went on resolutely. “He has turned a lot of . . . well, misfits . . . into very successful people. He’s really very good, and not high at all. If you decide to stay, I think we can manage something.”
He set the empty cup down quickly, because his hands were shaking again. He was still alert enough to recognize the old trap, even in this charming guise. He didn’t want to be rehabilitated, and he meant to keep his nose.
“Well, Mr. Gray?” the constable was drawling. “Want to see the principal?”
“I’d like to.” He grinned wanely, to cover his shuddering panic. “If you’ll just show me where to find him. And you’ve both been very kind.”
“Don’t mention it,” the constable said. “I’m driving back to the farm, and I’ll take you by the school.”:
But he didn’t talk to the principal. He had seen the trap, and he was still crafty enough to escape it. He started walking toward the building as the constable drove away, limping along as soberly as if he had already been rehabilitated, but he stopped outside, behind a hedge, to make his pitch.
He unlocked the battered case and set it up on the extended legs and lighted the three-dimensional displays. The children gathered on the playground were already pausing in the games to look at him, and when the psionic music began they flocked around him instantly.
His toys were the cheapest possible trinkets, mass-produced from common materials, but they were cleverly packaged and their ingenious designs reflected the advanced technology of the industrial planet where they were made, The small plastic boxes were gay with universal psionic labels, which reacted to attention with animated stereocolor scenes and changing labels which seemed to be printed in each looker’s own language.
“Come in closer, kiddies!”
He picked up the first little pile of round red boxes and began juggling them with a sudden dexterity in his twisted old fingers, so that they rose and fell in time to the racing psionic melody.
“Look, kiddies! A wonderful educational toy. Use it to demonstrate the great basic principles of meteorology and neutrionics. And surprise your friends.
“The Little Wonder Weather Wizard Blizzard Maker Set! It works by turning part of the heat energy of the air for several miles around into radiant neutrinos. The sudden chilling causes precipitation, and the outflow of cold air creates a brief but effective blizzard—the label tells you all about it.
“Step right up, kiddies! Buy ’em at a bargain price. Only twenty-five cents each, or three for half a dollar—”
“But we really shouldn’t, mister.” The boy who interrupted looked familiar, and he recognized the constable’s oldest son. “All most of us have is our lunch money, and we aren’t Supposed to spend it.”
“Don’t you worry, kid,” he answered quickly. “Even if you go home hungry, you’ll have your money’s worth. You never saw any toys like these. Only fifteen cents, to close ’em out. Come right up and buy ’em now, because I won’t be here tomorrow.”
He scooped up the coins from grubby little hands.
“But don’t start making storms just now,” he warned hastily. “We don’t want trouble with the teachers, do we, kiddies? Better keep ’em in your pockets until school is out. Sorry, sonny. That’s all the blizzard makers—but look at this!”
He picked up the next stack of small plastic boxes.
“The Junior Giant Degravitator Kit! A fascinating experiment in gravitational inversion. Learn the facts of basic science, and amaze your friends. The label shows you all about it.”
He began passing out the boxes. The bright psionic labels looked blank at first, but they came to shining life under tire eyes of the children, responding to the thoughts’ of each. Most of them pictured the harmless degravitation of such small objects as marbles and tadpoles, but he glimpsed one showing how to connect the device to the, foundations of the school building and another in which the astonished principal himself was falling upward toward open space.
“Wait a moment, sonny!” he whispered hurriedly. “Let’s not degravitate anything until after school is out. Sorry, laddie. That’s all the Junior Giants, but here’s something else that’s just as educational, and really better fun.”
He held up a Great Detective Annihilator Pistol-Pencil.
“It looks like an ordinary writing instrument, but the eraser really erases! It converts solid matter into invisible neutrinos. All you do is point it and press the clip. You can blow holes in walls, and make objects disappear, and fool your friends. All for one thin dime!”
The school bell began to ring as he handed out the annihilators and gathered up the dimes.
“Just one more item, kiddies, before you go to class.” He turned up the psionic amplifier, and raised his rusty voice. “Something I know you’re all going to want. An exciting experiment, with real atomic energy, that you can try at home!”
He poured bright little spheres out of a carton into the palm of his hand.
“Look at ’em, kiddies! Planet Blaster Fusion Bomb Capsules, Super-Dooper Size. All you do is drop one capsule in a bucket of water and wait for it to dissolve. The reaction fuses the hydrogen atoms in the water into helium—the free instruction leaflet tells you how the same reaction makes the stars shine.
“Buy ’em now, before you go to class. Add realism to your playground battles, and flabbergast your friends. Make your own fusion bombs. Only five cents each. Three for a dime, if you buy ’em now—”
“Say, mister.” The constable’s son had bought three capsules, but now he stood peering at them uneasily. “If these little pills make real atom bombs, aren’t they dangerous, even more than fireworks?”
“I wouldn’t know about fireworks.” The peddler scowled impatiently. “But these toys are safe enough, if you’ve had your psionic preconditioning. I hope you all know enough not to set off fusion bombs indoors!”
He laughed at the bewildered boy, and lifted his rasping voice.
“Your last chance, kiddie! I won’t be here when you get out of school, but right now these genuine fusion bomb capsules are going two for a nickel. One for two cents, sonny, if that’s all you’ve got.”
He swept in the last sweaty coppers.
“And that’s all, kiddies.” He turned out the shimmering displays and stopped the psionic music and folded up the stand. The children filed into the schoolhouse, and he hurried back across the village.
The tavern on the hill was open when he came back to it, and the scent of alcohol brought back all his thirst, so intense that his whole body shuddered. He was spreading out his money on the bar, when a blare of native music startled him.
The raw notes sawed at his nerves, too loud and queerly meaningless. He turned to scowl at the bulky machine from which they came, wondering what made them seem so flat and dead. After a moment of puzzled annoyance, he realized that the music was sound alone, with no psionic overtones.
Were these people ignorant of psionics? It seemed impossible that even the Covenants of Non-Contact could exclude all knowledge of such a basic science, yet now when he thought of it he couldn’t recall seeing any psionic device at all. The bartender ought to know.
“Well, mister, what will you have?”
“Tell me,” he whispered huskily, “do your schools here teach psionics?”
The man’s startled expression should have been answer enough, but he wasn’t looking at it. He had seen his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. The hard, narrow bloodless face. The shrinking chin.
The shifty, hollowed, bloodshot eyes. And the huge, crooked nose.
“Huh?” The bartender was stating. “What did you say?”
But his voice was gone. If these people didn’t know psionics, anything he said would give him away. The flier would be discovered, and he could never leave. He would be rehabilitated. White and weak with panic, he pushed the heap of coins across the bar.
“Whisky!” he gasped. “All this will buy.”
The bartender took an endless time to count the coins, but they bought six bottles. He crammed them into the empty case, and hurried out of the bar. And he came at last, footsore and dusty, back across the bridge and up the hills where he had left the flier.
His breath sobbed out when he stumbled through the trees and saw the empty spot beyond the rock. Dismay shook him. He thought the flier was gone, until he turned and recognized its inflated camouflage. Trembling with a sick weakness, he found the psionic key and tried to deflate the membrane.
The key didn’t work.
He tried again, but still the distended fabric remained hard as actual rock. He ran frantically around it, trying the key against a dozen different spots. None of them responded. He was locked out.
He couldn’t understand it, and he had to have a drink. He had been trying to wait until he was safe aboard, with his new destination dialed on the automatic pilot, but suddenly he felt too tired and cold and hopeless to make any effort without the warming aid of alcohol. He couldn’t even think.
He stooped to open the sales case, where he had put the whisky, but the psionic key failed again. It fell out of his fingers, when he realized what was wrong. Psionic and neutrionic devices seldom got out of order, but they could be disabled. The flier must have been discovered by somebody from the quarantine station.
Sick with panic, he tried to get away. He dropped the case and ran blindly off into the unfamiliar wilderness. His staggering flight must have led him in a circle, however, for at last he came reeling back to a hill and a rock that looked the same. His head was light with illness by that time, his twitching limbs hot with fever.
He was clawing feebly at the stiffened membrane, hopelessly trying to tear it away with his bleeding fingers, when he heard firm footsteps behind him and turned to see the stolid, sunburned figure of Constable Jud Hankins.
“Well, constable.” He leaned giddily back against the camouflage, grinning with a sick relief that this was not a quarantine inspector. His translator failed to work at first, but it spoke for him as he fumbled to adjust the instrument under his clothing.
“I give up,” he muttered dully. “I’ll go back with you.” A chill began to shake him, and his raw throat felt too painful for speech. “I’m ready to settle down—if they’ll only leave my nose alone.”
There was something else he ought to say, but his ears were roaring and his bones ached and he could barely stand. He felt too sick for a moment to remember anything, but at last it came back to him.
“The toys—” he sobbed. “They’re dangerous!”
“Not any longer,” the tall man told him curtly. “We slapped psionic and neutrionic inhibitors oh this whole area, to prevent accidents, before I borrowed the identity of Constable Hankins to pick them up.”
“You—” He stared blankly. “You are—”
“A quarantine inspector, from Sol Station.” The officer flashed a psionic badge. “You were detected before you landed. We delayed the arrest to be certain you had no confederates.”
He felt too ill to be astonished.
“You’ve got me,” he mumbled faintly. “Go ahead and give me full rehabilitation.”
“Too late for that.” The stern man Straightened impatiently. “You’re all alike, you quarantine breakers. You always forget that cultural impacts strike both ways. You never understand that the Covenants exist partly for your own protection.”
He shook his throbbing head.
“I know you were not processed through our clinic at the station,” the inspector rapped. “I see you didn’t even bring a medical kit I’d bet you landed here, among a people so primitive that malignant microorganisms are allowed to breed among them, with no protection for yourself whatever.”
“Clinic?” The one word was all he really caught, but he stiffened defensively. “You can do what else you like,” he whispered doggedly. “But I mean to keep my nose.”
“You’ve bigger troubles now.” The inspector studied him regretfully. “I suppose our ancestors were naturally immune, the way these people are, but I’d be dead in half a day if I hadn’t been immunized against a thousand viruses and germs. You’ve already picked them up.”
He stood wheezing for his breath, squinting painfully against the light.
“The people I met were well enough,” he protested stupidly. “One child had something called a cold, but the woman said it wasn’t dangerous.”
“Not to her,” the inspector said. “No more than atomic fusion bombs are to you.”
Uncomprehending, he swayed and fell.
THE END
The Greatest Invention
The Greatest Invention wasn’t made of wood or stone or metal and electrons. It made a Universe what it ivas—or wasn’t, where it failed. And it was great because it denied greatness!
The explorer was a worn little wisp of a man, with a bald spot and a stubborn chin and a burning eagerness in his pale, nearsighted eyes. He arrived at Sol Station on the yearly supply flier, and met a chilly welcome.
“I’m looking for Atlantis,” he told the hulking quarantine inspector who received his credentials. “The forgotten place, whatever you name it, where our interstellar culture was born. I expect to find it here on Sol III.”
They were standing in the cramped and cheerless undercover office at the station, which was hidden in a crater behind the moon. Earth itself was still another quarter-million miles away, but against the long light-centuries the explorer had already crossed, such a distance was nothing at all.
“Atlantis, huh?” The inspector squinted painfully at the psionic films, and tossed them to his desk with a bored contempt. A soft clumsy man, somewhat too bulky for his blue uniform, he had adjusted himself to the simple details of watching the spy screens and filling out reports in triplicate and waiting for promotion, and any interruption of that routine annoyed him.
“There never was such a place,” he stated flatly. “It’s nothing but a silly myth.” His bulging, lead-colored eyes blinked with a faint hostility. “Though some fool is always coming to look for it—I don’t know why.”
“Perhaps the name is only a legend.” The explorer spoke mildly, trying hard to be agreeable. “But human civilization has been spreading out through the galaxy at an average rate of around half the speed of light, for at least ten or twelve thousand years. It must have begun somewhere.”
“What if it did?”
The slight man straightened thoughtfully, puzzled at this ponderous obstinacy and already alarmed by it. He understood the working of the quarantine service and knew that he couldn’t visit Earth without the aid of the inspector, who headed the undercover staff here.
“I’m a scientist.” He chose the words with care, trying to penetrate the big man’s stolid skepticism. “I’m looking for the cradle of civilized mankind—but also and chiefly for the truth. It seems a great tragedy to me that our forefathers, in their haste to reach the stars, somehow lost their own beginnings. Our mislaid past is what I hope to recover. But even if I only found that the people of Sol III are wanderers themselves, as we are, from some unknown human homeland, that fact would fill one more gap in scientific knowledge.”
“If Atlantis ever existed anywhere, it wasn’t here.” The inspector’s loud voice seemed oddly belligerent. “I’ve been down to Sol III on undercover missions. A filthy pesthole, crawling with verminous savages so backward they actually think they’re the only people anywhere. They can’t build neutrionic fliers today. What makes you think they could ten thousand years ago?”
“The first interstellar ships were probably built by people who wanted to leave the planet,” the explorer answered mildly. “I suppose they did.”
“You theorists!” The inspector snorted scornfully. “Looking for the beginnings of civilization among savages who never heard of it—while every civilized people for a hundred light-years around can show you the site of Atlantis on one of their own planets.”
“I know.” The explorer’s bent shoulders drooped wearily. “I’ve been looking for Atlantis nearly all my life. The search has taken me to several hundred worlds where the legend still lives—and cost me so far too much objective time, wasted on the flights between them.” He sighed. “Now I’m displaced and alone, with nothing left to do but keep on looking.”
“But still you haven’t found it.”
“Not yet.” The grizzled little man nodded patiently. “The legend was there, but I always found evidence that it had come from somewhere else, carried by some forgotten migration.”
“Would people remember a myth?” The fat man’s dull eyes blinked with a heavy skepticism. “Even after they had forgotten the actual history of interstellar migrations?”
“There are plenty of planets where stories of the early migrations have survived,” the explorer told him. “The trouble is that few accounts are specific enough to help identify the places from which the legendary starships came.
“Those first interstellar pioneers must have found life pretty hard, don’t you see? They lacked psionics, and nearly all the neutrionic devices we can use to tame new worlds today. Whole colonies perished—more, probably, than didn’t. The severe struggle for survival forced most back toward savagery. Only now and then did the settlers keep the science of neutrionic flight alive, so that they could start new waves of migration, such as spread out from Denebola VII.”
“From that sinkhole?” The inspector sniffed. “I’ve been there, from our Denebola base. A handful of pitiful savages, as backward as these, scrabbling to keep alive on a desert planet. If that’s such a fountainhead of culture, why must it be quarantined?”
“No planet lasts very long as a center of migration,” the slight man answered. “The natural resources are used up to build the ships in which all the more enterprising people depart. After a few generations, the doubly impoverished world sinks back into stagnation.
