Time Travel Omnibus, page 195
“He’s ours,” said Dunbar, his glasses agleam. “He’s an ape-man,” said the assistant with the black eye.
“He’s a dangerous lunatic,” said the assistant with the cut lip.
“We’ve come to take him away,” said the assistant with the torn pants.
The gnarly man spread his feet and gripped his stick like a baseball bat by the small end.
Robinette opened a desk drawer and got out a large pistol. “One move toward him and I’ll use this. The use of extreme violence is justified to prevent commission of a felony, to wit, kidnapping.”
The five men backed up a little. Dunbar said, “This isn’t kidnapping. You can only kidnap a person, you know. He isn’t a human being, and I can prove it.”
The assistant with the black eye snickered. “If he wants protection, he better see a game-warden instead of a lawyer.”
“Maybe that’s what you think,” said Robinette. “You aren’t a lawyer. According to the law he’s human. Even corporations, idiots, and unborn children are legally persons, and he’s a damn sight more human than they are.”
“Then he’s a dangerous lunatic,” said Dunbar.
“Yeah? Where’s your commitment order? The only persons who can apply for one are (a) close relatives and (b) public officials charged with the maintenance of order. You’re neither.”
Dunbar continued stubbornly. “He ran amuck in my hospital and nearly killed a couple of my men, you know. I guess that gives us some rights.”
“Sure,” said Robinette. “You can step down to the nearest station and swear out a warrant.” He turned to the gnarly man. “Shall we slap a civil suit on ’em, Gaffney?”
“I’m all right,” said the individual, his speech returning to its normal slowness. “I just want to make sure these guys don’t pester me any more.”
“Okay. Now listen, Dunbar. One hostile move out of you and we’ll have a warrant out for you for false arrest, assault and battery, attempted kidnapping, criminal conspiracy, and disorderly conduct. We’ll throw the book at you. And there’ll be a suit for damages for sundry torts, to wit, assault, deprivation of civil rights, placing in jeopardy of life and limb, menace, and a few more I may think of later.”
“You’ll never make that stick,” snarled Dunbar. “We have all the witnesses.”
“Yeah? And wouldn’t the great Evan Dunbar look sweet defending such actions? Some of the ladies who gush over your books might suspect that maybe you weren’t such a damn knight in shining armor. We can make a prize monkey of you, and you know it.”
“You’re destroying the possibility of a great scientific discovery, you know, Robinette.”
“To Hell with that. My duty is to protect my client. Now beat it, all of you, before I call a cop.” His left hand moved suggestively to the telephone.
Dunbar grasped at a last straw. “Hmm. Have you got a permit for that gun?”
“Damn right. Want to see it?”
Dunbar sighed. “Never mind. You would have.” His greatest opportunity for fame was slipping out of his fingers. He drooped toward the door.
The gnarly man spoke up. “If you don’t mind, Dr. Dunbar. I left my hat at your place. I wish you’d send it to Mr. Robinette here. I have a hard time getting hats to fit me.”
Dunbar looked at him silently and left with his cohorts.
THE GNARLY MAN was giving the lawyer further details when the telephone rang. Robinette answered: “Yes . . . Saddler? Yes, he’s here . . . Your Dr. Dunbar was going to murder him so he could dissect him . . . Okay.” He turned to the gnarly man. “Your friend Dr. Saddler is looking for you. She’s on her way up here.”
“Herakles!” said Gaffney. “I’m going.”
“Don’t you want to see her? She was ‘phoning from around the corner. If you go out now you’ll run into her. How did she know where to call?”
“I gave her your number. I suppose she called the hospital and my boarding-house, and tried you as a last resort. This door goes into the hall, doesn’t it? Well, when she comes in the regular door I’m going out this one. And I don’t want you saying where I’ve gone. Nice to have known you, Mr. Robinette.”
“Why? What’s the matter? You’re not going to run out now, are you? Dunbar’s harmless, and you’ve got friends. I’m your friend.”
“You’re durn tootin’ I’m gonna run out. There’s too much trouble. I’ve kept alive all these centuries by staying away from trouble. I let down my guard with Dr. Saddler, and went to the surgeon she recommended. First he plots to take me apart to see what makes me tick. If that brain-instrument hadn’t made me suspicious I’d have been on my way to the alcohol jars by now. Then there’s a fight, and it’s just pure luck I didn’t kill a couple of those interns or whatever they are and get sent up for manslaughter. Now Matilda’s after me with a more than friendly interest. I know what it means when a woman looks at you that way and calls you ‘dear.’ I wouldn’t mind if she weren’t a prominent person of the kind that’s always in some sort of garboil. That would mean more trouble sooner or later. You don’t suppose I like trouble, do you?”
“But look here, Gaffney, you’re getting steamed up over a lot of damn—”
“Ssst!” The gnarly man took his stick and tiptoed over to the private entrance. As Dr. Saddler’s clear voice sounded in the outer office, he sneaked out. He was closing the door behind him when the scientist entered the inner office.
Matilda Saddler was a quick thinker. Robinette hardly had time to open his mouth when she flung herself at and through the private door with a cry of “Clarence!”
Robinette heard the clatter of feet on the stairs. Neither the pursued nor the pursuer had waited for the creaky elevator. Looking out the window he saw Gaffney leap into a taxi. Matilda Saddler sprinted after the cab, calling “Clarence! Come back!” But the traffic was light and the chase correspondingly hopeless.
THEY DID hear from the gnarly man once more. Three months later Robinette got a letter whose envelope contained, to his vast astonishment, ten ten-dollar bills. The single sheet was typed even to the signature.
DEAR MR. ROBINETTE:
I do not know what your regular fees are, but I hope that the inclosed will cover your services to me of last July.
Since leaving New York I have had several jobs. I pushed a hack (as we say) in Chicago, and I tried out as pitcher on a bush-league baseball team. Once I made my living by knocking over rabbits and things with stones, and I can still throw fairly well. Nor am I bad at swinging a club like a baseball bat. But my lameness makes me too slow for a baseball career.
I now have a job whose nature I cannot disclose because I do not wish to be traced. You need pay no attention to the postmark; I am not living in Kansas City, but had a friend post this letter there.
Ambition would be foolish for one in my peculiar position. I am satisfied with a job that furnishes me with the essentials, and allows me to go to an occasional movie, and a few friends with whom I can drink beer and talk.
I was sorry to leave New York without saying goodbye to Dr. Harold McGannon, who treated me very nicely. I wish you would explain to him why I had to leave as I did. You can get in touch with him through Columbia University.
If Dunbar sent you my hat as I requested, pit .re mail it to me, General Delivery, Kansas City. Mo. My friend will pick it up. There is not a hat store in the town where I live that can fit me.
With best wishes, I remain,
Yours sincerely,
SHINING HAWK
alias CLARENCE ALOYSIUS GAFFNEY
WHEN THE FUTURE DIES
Nat Schachner
The Green Globes came—and man had to go for lack of a weapon, for lack of time! But—the time machine was a weapon irresistible!
IT was in the spring of 1982 that the strange flotilla thundered down upon an unsuspecting Earth. Where it came from no one knew, nor was the exact truth ever discovered. The best opinion, however, of those who survived the first onslaught was that the invaders were not indigenous to the Solar System; that they came from one of the nearer stars.
In support of this contention it was pointed out that the spaceships were fashioned of a green-glowing metal that had no counterpart on Earth, or any of the planets; or in the fiery bosom of the Sun, for that matter. And, it was further argued, not only did the hulls shine with a green phosphorescence as they flashed across the night skies, but they held within their molecular patterns a blasting, continuous heat of such terrific intensity that would have melted into a showering flux any element, or combination of elements, in the known atomic scale.
The invaders came on a moonless night like a flock of streaking green comets. They landed on an open plain near Bordeaux, right in the heart of world-famous vineyards. There were twenty of their long, tubular spacecraft, pointed at one end, like well-sharpened metal pencils. The canny peasants, aroused by the thunder of their approach, the blast of their green-heated sheaths, fled in terror.
By the time mobilized troops and scientists from the University of Bordeaux and the Sorbonne in Paris had hurried to the scene a thin, translucent bubble, green glowing as the ships dimly wavering within, had surrounded the flotilla. Heat scorched outward from the bubble—so fierce, so incandescent that the country for a mile around was blasted clean of houses, vegetation and every form of life. The parched, brown soil was as bleak as any desert.
More troops were called upon; more scientists mobilized. They tried to signal the ships within the glowing bubble. They sent men clad in asbestos wrappings into the steaming area. They sent planes sealed against heat and cold soaring overhead.
But the unseen visitors did not answer the signals. The men in the asbestos suits were forced back by the furnacelike heat. And three of the planes, diving too close, were shriveled in the frightful bath as though they were midges falling on a red-hot stove.
After that the general in command. Marshal Perraud, a veteran of the Third World War, gave orders to fire. The new thirty-centimeter guns, using explosive shells of semi-atomic power, thundered a salvo. During the War, nothing had withstood their bombardment. Ferroconcrete fortresses, mile-deep Essinot lines, triple-reinforced stratosphere bombers, entire mountains, had been ripped wide open by the famous thirty-centimeters.
Yet now this tenuous bubble, semitransparent, hiding within its shining green distortions the wavering shapes of the pencil-shaped craft, refused to collapse under the terrific impact of the screaming shells.
The astonished observers, watching incredulously through vibro-scanners, saw queer, flowing movements within the protective shell. Movements obscured to a large extent by the greenish bubble, giving not even a hint of the strange creatures who followed those patterns. They were not human, that was obvious, nor any form of life understandable to man. For the paths, dimly seen, magnified, traced in three dimensions a complicated weave and design that had no counterpart on Earth. The shadows danced, died suddenly, reappeared elsewhere, seemed literally to twist themselves inside out. To the very end, no one solved the mystery; no one knew if those curious, flowing lines were mere distortions filtering through the bubble, or, in fact, true representations of the alien creatures who had come from outer space. No one knew; for no one ever saw the invaders face to face and lived to tell what he had seen.
AFTER forty-eight hours of continuous bombardment with every weapon and scientific device devised by man, Perraud was compelled to confess defeat. Once he had tried a bayonet charge and lost five thousand men in consequence. The closer they hurled across the waste lands the more frightful became the heat from the delicate, green phosphorescent bubble. The advance battalion, spurred on by the exhortations of its officers, died in droves with La Belle France on their blackened lips.
Perraud swore and tugged at his gray mustache. It was suicide to send more brave men against a furnace. The invaders had not retaliated; they did not even seem to realize that they were being attacked. The strange patterns gyrated their incredible dance within in ceaseless flight. Not once during all the turmoil and thunder of sound had they stopped or hesitated in their courses.
Perraud called Paris. The cabinet went into session. Martial law was declared. Perraud was displaced by Arcot. He had no greater success. Five thousand more men were lost and fifty great bombers. More cabinet sessions. The upshot was sensible. Since the invaders neither attacked nor could themselves be attacked, it was decided to adopt a policy of watchful waiting and let them alone.
Accordingly a forbidden area was declared around the glowing bubble—a sort of no man’s land. It inclosed the parched and blasted section, and a two-mile radius beyond. Around the circumference of this circle troops were massed. One hundred thousand men, equipped with every known offensive and defensive weapon, installed behind asbestos shields and yards-thick ferroconcrete; while French scientists worked feverishly in laboratories in search of new methods of penetration and communication with the unseen beings within; or, in the alternative, for new weapons whereby they could be completely destroyed.
But neither one result nor the other was obtained. The bubble remained outwardly quiescent, though the military observers could follow with some difficulty the unceasing signs of activity within. Nothing seemed able to penetrate that semitransparent shell—neither messages nor arms.
For two months the mobilized forces held to their position, tensely observant, not knowing just what to expect, but ready to die, if need be, to resist any further aggression on the part of this alien invasion from space.
The tension of the nation gradually relaxed. It was evident that the bulletnosed ships and their masters held no schemes of aggrandizement. A huge collective sigh of relief went up. The troops were gradually demobilized; a single battalion was left as a thin guard in the circumscribing trenches, more to warn off the curiously rash than to defend the country from further invasion.
Tourists came, as was to be expected, to observe the phenomenon. They brought their families and their lunches. The harassed soldiers were hard put to it to keep the unwary out of that zone of fierce, scorching heat. More scientists came, from all over the world. They spoke gravely of intra-atomic patterns, of a possible element of the atomic order of something like 112, whose instability divulged itself in fierce, continuous radiations. They tried to decipher through the most powerful vibro-scanners what curious order of life forms could give rise to those constant, weird gyrations; but without success. They tried communication by radio, by gesticulations, by heliograph, by huge geometric figures outlined in electric lights; yet no response came from within. Finally they, too, gave up in despair. The nine-day wonder was beginning to fade. Other matters distracted the flickle public eye.
Then one day, ten weeks after the sudden appearance of the spaceships, it happened. No one saw it happen, but it must have been about four in the afternoon, just as guard shift was taking place.
THE BUBBLE suddenly expanded. It split into a hundred separate segments, each similar in shape and form to the original bubble, and each swiftly grown to a similar size. The cellular segments lifted lightly into the air. They sped with sentient purposefulness along the radii of a widening circle. They dropped to the ground at spaced intervals, outward from the parent bubble, so as to include within their spheres of influence a territory of over three hundred square miles. The most beautiful, the most fertile section of France was completely obliterated.
For, wherever the bubbles landed, the huge outpourings of heat from their shimmering green shells destroyed towns, villages, trees, houses, all life. Nothing remained but the scorched and smoking soil. Nothing remained of the two thousand troops or the half million inhabitants who were trapped by that sudden irruption. Bordeaux, in whose great public square one of the hemispherical translucencies had come to rest, was a desolate waste. The people died like gnats in the furnace blast. The buildings crumbled and crashed in glowing masses of masonry. Even the steel girders of the larger structures buckled and sagged under the tremendous temperatures.
France was swept by frenzied horror. She had been lulled into a sense of security by the quiescence of the invaders. But now they had acted; half a million people had died, and three hundred square miles of territory were destroyed beyond redemption.
The country was put on a wartime basis. Every able-bodied man was called to the colors. Munition factories worked full speed; munition laboratories at a still greater pace. These aliens were definitely inimical to human civilization and must be wiped out once and for all.
But this was easier said than done. Again vast armies were hurled against the green-glowing bubbles, protected with every weapon at the command of science against the fierce temperatures. In vain! Even those who, clad like strange antediluvian monsters in impervious asbestos, and incased in armored tanks lined with the same material, managed to approach the frail-seeming bubbles, found it impenetrable by shot, shell or old-fashioned ramming. A thousand massed bombers, flying in close formations, unloading their deadly cargoes from above, achieved no better results. Thousands more died in the attempts, and a hundred thousand found themselves erupting with sores and burns dreadfully reminiscent of second-degree radium bums of a former day.
For ten weeks more the bubbles were quiescent outwardly, neither fighting back at the desperate onslaughts of their human foes, nor showing any sign that those within were even aware that such a creature as man existed. Once more France and the expectant world relaxed, thinking that perhaps this time the worst was over.
But at the end of the ten weeks, as though ticked off by a stellar clock, the same phenomenon was repeated. Each of the hundred bubbles expanded and subdivided into a hundred similar offspring. Ten thousand newly hatched shells lifted high and sped swiftly, in spaced patterns, over the surrounding countryside. France was destroyed as far north as the gates of Paris, half of Spain and Portugal succumbed to the holocaust. The loss of life was appalling. Thousands had migrated from the surrounding territories, but millions had remained, stubborn in the belief that the first division of the invaders would be the last. They died now for their stubbornness, caught like insects in this second foray.
