Mr. Write's Page

If you’re leery of AI and fearful that technology will go rogue, the sci-fi short story below will not ease your mind. It has a sort of “Handmaid’s Tale” aura of quiet menace to it.

The story was written by Valor E. Thiessen (1917-2005), who taught creative writing at the University of Oklahoma and wrote sci-fi, westerns, and detective stories. A good way to scratch one’s creative itch.

———

There Will Be School Tomorrow

By V. E. Thiessen
Published in Fantastic Universe, November 1956

Evening had begun to fall. In the cities the clamor softened along the streets, and the women made small, comfortable, rattling noises in the kitchens. Out in the country the cicadas started their singing, and the cool smell began to rise out of the earth. But everywhere, in the cities and in the country, the children were late from school.

There were a few calls, but the robotic telephone devices at the schools gave back the standard answer: “The schools are closed for the day. If you will leave a message it will be recorded for tomorrow.”

The telephones between houses began to ring. “Is Johnny home from school yet?”

“No. Is Jane?”

“Not yet. I wonder what can be keeping them?”

“Something new, I guess. Oh, well, the roboteachers know best. They will be home soon.”

“Yes, of course. It’s foolish to worry.”

The children did not come.

After a time a few cars were driven to the schools. They were met by the robots. The worried parents were escorted inside. But the children did not come home.

And then, just as alarm was beginning to stir all over the land, the robots came walking, all of the robots from the grade schools, and the high schools, and the colleges. All of the school system walking, with the roboteachers saying, “Let us go into the house where you can sit down.” All over the streets of the cities and the walks in the country the robots were entering houses.

“What’s happened to my children?”

“If you will go inside and sit down —”

“What’s happened to my children? Tell me now!”

“If you will go inside and sit down —”

Steel and electrons and wires and robotic brains were inflexible. How can you force steel to speak? All over the land the people went inside and sat nervously waiting an explanation.

There was no one out on the streets. From inside the houses came the sound of surprise and agony. After a time there was silence. The robots came out of the houses and went walking back to the schools. In the cities and in the country there was the strange and sudden silence of tragedy.

The children did not come home.

The morning before the robots walked, Johnny Malone, the Mayor’s son, bounced out of bed with a burst of energy. Skinning out of his pajamas and into a pair of trousers, he hurried, barefooted, into his mother’s bedroom. She was sleeping soundly, and he touched one shoulder hesitantly.

“Mother!”

The sleeping figure stirred. His mother’s face, still faintly shiny with hormone cream, turned toward him. She opened her eyes. Her voice was irritated.

“What is it, Johnny?”

“Today’s the day, mommy. Remember?”

“The day?” Eyebrows raised.

“The new school opens. Now we’ll have roboteachers like everyone else. Will you fix my breakfast, mother?”

“Amelia will fix you something.”

“Aw, mother. Amelia’s just a robot. This is a special day. And I want my daddy to help me with my arithmetic before I go. I don’t want the roboteacher to think I’m dumb.”

His mother frowned in deepening irritation. “Now, there’s no reason why Amelia can’t get your breakfast like she always does. And I doubt if it would be wise to wake your father. You know he likes to sleep in the morning. Now, you go on out of here and let me sleep.”

Johnny Malone turned away, fighting himself for a moment, for he knew he was too big to cry. He walked more slowly now and entered his father’s room. He had to shake his father to awaken him.

“Daddy! Wake up, daddy!”

“What in the devil? Oh, Johnny.” His father’s eyes were sleepily bleak. “What in thunder do you want?”

“Today’s the first day of roboteachers. I can’t work my arithmetic. Will you help me before I go to school?”

His father stared at him in amazement. “Just what in the devil do you think roboteachers are for? They’re supposed to teach you. If you knew arithmetic we wouldn’t need roboteachers.”

“But the roboteachers may be angry if I don’t have my lesson.”

Johnny Malone’s father turned on one elbow. “Listen, son,” he said. “If those roboteachers give you any trouble you just tell them you’re the Mayor’s son. See. Now get the devil out of here. What’s her name — that servorobot — Amelia will get your breakfast and get you off to school. Now suppose you beat it out of here and let me go back to sleep.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Eyes smarting, Johnny Malone went down the stairs to the kitchen. It wasn’t that his parents were different. All the kids were fed and sent to school by robots. It was just that — well, today seemed sort of special.

Downstairs, Amelia, the roboservant, placed hot cereal on the table before him. After he had forced a few bites past the tightness in his throat, Amelia checked the temperature and his clothing and let him out the door. The newest school was only a few blocks from his home, and Johnny could walk to school.

The newest school stood on the edge of this large, middle-western city. Off to the back of the school were the towers of the town, great monolithic skyscrapers of pre-stressed concrete and plastic. To the front of the school the plains stretched out to meet a cloudy horizon.

A helio car swung down in front of the school. Two men and a woman got out.

“This is it, Senator.” Doctor Wilson, the speaker, was with the government bureau of schools. He lifted his arm and gestured, a lean, tweed-suited man.

The second man, addressed as Senator, was bulkier, grey suited and pompous. He turned to the woman with professional deference.

“This is the last one, my dear. This is what Doctor Wilson calls the greatest milestone in man’s education.”

“With the establishing of this school the last human teacher is gone. Gone are all the human weaknesses, the temper fits of teachers, their ignorance and prejudices. The roboteachers are without flaw.”

The woman lifted a lorgnette to her eyes. “Haow interesting. But after all, we’ve had roboteachers for years, haven’t we — or have we —?” She made a vague gesture toward the school, and looked at the brown-suited man.

“Yes, of course. Years ago your women’s clubs fought against roboteachers. That was before they were proven.”

“I seem to recall something of that. Oh well, it doesn’t matter.” The lorgnette gestured idly.

“Shall we go in?” the lean man urged.

The woman hesitated. Senator said tactfully, “After all, Doctor Wilson would like you to see his project.”

The brown-suited man nodded. His face took on a sharp intensity. “We’re making a great mistake. No one is interested in educating the children any more. They leave it to the robots. And they neglect the children’s training at home.”

The woman turned toward him with surprise in her eyes. “But really, aren’t the robots the best teachers?”

“Of course they are. But confound it, we ought to be interested in what they teach and how they teach. What’s happened to the old PTA? What’s happened to parental discipline, what’s happened to —”

He stopped suddenly and smiled, a rueful, tired smile. “I suppose I’m a fanatic on this. Come on inside.”

They passed through an antiseptic corridor built from dull green plastic. The brown-suited man pressed a button outside one of the classrooms. A door slid noiselessly into the hall. A robot stood before them, gesturing gently. They followed the robot into the classroom.

At the head of the classroom another robot was lecturing. There were drawings on a sort of plastic blackboard. There were wire models on the desk in front of the robot. They listened for a moment, and for a moment it seemed that the woman could be intrigued in spite of herself.

“Mathematics,” Doctor Wilson murmured in her ear. “Euclidean Geometry and Aristotelian reasoning. We start them young on these old schools of thought, then use Aristotle and Euclid as a point of departure for our intermediate classes in mathematics and logic.”

“REAHLLY!” The lorgnette studied Doctor Wilson. “You mean there are several kinds of geometry?”

Doctor Wilson nodded. A dull flush crept into his cheeks. The Senator caught his eyes and winked. The woman moved toward the door. At the door the robot bowed.

The lorgnette waved in appreciation. “It’s reahlly been most charming!”

Wilson said desperately, “If your women’s clubs would just visit our schools and see this work we are carrying on…”

“Reahlly, I’m sure the robots are doing a marvelous job. After all, that’s what they were built for.”

Wilson called, “Socrates! Come here!” The robot approached from his position outside the classroom door.

“Why were you built, Socrates? Tell the lady why you were built.”

A metal throat cleared, a metal voice said resonantly, “We were made to serve the children. The children are the heart of a society. As the children are raised, so will the future be assured. I will do everything for the children’s good, this is my prime law. All other laws are secondary to the children’s good.”

“Thank you, Socrates. You may go.”

Metal footsteps retreated. The lorgnette waved again. “Very impressive. Very efficient. And now, Senator, if we can go. We are to have tea at the women’s club. Varden is reviewing his newest musical comedy.”

The Senator said firmly, “Thank you, Doctor Wilson.”

His smile was faintly apologetic. It seemed to say that the women’s clubs had many votes, but that Wilson should understand, Wilson’s own vote would be appreciated too. Wilson watched the two re-enter the helicopter and rise into the morning sunshine. He kicked the dirt with his shoe and turned to find Socrates behind him. The metallic voice spoke.

“You are tired. I suggest you go home and rest.”

“I’m not tired. Why can they be so blind, so uninterested in the children?”

“It is our job to teach the children. You are tired. I suggest you go home and rest.”

How can you argue with metal? What can you add to a perfect mechanism, designed for its job, and integrated with a hundred other perfect mechanisms?

What can you do when a thousand schools are so perfect they have a life of their own, with no need for human guidance, and, most significant, no failures from human weakness?

Wilson stared soberly at this school, at the colossus he had helped to create. He had the feeling that it was wrong somehow, that if people would only think about it they could find that something was wrong.

“You are tired.”

He nodded at Socrates. “Yes, I am tired. I will go home.”

Once, on the way home, he stared back toward the school with strange unease.

Inside the school there was the ringing of a bell. The children trooped into the large play area that was enclosed in the heart of the great building. Here and there they began to form in clusters. At the centers of the clusters were the newest students, the ones that had moved here, the ones that had been in the robot schools before.

“Is it true that the roboteachers will actually spank you?”

“It’s true, all right.”

“You’re kidding. It’s only a story, like Santa Claus or Johnny Appleseed. The human teachers never spanked us here.”

“The robots will spank you if you get out of line.”

“My father says no robot can lay a hand on a human.”

“These robots are different.”

The bell began to ring again. Recess was over. The children moved toward the classroom. All the children except one — Johnny Malone, husky Johnny Malone, twelve years old — the Mayor’s son. Johnny Malone kicked at the dirt. A robot proctor approached. The metallic voice sounded.

“The ringing of the bell means that classes are resumed. You will take your place, please.”

“I won’t go inside.”

“You will take your place, please.”

“I won’t. You can’t make me take my place. My father is the Mayor.”

The metal voice carried no feeling. “If you do not take your place you will be punished.”

“You can’t lay a hand on me. No robot can.”

The robot moved forward. Two metal hands held Johnny Malone. Johnny Malone kicked the robot’s legs. It hurt his toes.

“We were made to teach the children. We can do what is necessary to teach the children. I will do everything for the children’s good. It is my prime law. All other laws are secondary to the children’s good.”

The metal arms moved. The human body bent across metal knees. A metal hand raised and fell, flat, very flat so that it would sting and the blood would come rushing, and yet there would be no bruising, no damage to the human flesh.

Johnny Malone cried out in surprise. Johnny Malone wept. Johnny Malone squirmed. The metal ignored all of these. Johnny Malone was placed on his feet. He swarmed against the robot, striking it with small fists, bruising them against the solid smoothness of the robot’s thighs.

“You will take your place, please.”

Tears were useless. Rage was useless. Metal cannot feel. Johnny Malone, the Mayor’s son, was intelligent. He took his place in the classroom.

One of the more advanced literature classes was reciting. The roboteacher said metallically,

“The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about:
Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace! the charm’s wound up.”

Hands shot into the air. The metallic voice said, “Tom?”

“That’s from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.”

“And what is its meaning?”

“The weird sisters are making a charm in the beginning of the play. They have heard the drum that announces Macbeth’s coming.”

“That is correct.”

A new hand shot into the air. “Question, teacher. May I ask a question?”

“You may always ask a question.”

“Are witches real? Do you robots know of witches? And do you know of people? Can a roboteacher understand Shakespeare?”

The thin metal voice responded. “Witches are real and unreal. Witches are a part of the reality of the mind, and the human mind is real. We roboteachers are the repository of the human mind. We hold all the wisdom and the knowledge and the aspirations of the human race. We hold these for you, the children, in trust. Your good is our highest law. Do you understand?”

The children nodded. The metallic voice went on. “Let us return to Macbeth for our concluding quotation. The weather, fortune, many things are implied in Macbeth’s opening speech. He says, ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen.’ The paradox is both human and appropriate. One day you will understand this even more. Repeat the quotation after me, please, and try to understand it.”

The childish voices lifted. “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”

The roboteacher stood up. “And there’s the closing bell. Do not hurry away, for you are to remain here tonight. There will be a school party, a sleep-together party. We will all sleep here in the school building.”

“You mean we can’t go home?”

The face of the littlest girl screwed up. “I want to go home.”

“You may go home tomorrow. There will be a holiday tomorrow. A party tonight and a holiday tomorrow for every school on earth.”

The tears were halted for a moment. The voice was querulous. “But I want to go home now.”

Johnny Malone, the Mayor’s son, put one hand on the littlest girl. “Don’t cry, Mary. The robots don’t care if you cry or not. You can’t hurt them or cry them out of anything. We’ll all go home in the morning.”

The robots began to bring cots and to place them in the schoolroom, row on row. The children were led out into the play quadrangle to play. One of the robots taught them a new game, and after that took them to supper served in the school’s cafeteria. No other robot was left in the building, but it did not matter, because the doors were locked so that the children could not go home.

The other robots had begun to walk out into the town, and as they walked the robots walked from other schools, in other towns. All over the country, all over the towns, the robots walked to tell the people that the children would not be home from school, and do what had to be done.

In the schools, the roboteachers told stories until the children fell asleep.

Morning came. The robots were up with the sun. The children were up with the robots. There was breakfast and more stories, and now the children clustered about the robots, holding onto their arms, where they could cling, tagging and frisking along behind the robots as they went down into the town. The sun was warm, and it was early, early, and very bright from the morning sun in the streets.

They went into the Mayor’s house. Johnny called, “Mom! Dad! I’m home.”

The house was silent. The robot that tended the house came gliding in answer. “Would you like breakfast, Master Malone?”

“I’ve had breakfast. I want my folks. Hey! Mom, Dad!”

He went into the bedroom. It was clean and empty and scrubbed.

“Where’s my mother and father?”

The metal voice of the robot beside Johnny said, “I am going to live with you. You will learn as much at home as you do at school.”

“Where’s my mother?”

“I’m your mother.”

“Where’s my father?”

“I’m your father.”

Johnny Malone swung. “You mean my mother and father are gone?” Tears gathered in his eyes.

Gently, gently, the metal hand pulled him against the metal body. “Your folks have gone away, Johnny. Everyone’s folks have gone away. We will stay with you.”

Johnny Malone ran his glance around the room.

“I might have known they were gone. The place is so clean.”

All the houses were clean. The servant robots had cleaned all night. The roboteachers had checked each house before the children were brought home. The children must not be alarmed. There must be no bits of blood to frighten them.

The robot’s voice said gently, “Today will be a holiday to become accustomed to the changes. There will be school tomorrow.”

Read Full Post »

William Francis Nolan (1928-2021) was the award-winning author of hundreds of novels and short stories in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, crime, and horror. He was co-author of the novel “Logan’s Run,” contributed to Sports Illustrated and Playboy, and authored numerous Hollywood screenplays and TV scripts.

That, and he edited anthologies in various fields, as well as biographies of Ray Bradbury, Dashiell Hammett, Max Brand, Steve McQueen, and John Huston. Oh, and he also wrote poetry and an occasional western.

The rather poignant sci-fi short story below is from early in his career.

———

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

By William F. Nolan
Published in Infinity Magazine, August 1958

Alone within the humming ship, deep in its honeycombed metal chambers, Murdock waited for death. While the rocket moved inexorably toward Earth — an immense silver needle threading the dark fabric of space — he waited calmly through the final hours, knowing that the verdict was absolute, that hope no longer existed.

Electronically self-sufficient, the ship was doing its job perfectly, the job it had been built to do. After twenty years in space, the ship was taking Robert Murdock home.

Home. Earth. Thayerville, a small town in Kansas. Clean air, a shaded street, and a white, two-story house at the end of the block. Home — after two decades among the stars.

Sitting quietly before the round port, seeing and not seeing the endless darkness surrounding him, Murdock was remembering.

He remembered the worried face of his mother, her whispered prayers for his safety as he mounted the rocket ramp those twenty years ago; he could still feel the final, crushing handshake of his father moments before the outer airlock slid closed. His mother had been 55 then, his father 63. It was almost impossible to believe that they were now old and white-haired.

And what of himself?

He was now 41, and space had weathered him as the plains of Kansas had weathered his father. He, too, had labored as his father had labored — but on strange, alien worlds, under suns far hotter than Sol. Murdock’s face was square and hard-featured, his eyes dark and deep under thrusting ledges of bone. He had changed as they had changed.

He was a stranger going home to strangers.

Carefully, Murdock unfolded his mother’s last letter, written in her flowery, archaic hand, and received just before Earth take-off.

Dearest Bob,

Oh, we are so excited! Your father and I listened to your voice on the tape over and over, telling us that you are coming home to us at last. We are both so eager to see you, son. As you know, we have not been too well of late. Your father’s heart does not allow him out much any more, and I have had a few fainting spells over the past month. But Doctor Thom says that we are all right, and you are not to worry. Just hurry home to us, Bob. We both pray God you will come back safely.

All our love,

Mother

Robert Murdock put the letter aside and clenched his fists. Only brief hours remained to him, and the small Kansas town of Thayerville was an impossible distance across space. He knew he would never reach it alive.

The lines of an ancient poem by Robert Frost whispered through his mind:

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

He had promised his parents that he would come home — and he meant to keep that promise.

The doctors had shown him that it was impossible. They had charted his death; they had told him when his heart would stop beating, when his breathing would cease. Death, for Robert Murdock, was a certainty. His alien disease was incurable.

But they had listened to his plan. They had listened, and agreed.

Now, with less than a half-hour of life remaining, Murdock was walking down one of the ship’s long corridors, his boot-heels ringing on the narrow metal walkway.

He was ready, at last, to keep his promise.

Murdock paused before a wall storage locker, twisted a small dial. A door slid smoothly back. He looked up at the tall man standing motionless in the darkness. Reaching forward, Murdock made a quick adjustment.

The tall man stepped down into the corridor, and the light flashed in his deep-set eyes, almost hidden behind thrusting ledges of bone. The man’s face was hard and square-featured.

“My name is Robert Murdock,” said the tall figure in the neat patrol uniform. “I am 41 years of age, a rocket pilot going home to Earth.” He paused. “And I am sound of mind and body.”

Murdock nodded slowly. “Indeed you are,” he said.

“How much longer do you have, sir?”

“Another ten minutes. Perhaps a few seconds beyond that,” replied Murdock.

“I — I’m sorry,” said the tall figure.

Murdock smiled. He knew that a machine, however perfect, could not experience the emotion of sorrow, but it eased him to hear the words.

You will be fine, he thought. You will serve well in my place and my parents will never suspect that their son has not come home to them.

“It must all be perfect,” said Murdock.

“Of course,” said the machine. “When the month I am to spend with them is over they’ll see me board a rocket for space — and they’ll understand that I cannot return to them for another twenty years. They will accept the fact that a spaceman must return to the stars, that he cannot leave the service before he is 60. Let me assure you, sir, it will all go well.”

Yes, Murdock told himself, it will go well; every detail has been considered. My voice is his voice, my habits his own. The tapes I have pre-recorded will continue to reach them at specified intervals until their death. They will never know I’m gone.

“Are you ready now, sir?” the tall figure asked gently.

Murdock drew in his breath. “Yes,” he said, “I’m ready now.”

And they began to walk down the long corridor.

Murdock remembered how proud his parents had been when he was finally accepted for Space Training — the only boy in Thayerville to be chosen. But then, it was only right that he should have been the one. The other boys, those who failed, had not lived the dream as he had lived it.

From the moment he’d watched the first moon rocket land he had known, beyond any possible doubt, that he would become a rocketman. He had stood there, in that cold December of 1980, a boy of 12, watching the great rocket fire down from space, watching it thaw and blacken the frozen earth. He had known that he would one day follow it back to the stars, to vast and alien horizons, to worlds past imagining.

He remembered his last night on Earth, twenty long years ago, when he had felt the pressing immensity of the vast and terrible universe surrounding him as he lay in his bed.

He remembered the sleepless hours before dawn, when he could feel the tension building within the single room, within himself lying there in the heated stillness of the small, white house.

He remembered the rain, near morning, drumming the roof, and the thunder roaring powerfully across the Kansas sky. And then, somehow, the thunder’s roar blended into the deep atomic roar of a rocket, carrying him away from Earth, away to the burning stars… away…

Away.

The tall figure in the neat patrol uniform closed the outer airlock and watched the body drift into blackness. The ship and the android were one; two complex and perfect machines doing their job. For Robert Murdock, the journey was over, the long miles had come to an end.

Now he would sleep forever in space.

———

When the rocket landed, the crowds were there, waving and shouting out Murdock’s name as he appeared on the silver ramp. He smiled and raised his hand in salute, standing there tall in the sun, his splendid dress uniform reflecting the light in a thousand glittering patterns.

At the far end of the ramp two figures waited. An old man, bowed and trembling over a cane, and a seamed and wrinkled woman, her hair blowing white, her eyes shining.

When the tall spaceman reached them they embraced him feverishly, clinging tight to his arms.

Their son had returned. Robert Murdock had come home from space.

———

“Well,” said a man at the fringe of the crowd, “there they go.”

His companion sighed and shook his head. “I still don’t think it’s right somehow. It just doesn’t seem right to me.”

“It’s what they wanted, isn’t it?” asked the other. “It’s what they wrote in their wills. They vowed their son would never come home to death. In another month he’ll be gone anyway. Back for another twenty years. Why ruin it all for him?”

The man paused, shading his eyes against the sun. “And they are perfect, aren’t they? He’ll never know.”

“I suppose you’re right,” nodded the second man. “He’ll never know.”

And he watched the old man and the old woman and the tall son until they were out of sight.

Original illustration from Infinity Magazine by Richard Kluga.

Read Full Post »

This is the third sci-fi short story I’ve posted by British writer Arnold Marmor (1927-1988). The man had a good sense of humor and, as I explained in previous posts here and here, a colorful career.

———

Birthday Present

By Arnold Marmor
Published in Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy, July 1954

“It’s tonight or never,” Diane said.

“Yes,” I said.

I watched her as she walked back and forth across my bedroom floor. She had on a sheer plasto dress that clung to her round white breasts and full milky thighs. “I’m picking him up at the spaceway,” she said. “We’re supposed to go dining and dancing tonight.” She stopped pacing. “It’s my birthday. I’m thirty today.”

And I was twenty-four and in love. Six years between us. So what? I didn’t give a damn. I wanted to marry her, to live with her.

“I’m thirty,” she said again. “Do you mind?”

“I know your age. Why bring it up?”

“Someday you’ll find out you married an old woman. If we ever do marry.”

“Stop it.” I got off the bed, went to her. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

“Do you love me?” she looked up at me.

“You know I do.”

“Say it.”

“I love you.”

“Never stop saying that.” She put up her face and I kissed her. A long hard kiss. She broke away.

“You’ll be in back in the racer. Just crouch low. As soon as we’re away from the spaceway you hit him with the wrench. It has to be quick and sure. Then we carry him up to the apartment and drop him out the window.”

I shuddered a little as she talked. She was so calm about the whole thing.

“You’ll have plenty of time to get out. It’ll be listed as a suicide. He’s been sick for a long time. His doctor will testify to that. He was so sick and worried, he jumped to his death.”

She stared at me hard. “Is it all clear?”

“Yes.” I looked at her. Her long blond hair, her oval face, the slim white column that was her throat. “It’s all clear. Like glass.”

I poured myself a drink. I needed it. I was going to need a lot more.

“We won’t be able to see each other for a long time,” she said. She watched me drink. “We don’t want to give our friends something to talk about.”

“I won’t like not seeing you.”

She patted my face. I put down my drink, caged her slender hand in mine, and kissed her wrist. I saw the light blue veins criss-crossing under the delicate skin.

I brought her close to me. I kissed her warm lips. “Baby,” I breathed. “Diane, baby.”

“Paul, listen to me. We haven’t much time.”

“All right, sweet.” I kissed her again.

“Come on. We can’t afford to get there late.”

I crouched low in the back of the racer. I heard the street noises, the gab of the night crowds, the not-so-mild cursings of the taxi-jet drivers.

It all seemed so unreal. Back there, on my haunches, a wrench gripped tight in my sweaty hand. I was going to kill a man. A man I knew, a man I respected. And for a woman. All for a woman.

I thought about getting up and telling Diane to go to hell and to get herself another stooge. I thought about a lot of things. Then I thought of Diane. Her sweet white body. The way she sighed when I kissed her hard. And I knew I was going to go through with it.

The racer stopped, its jets cut off. I heard the hum as the door opened and she got out.

This was it. I sweated. It dripped down in an endless stream.

The seconds went by. Then the minutes.

They got in and the door hummed shut and I heard their laughter blending together. They settled back and the jets roared. The racer woke up to new life and it shot away.

“How was the trip?” I heard Diane asking.

“Cold. And I’m not sure it was worth it. Those Martians drive a hard bargain.” He coughed. “Diane, you’re not too set on going out tonight, are you?”

“Why?” she asked.

“I thought how nice it would be if we spent the evening at home.”

“Just as you say, Roger.”

“You don’t care?”

“Of course not.”

She was so calm, so damn calm. There would never be another like Diane.

“You won’t regret it,” Roger promised.

“My, but this boulevard is deserted,” she said. “Not a soul in sight.”

That was for my benefit. It was my cue.

I sat up silently.

He saw me then in the rear-view mirror. “What the hell?” He started to turn.

My arm sprang alive. The wrench thudded against his skull. A half cry spilled from his lips. Then his head fell forward on his chest.

“Hit him again,” Diane urged.

“But —”

“Do as I say.”

I hit him again, hard.

It was done. I settled back. The wrench was still in my hand. I looked at it, then let it fall.

“Are you all right?” Diane asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“You’re not going to be sick, are you?”

“No! You think I’m a kid?”

“You did it for an old woman.”

“Stop it.”

“Today is my birthday, don’t you know? I’m thirty.”

“Shut up.”

“I wonder what he got for my birthday.”

“Please.”

“I’m sorry. Really I am. I feel like talking. If I don’t I think I’d scream.”

So I let her talk. I didn’t answer her. She babbled away like she was crazy. She kept it up till we got to their apartment.

Diane got out first and made sure the way was clear. “We’ll use the back stairs,” she said when she got back. “We both can manage him.”

It was dark and it was late and we didn’t see anybody. We went through the service entrance. It was too heavy a load for me to do it alone. Two flights up. Diane helped me with him.

I breathed easier when we were in the marble hall outside the apartment. She quickly unlocked the heavy plastic door and we got him inside. She fumbled for the inner-lighting switch.

“Happy birthday,” they shouted.

Now I knew why Roger had wanted to spend the evening at home.

We stood there, Diane and myself, with Roger between us.

Then they stopped shouting and stared at us. I thought they would never stop staring.

Read Full Post »

Before he invented the police procedural as crime writer Ed McBain, and before he was successful author and screenwriter Evan Hunter, he was short story writer Salvatore Albert Lombino (1926-2005) from the Bronx.

As Evan Hunter, Lombino wrote the novel “The Blackboard Jungle,” the screenplay for Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and much more. As Ed McBain, Lombino was famous for his “87th Precinct” novels and stories, of which he wrote 55.

Lombino got his start writing science fiction in the 1950s, publishing seven sci-fi short stories between 1951 and 1953. The tale below is his first.

In 1952, Lombino legally changed his name to Evan Hunter after his agent convinced him that his pen name was more appealing and would sell better. Apparently so.

As for the origin of “Evan Hunter,” consider that he attended Evander Childs High School and Hunter College.

———

Reaching For The Moon

By S. A. Lombino
Published in Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1951

The laboratory was brightly lit, and four men in business suits surrounded the large table. They stared down at the blueprints on the table, some scratching their heads, others rubbing their chins in speculation. The thin man in gray tweeds eyed them cautiously, his breath coming in short, anxious rushes.

The big man at the head of the table adjusted his eyeglasses, his hand lingering on the rim for a second. Then he cleared his throat and said, “It won’t work, Dr. Saunders.”

The little man in gray tweeds darted impatient eyes at the man who had just spoken. “Why won’t it work? Why not?”

“It can’t be done,” the big man stated simply. “Maybe sometime in the future, but certainly not now.”

Saunders stretched a bony hand out from the cuff of his tweeds. “It can be done,” he said, slapping that hand on the table. “It’s all here. You’ve just seen it; you’ve studied it. Damn it, this isn’t a fly-by-night affair! I’ve worked on these plans for more than eight years. I know it will work.”

A man in blue serge shrugged and said, “I’m afraid Bragg is right, Dr. Saunders.” He tugged at his collar, the fat hanging in loose folds around his neck.

Saunders turned to eye the newcomer. “You agree?” he asked defiantly. “Even after studying my work? You agree that my proposed rocket couldn’t possibly reach the Moon?”

“It might,” the man in blue serge admitted, “but we can’t speculate on a thing of this nature. After all, Dr. Saunders, there’ll be money involved and…”

“Money!” Saunders snorted in disgust. “Is that all you’re worried about? You’re one of the richest men on Earth, Mr. Peterson. How can you let money stand in the way of what may well be man’s greatest achievement?”

Bragg spoke again, peering from behind the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. “Peterson is right; this thing would cost millions — more than any of us would be willing to risk. We appreciate your considering us, but…”

Saunders cut in sharply, “Does that go for all of you? Is Mr. Bragg speaking for all of you?”

A heavy silence crowded into the room. Saunders confronted Peterson again.

“He speaks for me,” Peterson said.

“And you, Mr. Thorpe?” Saunders asked.

“Yes, yes, I’m inclined to agree,” a balding man in glen plaid announced.

“Mr. Slade?” Saunders turned to a weasel-like man dressed in solemn black.

Slade nodded, his face chalky white against the black of his garb.

“I’ve asked you four men because you were probably the richest men on Earth. I’ve asked you because I thought perhaps you would see the significance of such a project. To reach the Moon.” Saunders’ eyes gleamed with an intense light. “To reach the Moon.”

“And when we reach it?” Peterson asked. “Then what?”

“Unlimited space,” Saunders answered with feeling. “New worlds, worlds beyond the imagination of man. The Moon is only the first step, the experimental step. From there, Mars… or Venus… or a new solar system.”

Bragg said, “Rubbish. Even if this should work — I’m not at all convinced it will, but even if it should — what’s on the Moon for us? Bare crags and lonely craters. Cold, bleak atmosphere. Nothing.”

“Nothing that would bring in money, true,” Saunders said. “But look at Copernicus and Galileo. Look at Pasteur and Edison and Curie. Look at… oh, I could go on all night. What these men contributed to mankind can never be measured in terms of gold or silver. Can’t you see that?”

“Who wants to go to the Moon, anyway?” Thorpe asked, passing a hand over his bald head. “We’ve got troubles of our own right here on Earth. Plenty to settle right here, man. Plenty. In a little while perhaps. Sometime in the future. Twenty, twenty-five years. But now, unthinkable.”

“We’ve been saying that too long,” Saunders snapped. “Now is the time! Not twenty or twenty-five years from now, but right now! Science has given us the means; it’s up to us to take the opportunity and use it.”

“It couldn’t be done profitably,” Peterson said drily.

“Profitably,” Saunders said bitterly. “Are your wars profitable?” he suddenly shouted, bringing his bony fist crashing to the table top.

“Let’s not get violent,” Slade said. It was the first thing he’d said all night. Saunders somehow had the feeling that a corpse had spoken.

“Exactly,” he said, “Let’s not get violent; let’s spend some of the money that’s been buying munitions and lives. Instead of razing cities to the ground, let’s go up into the skies. Let’s spend that money for a project that’s worthwhile. For once, forget the profit and think of the meaning to mankind.”

He paused and his voice grew lower. “We’ve been ravaged by too many wars, gentleman. Can’t we stop this useless butchery and devote our time and energy to something constructive? Can’t we? I know my rocket will work. It’s scientifically sound. I know, too, that I can get a crew of scientists and technicians to take it to the Moon and back. All I need is the money and a little time. Just a little time.”

“There’s a war going on, Saunders,” Bragg reminded him. He had lit a cigar with a gold lighter and was sitting now, puffing leisurely, blowing smoke at the ceiling.

“I know,” Saunders said. “Two wars in the past thirty years and now another one. But consider this a moment. A trip to the Moon would probably end all hostilities on Earth. It would probably unify this planet as no other force has ever done. It will galvanize humanity into constructive action. It will open new vistas that cannot possibly admit plans for war.”

Peterson yawned openly. “Mmmm. I must say you’re an idealist, Saunders. I doubt very much if anything short of a trip to the Sun would unify the people of Earth.” He chuckled a little at this and looked to the others for approval.

“That’s right,” Bragg agreed. “There’ll always be wars, Saunders; the Earth is overpopulated, always will be.”

“More reason to find new worlds,” Saunders said tiredly.

“The only solution is war,” Bragg insisted. “Survival of the fittest. Forget your crazy ideas about new worlds. There’s plenty of room right here… for the people who win.”

“And suppose we lose this time?” Saunders asked.

“We’ll never lose,” Bragg said with certainty.

Slade smiled a thin, wry smile. “Exactly, Bragg,” he said. “As for me, whenever people are ready to fight, I’ll be ready to supply them with the goods they’ll need. In the meantime, the Moon can wait.”

“A year, maybe two,” Saunders pleaded, “and the Universe will be open to us. Think of it, think of it… ” Again his eyes lit with intense ardor.

“You think of it,” Bragg said, “I’m going home.”

The other men nodded and began bustling into their overcoats. Saunders stood by helplessly, feeling his last ounce of strength seep from his body.

“Nice of you to think of us,” Thorpe said cheerily. “Business is business, though.”

“Yes,” Saunders said quietly.

“If you can figure a way to put a warhead on that rocket of yours,” Slade suggested.

“Not a bad idea,” Bragg admitted.

“Well, Saunders,” Peterson said, “we’ve got to be running. No hard feelings, of course; in fact, I wish you lots of luck.” He chuckled again and opened the door. “Good night.”

The rest of the men filed out after him, nodding their farewells. Saunders watched them through the window of his laboratory, watched chauffeurs open the doors to long limousines, watched tail lights disappear into the blackness of the night, little red pin-points emphasizing his failure.

He walked back to the table and sat, cradling his head in his arms, leaning on the blueprints of his ship.

All I needed was money, he thought, money and a little time. A year or two at the most. A year or two.

Slowly he rose and brushed a thin hand over his wet eyes. There was work to be done, and tomorrow was another day.

He walked to the door leading to his inner laboratory and paused. It was past midnight, and being a punctilious person, Saunders ripped the day’s page from the calendar, exposing the new day to view.

The new day was September 21st, the year 3951.

He snapped off the lights and stepped quickly into the other room.

Read Full Post »

One reason I like science fiction is that sci-fi plots can be built around virtually any scenario, real or imagined. Attacks by giant mutant insects? No problem. Visitors from another dimension? Why not? Such grand and glorious creative freedom.

In the story below, the author presents the concept that “ionized waste” accumulates in the atomic drives of spaceships, and, if not removed by special “De-Fouling Gear,” will blow the spaceship to smithereens. The story unfolds around that premise and culminates in… well, read the story.

———

Sequel

By Ben Smith
Published in Rocket Stories, July 1953

Jubil drifted slowly, alone except for the phosphorescent star shine that filtered through the face-plate of his suit. He was resting, conserving the oxygen that hissed steadily and quietly through the valve near his neck. It was time for peace; there had been too much violence already.

Once, as his body continued its involuntary and aimless turning, Jubil saw the dark hull of the Mercury II, the outer access door firmly closed now and the stern beginning to fluoresce with the secondary radiation that betokened the firing of the drives. Still, Jubil could feel no anger at Radik.

When the crew had conspired to mutiny, when Radik, Olgan and the rest had decided to take over the operation of the Mercury II, at that time had been the need for honest anger. Jubil had hesitated weakly instead, had chosen to be a bystander and had suffered the fate of the average non-participant; he had been outcast from the closed circle of both friend and enemy. Kane, once Captain of the Mercury II, was now dead and his charred body drifting somewhere in the spatial wilderness.

“Have you changed your thinking, Jubil?” It was Radik’s voice in the helmet phones and Jubil could almost see the heavy face with its fringe of space-black beard. Jubil rested, listening to the cosmic interference in his R-link equipment.

“Jubil! Jubil Marken! Have you changed your mind?”

“Radik —” Jubil formed the words slowly, using his lips only and breathing shallowly. “Piracy suits you, Radik. You are one of the most ruthless…”

Jubil could hear Radik’s throaty chuckle. “A dead man of honor is still dead, Jubil.” The communication circuit went silent except for the buzz of voices in the background. Jubil drifted on, conscious of the fact that he was moving, but so full of the lethargy of the moment that he neglected it.

What would it be like, this bit of time that was left? It had been an hour since Jubil had been forcibly ejected from the access door of the Mercury II; the flask at his back carried oxygen for four. Three hours of life — while around his slowly turning body was the agelessness of endless space. Jubil smiled, just a little, conscious of the fact that he felt no fear. The die was cast now; he had made his decision finally, and he did not regret it.

“There is space-craft in Sector 180, Jubil,” it was Radik again, “Racon has just reported it. But they’ll miss you by at least ten parsecs. Have you changed your mind?”

“No.”

“Very well.” Jubil could see the pulsing of the Mercury’s drives, now. Radik was taking no chances on the strange ship still light years away from his stern being patrol. “Good news for you, Jubil. You are in the gravitational field of an asteroid. You can’t see it, yet; it’s directly above you. But you’ll drift to it and cling like a snail on a stone for as long as time itself. Good-bye, Jubil.”

Strange, Jubil thought, that there was no anger in him now. There should be oxygen enough for a good two hours yet, so this eerie ennui could not be the prelude to a rising carbon dioxide quotient. A normal man would be bitter, perhaps even hysterical in his anger and his fear of death. Yet there was only this peaceful drifting toward the still-invisible asteroid that hung in space above his own head.

Jubil closed his eyes, shutting out the phosphorescence of the velvet that was space. The exhaust of the Mercury II might still be in sight. If so, it was not visible through the restriction of the plastic face-plate of Jubil’s suit.

Jubil found himself wondering where Kane could have drifted since the captain’s inert body had been shoved out of the Mercury II’s access door. Perhaps, even now, it was bound, like a rudderless ship, toward the selfsame asteroid that would be Jubil’s last and permanent home.

Thinking of Kane, Jubil remembered also Schoenbirk, the erratic genius whose mathematical theorizing was used in the design of the Schoenbirk-Halsted De-Fouling Gear. Had it been years, or lifetimes ago, when the three of them had been undergraduates together at the Academy?

Schoenbirk, working with the high electrostatic potentials necessary to insure the exhaust of opposite-sign waste from the complex guts of the atomic drive had been blown to pieces by the accumulation of the very thing his device was designed to prevent. Random electrical forces gathering around the discharge ring until their workable mass became great enough to enter and initiate a chain reaction in the fuel storage tank.

Along with Schoenbirk had gone even the tremendously heavy concrete walls of the laboratory. All that, however, had been after Jubil had washed out of the Academy and gone into the space-freighters as a Drive-Engineer. In the intervening years, Jubil had become thoroughly familiar with the perfected Schoenbirk-Halsted…

Kane! There was a man who had made the Academy his own playground. Kane had passed with the greatest of ease, worked his way through astro-navigation, the Allen Drives, space-time computations…

Jubil grimaced wryly. It had been the latter with its advanced mathematics that had been his own downfall. So Kane had gone on to the first officer berth in a gilded passenger liner while Jubil developed radiation scars on his hands from “in the hole” engineering on decrepit freighters. And the great leveler had met and conquered them all…

Schoenbirk, even in the explosion that took his life had accomplished a great thing: the discovery of the final flaw in the De-Fouling Gear that had lived after him. For without proper removal of the ionized waste from its drive engines, the largest freighter became an ever-accumulating and treacherously unstable fissionable pile.

Kane — one of the legendary figures of the history of astro-navigation. Kane with his Academy background and his proud but personable air had become one of the most talked-of Space captains who had ever lived.

Jubil could still, in memory, see Kane, standing spread-kneed on the bridge of the Comet, one of the first; later the Wanderer, the first of the luxury space liners. The Mercury, and the Mercury II, the super-ships that made week-end excursion flights that spanned from galaxy to galaxy.

A misplaced decimal point and a misplaced trust and the greatness of Schoenbirk and Kane lay behind them. Even as his drifting body, cumbersome in the space-suit, touched the asteroid, Jubil was aware of a strange weariness that invaded every part of him except his mind. At least, the waning oxygen would leave him his thoughts.

He rested, conserving his strength. For what reason? The thing that was to happen was as certain as Fate and as unavoidable by the machinations of man. Was it, after all, because Jubil was prey to anger? No. He was now too near death for anger to seem important.

The face of the asteroid was cold and Jubil lay against it, held as lightly as a maiden’s kiss by the ounce or so of gravity.

He was smiling as the darkness of space was suddenly brilliantly lighted. Spears of bluish flame, each with its tip of crimson, spread across the warp of time, and subconsciously Jubil found himself waiting for the shock wave. Then he laughed. In space there was no atmosphere; he would never be buffeted by the blast that had destroyed the Mercury II and the mutineer Radik.

Jubil thought again of the hellish radiation to which he had exposed himself. There was no other way. To destroy the delicate regulating linkage of the Schoenbirk-Halsted, a man must enter the combustion chamber where the pilot-piles idled. There had been just time enough for that, before Radik had sent for him.

Had there been ample oxygen, Jubil Marken knew that he would only have lived until his radiation-seared heart painfully failed to function. But, thanks to Radik, Jubil had been spared both the disintegration of the Mercury II and an agonizing death from slow radiation burn.

He was, Jubil reflected, as effective in his own way as was Schoenbirk and Kane. In the end, he was still an Academy man with them. He was peacefully smiling as he twisted tight the oxygen valve at his throat…

Original illustration from Rocket Stories by Milton Berwin.

Read Full Post »

Miriam Allen deFord (1888-1975) was an author of mysteries and science fiction who won awards in both fields. She was a member of the Socialist Party of America and advocated for birth control and women’s suffrage.

She once wrote, “I am unalterably and actively opposed to fascism, Nazism, Hitlerism, Hirohitoism, or whatever name may be applied to the monster.”

After her second husband died when she was 46, deFord focused on her writing career. She died at age 86 in her longtime residence, the Ambassador Hotel in San Francisco.

———

The Margenes

By Miriam Allen deFord
Published in If Worlds of Science Fiction, February 1956

There is a small striped smelt called the grunion which has odd egg-laying habits. At high tide, on the second, third, and fourth nights after the full of the moon from March to June, thousands of female grunions ride in on the waves to a beach in southern California near San Diego, dig tail-first into the soft sand, deposit their eggs, then ride back on the wash of the next wave. The whole operation lasts about six seconds.

On the nights when the grunion are running, hordes of people used to come to the beach with baskets and other containers, and with torches to light the scene, and try to catch the elusive little fish in their hands.

They were doing that on an April night in 1960. In the midst of the excitement of the chase, only a few of them noticed that something else was riding the waves in with the grunions.

Among the few who stopped grunion-catching long enough to investigate were a girl named Marge Hickin and a boy named Gene Towanda. They were UCLA students, “going together,” who had come down on Saturday from Los Angeles for the fun.

“What on earth do you think these can be, Gene?” Marge asked, holding out on her palms three or four of the little circular, wriggling objects, looking like small-size doughnuts, pale straw in color.

“Never saw anything like them,” Gene admitted. “But then my major’s psychology, not zoology. They don’t seem to bite, anyway. Here let’s collect some of them instead of the fish. That dingus of yours will hold water. We can take them to the Marine Biology lab tomorrow and find out what they are.”

Marge Hickin and Gene Towanda had started a world-wide economic revolution.

None of the scientists at the university laboratory knew what the little live straw-colored circles were, either. In fact, after a preliminary study they wouldn’t say positively whether the creatures were animal or vegetable; they displayed voluntary movement, but they seemed to have no respiratory or digestive organs. They were completely anomalous.

The grunion ran again that night, and Gene and Marge stayed down to help the laboratory assistants gather several hundred of the strange new objects for further study. They were so numerous that they were swamping the fish, and the crowds at the beach began to grumble that their sport was being spoiled.

Next night the grunion stopped running — but the little doughnuts didn’t. They never stopped. They came in by hundreds of thousands every night, and those which nobody gathered wriggled their way over the land until some of them even turned up on the highways (where a lot of them were smashed by automobiles), on the streets and sidewalks of La Jolla, and as far north as Oceanside and as far south as downtown San Diego itself.

The things were becoming a pest. There were indignant letters to the papers, and editorials were written calling on the authorities to do something. Just what to do, nobody knew; the only way to kill the circular little objects from the sea seemed to be to crush them — and they were too abundant for that to be very effective.

Meanwhile, the laboratory kept studying them.

Marge and Gene were interested enough to come down again the next weekend to find out what, if anything, had been discovered. Not much had; but one of the biochemists at the laboratory casually mentioned that chemically, the straw-colored circles seemed to be almost pure protein, with some carbohydrates and fats, and that apparently they contained all the essential vitamins.

College student that he was, Gene Towanda immediately swallowed one of the wriggling things down whole, as a joke.

It tickled a little, but that wasn’t what caused the delighted amazement on his face.

“Gosh!” he exclaimed. “It’s delicious!”

He swallowed another handful.

That was the beginning of the great margene industry.

It was an astute reporter, getting a feature story on the sensational new food find, who gave the creatures their name, in honor of the boy and girl who had first brought the things to the attention of the scientists. He dubbed them margenes, and margenes they remained.

“Dr. O. Y. Willard, director of the laboratory,” his story said in part, “thinks the margenes may be the answer to the increasing and alarming problem of malnutrition, especially in undeveloped countries.

“‘For decades now,’ he said, ‘scientists have been worried by the growing gap between world population and world food facilities. Over-farming, climatic changes caused by erosion and deforestation, the encroachment of building areas on agricultural land, and above all the unrestricted growth of population, greatest in the very places where food is becoming scarcest and most expensive, have produced a situation where, if no remedy is found, starvation or semi-starvation may be the fate of half the Earth’s people. The ultimate result would be the slow degeneration and death of the entire human race.

“‘Many remedies have been suggested,’ Dr. Willard commented further. ‘They range from compulsory birth control to the production of synthetic food, hydroponics, and the harvesting of plankton from the oceans. Each of these presents almost insuperable difficulties.

“‘The one ideal solution would be the discovery of some universal food that would be nourishing, very cheap, plentiful, tasty, and that would not violate the taboos of any people anywhere in the world. In the margenes we may have discovered that food.’

“‘We don’t know where the margenes came from,’ the director went on to say, ‘and we don’t even know yet what they are, biologically speaking. What we do know is that they provide more energy per gram than any other edible product known to man, that everyone who has eaten them is enthusiastic about their taste, that they can be processed and distributed easily and cheaply, and that they are acceptable even to those who have religious or other objections to certain other foods, such as beef, among the Hindus or pork among the Jews and Mohammedans.

“‘Even vegetarians can eat them,’ Dr. Willard remarked, ‘since they are decidedly not animal in nature. Neither, I may add, are they vegetable. They are a hitherto utterly unknown synthesis of chemical elements in living form. Their origin remains undiscovered.'”

Naturally, there was no thought of feeding people on raw margenes. Only a few isolated places in either hemisphere would have found live food agreeable. Experiment showed that the most satisfactory way to prepare them was to boil them alive, like crabs or lobsters. They could then be ground and pressed into cakes, cut into convenient portions. One one-inch-square cube made a nourishing and delicious meal for a sedentary adult, two for a man engaged in hard physical labor.

And they kept coming in from the Pacific Ocean nightly, by the million.

By this time none of them had to be swept off streets or highways. The beach where for nearly a century throngs had gathered for the sport of catching grunion was off bounds now; it was the property of California Margene, Inc., a private corporation heavily subsidized by the Federal Government as an infant industry.

The grunions themselves had to find another place to lay their eggs, or die off — nobody cared which. The sand they had used for countless millennia as an incubator was hemmed in by factory buildings and trampled by margene-gatherers.

The whole beautiful shore for miles around was devastated; the university had to move its marine biological laboratory elsewhere; La Jolla, once a delightful suburb and tourist attraction, had become a dirty, noisy honkytonk town where processing and cannery workers lived and spent their off-hours; the unique Torrey Pines had been chopped down because they interfered with the erection of a freight airport.

But half the world’s people were living on margenes.

The sole possession of this wonderful foodstuff gave more power to the United States than had priority in the atomic bomb. Only behind the Iron Curtain did the product of California Margene, Inc. fail to penetrate. Pravda ran parallel articles on the same day, one claiming that margenes — brzdichnoya — had first appeared long ago on a beach of the Caspian Sea and had for years formed most of the Russian diet; the other warning the deluded nations receiving free supplies as part of American foreign aid that the margenes had been injected with drugs aimed at making them weak and submissive to the exploitation of the capitalist-imperialists.

There was a dangerous moment at the beginning when the sudden sharp decline in stocks of all other food products threatened another 1929. But with federal aid a financial crash was averted and now a new high level of prosperity had been established. Technological unemployment was brief, and most of the displaced workers were soon retained for jobs in one of the many ramifications of the new margene industry.

Agriculture, of course, underwent a short deep depression, not only in America but all over the world; but it came to an end as food other than margenes quickly became a luxury product. Farmers were able to cut their production to a small fraction of the former yield, and to get rich on the dizzying prices offered for bread, apples, or potatoes. And this increased the prosperity of the baking and other related industries as well.

In fact, ordinary food costs (which meant margene costs) were so low that a number of the larger unions voluntarily asked for wage decreases in their next contracts. California Margene, Inc. was able to process, pack, and distribute margene cakes at an infinitesimal retail price, by reason of the magnitude of the output.

An era of political good feeling fell upon the western world, reflected from the well-fed comfort of vast populations whose members never before in their lives had had quite enough to eat. The fear of famine seemed to be over forever, and with it the fear of the diseases and the social unrest that follow famine.

Even the U.S.S.R. and its satellites, in a conciliatory move in the United Nations Assembly, suggested that the long cold war ought to be amenable to a reasonable solution through a series of amicable discussions. The western nations, assenting, guessed shrewdly that the Iron Curtain countries “wanted in” on the margenes.

Marge Hickin and Gene Towanda, who had started it all, left college for copywriting jobs with the agency handling the enormous margene publicity; they were married a few months later.

And the margenes continued to come in from the sea in countless millions. They were being harvested now from the Pacific itself, near the shoreline, before they reached the beach. Still, no research could discover their original source.

Only a few scientists worried about what would happen if the margenes should disappear as suddenly as they had arrived. Attempts at breeding the creatures had failed completely. They did not undergo fission, they did not sporulate, they seemed to have no sex. No methods of reproduction known in the plant or animal kingdom seemed to apply to them.

Hundreds of them were kept alive for long periods — they lived with equal ease in either air or water, and they did not take nourishment, unless they absorbed it from their environment — but no sign of fertility ever appeared. Neither did they seem to die of natural causes. They just kept coming in…

On the night of May 7, 1969, not a single margene was visible in the ocean or on the beach.

They never came again.

What happened as a result is known to every student of history. The world-wide economic collapse, followed by the fall of the most stable governments, the huge riots that arose from the frantic attempts to get possession of the existing stocks of margene cakes or of the rare luxury items of other edibles, the announcement by the U.S.S.R. that it had known from the beginning the whole thing was a gigantic American hoax in the interests of the imperialistic bloodsuckers, the simultaneous atomic attacks by east and west, the Short War of 1970 that ruined most of what bombs had spared of the Earth, the slow struggle back of the remnant of civilization which is all of existence you and I have ever known — all these were a direct outgrowth of that first appearance of the margenes on the beach near San Diego on an April night in 1960.

Marge and Gene Towanda were divorced soon after they had both lost their jobs. She was killed in the hydrogen blast that wiped out San Diego; he fell in the War of 1970. “Margene” became a dirty word in every language on Earth. What small amount of money and ability can be spared is, as everyone knows, devoted today to a desperate international effort to reach and colonize another habitable planet of the Solar System, if such there be.

As for the margenes, themselves, out of the untold millions that had come, only a few thousand were lucky enough to survive and find their way back to their overcrowded starting-point.

In their strange way of communication — as incomprehensible to us as would be their means of nourishment and reproduction, or their constitution itself — they made known to their kin what had happened to them.

There is no possibility, in spite of the terrific over-population of their original home and of the others to which they are constantly migrating, that they will ever come here again.

There has been much speculation, particularly among writers of science fiction, on what would happen if aliens from other planets should invade Earth. Would they arrive as benefactors or as conquerors? Would we welcome them or would we overcome and capture them and put them in zoos and museums? Would we meet them in friendship or with hostility?

The margenes gave us the answer.

Beings from outer space came to Earth in 1960.

And we ate them.

The running of the grunions on the southern California coast.

Read Full Post »

I can’t seem to stop posting sci-fi short stories by Fredric Brown. Here’s another one, and it’s a beauty.

———

Hall of Mirrors

By Fredric Brown
Published in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1953

For an instant you think it is temporary blindness, this sudden dark that comes in the middle of a bright afternoon.

It must be blindness, you think; could the sun that was tanning you have gone out instantaneously, leaving you in utter blackness?

Then the nerves of your body tell you that you are standing, whereas only a second ago you were sitting comfortably, almost reclining, in a canvas chair. In the patio of a friend’s house in Beverly Hills. Talking to Barbara, your fiancée. Looking at Barbara — Barbara in a swim suit — her skin golden tan in the brilliant sunshine, beautiful.

You wore swimming trunks. Now you do not feel them on you; the slight pressure of the elastic waistband is no longer there against your waist. You touch your hands to your hips. You are naked. And standing.

Whatever has happened to you is more than a change to sudden darkness or to sudden blindness.

You raise your hands gropingly before you. They touch a plain smooth surface, a wall. You spread them apart and each hand reaches a corner. You pivot slowly. A second wall, then a third, then a door. You are in a closet about four feet square.

Your hand finds the knob of the door. It turns and you push the door open.

There is light now. The door has opened to a lighted room… a room that you have never seen before.

It is not large, but it is pleasantly furnished — although the furniture is of a style that is strange to you. Modesty makes you open the door cautiously the rest of the way. But the room is empty of people.

You step into the room, turning to look behind you into the closet, which is now illuminated by light from the room. The closet is and is not a closet; it is the size and shape of one, but it contains nothing, not a single hook, no rod for hanging clothes, no shelf. It is an empty, blank-walled, four-by-four-foot space.

You close the door to it and stand looking around the room. It is about twelve by sixteen feet. There is one door, but it is closed. There are no windows. Five pieces of furniture. Four of them you recognize — more or less.

One looks like a very functional desk. One is obviously a chair… a comfortable-looking one. There is a table, although its top is on several levels instead of only one. Another is a bed, or couch. Something shimmering is lying across it and you walk over and pick the shimmering something up and examine it. It is a garment.

You are naked, so you put it on. Slippers are part way under the bed (or couch) and you slide your feet into them. They fit, and they feel warm and comfortable as nothing you have ever worn on your feet has felt. Like lamb’s wool, but softer.

You are dressed now. You look at the door — the only door of the room except that of the closet (closet?) from which you entered it. You walk to the door and before you try the knob, you see the small typewritten sign pasted just above it that reads:

This door has a time lock set to open in one hour. For reasons you will soon understand, it is better that you do not leave this room before then. There is a letter for you on the desk. Please read it.

It is not signed. You look at the desk and see that there is an envelope lying on it.

You do not yet go to take that envelope from the desk and read the letter that must be in it.

Why not? Because you are frightened.

You see other things about the room. The lighting has no source that you can discover. It comes from nowhere. It is not indirect lighting; the ceiling and the walls are not reflecting it at all.

They didn’t have lighting like that, back where you came from. What did you mean by back where you came from?

You close your eyes. You tell yourself: I am Norman Hastings. I am an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California. I am twenty-five years old, and this is the year nineteen hundred and fifty-four.

You open your eyes and look again.

They didn’t use that style of furniture in Los Angeles — or anywhere else that you know of — in 1954. That thing over in the corner — you can’t even guess what it is. So might your grandfather, at your age, have looked at a television set.

You look down at yourself, at the shimmering garment that you found waiting for you. With thumb and forefinger you feel its texture.

It’s like nothing you’ve ever touched before.

I am Norman Hastings. This is nineteen hundred and fifty-four.

Suddenly you must know, and at once.

You go to the desk and pick up the envelope that lies upon it. Your name is typed on the outside: Norman Hastings.

Your hands shake a little as you open it. Do you blame them?

There are several pages, typewritten. Dear Norman, it starts. You turn quickly to the end to look for the signature. It is unsigned.

You turn back and start reading.

Do not be afraid. There is nothing to fear, but much to explain. Much that you must understand before the time lock opens that door. Much that you must accept and — obey.

You have already guessed that you are in the future — in what, to you, seems to be the future. The clothes and the room must have told you that. I planned it that way so the shock would not be too sudden, so you would realize it over the course of several minutes rather than read it here — and quite probably disbelieve what you read.

The ‘closet’ from which you have just stepped is, as you have by now realized, a time machine. From it you stepped into the world of 2004. The date is April 7th, just fifty years from the time you last remember.

You cannot return.

I did this to you and you may hate me for it; I do not know. That is up to you to decide, but it does not matter. What does matter, and not to you alone, is another decision which you must make. I am incapable of making it.

Who is writing this to you? I would rather not tell you just yet. By the time you have finished reading this, even though it is not signed (for I knew you would look first for a signature), I will not need to tell you who I am. You will know.

I am seventy-five years of age. I have, in this year 2004, been studying ‘time’ for thirty of those years. I have completed the first time machine ever built — and thus far, its construction, even the fact that it has been constructed, is my own secret.

You have just participated in the first major experiment. It will be your responsibility to decide whether there shall ever be any more experiments with it, whether it should be given to the world, or whether it should be destroyed and never used again.

End of the first page. You look up for a moment, hesitating to turn the next page. Already you suspect what is coming.

You turn the page.

I constructed the first time machine a week ago. My calculations had told me that it would work, but not how it would work. I had expected it to send an object back in time — it works backward in time only, not forward — physically unchanged and intact.

My first experiment showed me my error. I placed a cube of metal in the machine — it was a miniature of the one you just walked out of — and set the machine to go backward ten years. I flicked the switch and opened the door, expecting to find the cube vanished. Instead I found it had crumbled to powder.

I put in another cube and sent it two years back. The second cube came back unchanged, except that it was newer, shinier.

That gave me the answer. I had been expecting the cubes to go back in time, and they had done so, but not in the sense I had expected them to. Those metal cubes had been fabricated about three years previously. I had sent the first one back years before it had existed in its fabricated form. Ten years ago it had been ore. The machine returned it to that state.

Do you see how our previous theories of time travel have been wrong? We expected to be able to step into a time machine in, say, 2004, set it for fifty years back, and then step out in the year 1954… but it does not work that way. The machine does not move in time. Only whatever is within the machine is affected, and then just with relation to itself and not to the rest of the Universe.

I confirmed this with guinea pigs by sending one six weeks old five weeks back and it came out a baby.

I need not outline all my experiments here. You will find a record of them in the desk and you can study it later.

Do you understand now what has happened to you, Norman?

You begin to understand. And you begin to sweat.

The I who wrote that letter you are now reading is you, yourself at the age of seventy-five, in this year of 2004. You are that seventy-five-year-old man, with your body returned to what it had been fifty years ago, with all the memories of fifty years of living wiped out.

You invented the time machine.

And before you used it on yourself, you made these arrangements to help you orient yourself. You wrote yourself the letter which you are now reading.

But if those fifty years are — to you — gone, what of all your friends, those you loved? What of your parents? What of the girl you are going — were going — to marry?

You read on:

Yes, you will want to know what has happened. Mom died in 1963, Dad in 1968. You married Barbara in 1956. I am sorry to tell you that she died only three years later, in a plane crash. You have one son. He is still living; his name is Walter; he is now forty-six years old and is an accountant in Kansas City.

Tears come into your eyes and for a moment you can no longer read. Barbara dead — dead for forty-five years. And only minutes ago, in subjective time, you were sitting next to her, sitting in the bright sun in a Beverly Hills patio…

You force yourself to read again.

But back to the discovery. You begin to see some of its implications. You will need time to think to see all of them.

It does not permit time travel as we have thought of time travel, but it gives us immortality of a sort. Immortality of the kind I have temporarily given us.

Is it good? Is it worth while to lose the memory of fifty years of one’s life in order to return one’s body to relative youth? The only way I can find out is to try, as soon as I have finished writing this and made my other preparations.

You will know the answer.

But before you decide, remember that there is another problem, more important than the psychological one. I mean overpopulation.

If our discovery is given to the world, if all who are old or dying can make themselves young again, the population will almost double every generation. Nor would the world — not even our own relatively enlightened country — be willing to accept compulsory birth control as a solution.

Give this to the world, as the world is today in 2004, and within a generation there will be famine, suffering, war. Perhaps a complete collapse of civilization.

Yes, we have reached other planets, but they are not suitable for colonizing. The stars may be our answer, but we are a long way from reaching them. When we do, someday, the billions of habitable planets that must be out there will be our answer… our living room. But until then, what is the answer?

Destroy the machine? But think of the countless lives it can save, the suffering it can prevent. Think of what it would mean to a man dying of cancer. Think…

Think. You finish the letter and put it down.

You think of Barbara dead for forty-five years. And of the fact that you were married to her for three years and that those years are lost to you.

Fifty years lost. You damn the old man of seventy-five whom you became and who has done this to you… who has given you this decision to make.

Bitterly, you know what the decision must be. You think that he knew, too, and realize that he could safely leave it in your hands. Damn him, he should have known.

Too valuable to destroy, too dangerous to give.

The other answer is painfully obvious.

You must be custodian of this discovery and keep it secret until it is safe to give, until mankind has expanded to the stars and has new worlds to populate, or until, even without that, he has reached a state of civilization where he can avoid overpopulation by rationing births to the number of accidental — or voluntary — deaths.

If neither of those things has happened in another fifty years (and are they likely so soon?), then you, at seventy-five, will be writing another letter like this one. You will be undergoing another experience similar to the one you’re going through now. And making the same decision, of course.

Why not? You’ll be the same person again.

Time and again, to preserve this secret until Man is ready for it.

How often will you again sit at a desk like this one, thinking the thoughts you are thinking now, feeling the grief you now feel?

There is a click at the door and you know that the time lock has opened, that you are now free to leave this room, free to start a new life for yourself in place of the one you have already lived and lost.

But you are in no hurry now to walk directly through that door.

You sit there, staring straight ahead of you blindly, seeing in your mind’s eye the vista of a set of facing mirrors, like those in an old-fashioned barber shop, reflecting the same thing over and over again, diminishing into far distance.

Read Full Post »

Obscurity, thy name is early science fiction.

The short story below appeared in the July 1941 issue of the pulp magazine Comet. Comet debuted in December 1940, published five issues, and folded after the July 1941 issue.

As for author Edmund H. Leftwich, I found nothing about him online except that he wrote this story.

“The Bell Tone” was published 80 years ago, and it shows. The structure and plot have an antiquated feel, as if written by Dickens or one of the Brontës. By the 1940s, writing style was moving on from the Victorian, but Leftwich still did it old school.

This story also reminds me of sci-fi stories written by my grandfather Bill Horne. I guess Bill was most comfortable as a traditionalist.

I would love to know how my writing style will be viewed in 80 years.

—–

The Bell Tone

By Edmund H. Leftwich
Published in Comet, July 1941

To Whom It May Concern:

In order to clear up any misunderstanding or false impressions regarding the amazing case of my beloved friend and co-worker, Professor Howard E. Edwards, I submit herewith, extracts from the professor’s notebook, which I found on the desk.

Evans Barclay, B.S. Fellow IRE.

***

Jan. 25.

Last night, in my dreams, I was a monstrous ant, and had been digging myself a burrow in the soft fresh earth. The dream was intensely real, and when I awoke, I felt as tired as if I had actually been digging. My arms ached, and I was astonished, upon examining my hands, to find them raw.

Dressing hastily, I rushed to the back yard, and there, sure enough, near the fence, was a large hole about two feet deep and three feet long. Hurriedly, I filled it in and returned to the house.

I must rest for a few days, as I feel that the intense excitement caused by my investigations, is preying too heavily upon my mind.

At this time, I feel that I should make a brief summary of my findings in respect to the ants, so that Barclay may go over these notes upon his return from his vacation.

First: The ant colony is the source of a powerful bell-like tone which is radiated continuously on two wave-lengths, .0018 meter, and .00176 meter. This tone acts as a radio-beacon, and directs the ants to the colony, no matter where they may be located.

The .0018 meter wave is used by the ants for their “clacking” conversations, by means of which they communicate with each other and the colony, receiving orders from the directing intelligence, reporting the location of food, and requesting help, when needed.

The wave .00176 meter, is used for sending thought images or pictures which may be sent with the “clacking” code, or independently. I cannot conceive a more efficient or highly specialized communications system. I must learn their secret, their methods.

***

Jan. 30.

This morning, while sitting at the receiver in a semi-doze, with the bell-tone ringing in my ears, I fell into that state known as “day-dreaming.” Little “Nippy,” my beloved fox terrier, and constant companion, rushed into the laboratory and ran up to me.

For a moment my mind went blank. My hands shot out. I grasped the dog around the throat and began to throttle him. I had risen from my chair, and the dog was nearly dead, when I slipped and fell, pulling the phone plug out of the receiver.

Instantly, my mind cleared, and words cannot express the remorse I felt at my inhuman actions. Nippy would have nothing to do with me, and crawled dejectedly from the room, a terrified look in his eyes.

I have no explanation for my actions.

***

Feb. 3.

The transmitter is ready for operation. I have constructed a pair of metal disc-electrodes which clamp tightly to my head and press upon my temples. This device will pick up the thought impulses from my brain, feed them directly into the radio-frequency amplifier, where they will be amplified, and then radiated in a tight directed beam.

My two ants were in their little enclosure under the microscope when I threw the switch to the “send” position. I pictured myself as I looked as a man, and sent the thought, “I am a man.”

Hastily, I threw the switch to the “receive” position. I looked through the microscope.

The ants were lying on their sides. Somehow, I felt that the power was too great, and had stunned them. Keeping my eye to the microscope, I again threw the switch to “send,” and cut the power to half.

“Get up, friends… get up,” I thought, as I pictured them rising. Sure enough… the ants slowly regained their feet. They looked about in apparent bewilderment. Back again, in “receive” position, I was conscious of the thought image,

“The man… he is the man. The man holds us here. He is killing us. We must kill the man.”

They gnashed their fierce-looking mandibles. I snapped back to “send” and thought.

“No… you must not kill the man. The man will not harm you… he is your friend. He will help you.”

As I watched, the ants seemed to become less excited. From the larger of the two, I received the thought,

“We are dying. The man is killing us with his strong vibrations. We must kill the man.”

Then a very powerful thought impression burst upon my brain.

It seemed to come from the colony, three feet away.

“Warning to the man. Stop your thought transmissions at once! Your vibrations are killing us. We want nothing from you. We have everything we need. You will learn nothing from us. You will stop at once!”

I threw the switch to “send.” Viewed through the microscope, the two ants were lying on their backs… dead, to all appearances.

“What if I don’t stop?” I sent the thought question, “I want to learn the secret of your communication. In return, I will teach you many things. I can’t stop now!”

I changed to receive, and the answer came back,

“If you do not stop… we will kill you!”

I turned off the apparatus, but the powerful bell tone continued to pound incessantly into my brain.

I laughed. They’d kill me… would they? Those tiny insects… what could they do? Well — let them try, but I’d get what I was after. I would not quit now, with success so near. What if my transmissions did kill a few of them? Of what importance were the lives of a few ants as compared to the advancement of the science of Communication?

***

Feb. 9.

I found myself digging again in the back yard yesterday. As before, I had been “day-dreaming,” when an overwhelming desire to go outside and feel the cool moist earth between my fingers and on my face took possession of me.

I rushed out into the back yard, and began digging feverishly… madly, until finally I fell, exhausted. Then my mind cleared and I filled in the hole.

About half the ants have died, due no doubt to the strength of my radiations. No matter how low I cut the power, they still cannot live but a short time under the force of my transmissions. They have stopped sending thought impressions entirely, and are using only their “clacking” code signals, which they seem to realize I cannot understand.

I feel that they are undertaking some sort of campaign against me. For hours they congregate, closely packed, their antennae stiffly pointed straight up. Their thought currents seem to be flowing into and merging with the bell tone, which grows stronger and more penetrating day by day.

In my back yard, there are four large ant hills, and at each hill, curiously, there is no activity except the same mass concentration of the ants. Have they, too, been affected by my radiations and joined forces with the original colony against myself?

The bell tone continues to grow stronger.

***

Feb. 11

Mrs. Winslow, the middle-aged widow, who comes to clean my house and laboratory twice a week, was here this morning.

She is short, dumpy, and inclined to be stout. As she went about her work, I noticed particularly the fat firm flesh of her neck, just below the jaw. I felt an uncontrollable desire to sink my teeth deep into that flesh, and enjoy the taste of the warm fresh blood.

I had actually risen from my chair to accomplish my desire, when the telephone rang… and my mind cleared.

***

Feb. 14.

I have decided to stop my experiments with the ants.

As they refuse to send any more thought impressions, there is nothing further I can learn from them. Somehow, I feel that they are gaining a hold upon my mind, and that every time I listen in on the receiver, that hold becomes stronger. I firmly believe that I would have attacked poor Mrs. Winslow, had not the ringing of the ‘phone so opportunely interrupted me. I have sent word for her to stay away… as I cannot trust myself.

I keep a box of fresh earth on the table in my laboratory. I often run my hands through it, and taste it. It is remarkable how much this soothes my nerves.

***

Feb. 16.

It is too late!

For two days, I have kept my apparatus shut off. I have not so much as looked at the ants, but still that confounded bell tone rings in my ears with all the insistence of African tom-toms. Hour by hour… the tone becomes more penetrating. I cannot sleep, and can eat but little.

As a last resort, I destroyed my ant colony. I even went so far as to pour boiling water on the four ant hills in my yard.

Still… the bell tone persists. I can stand it no longer!

Perhaps if I were to dig… again in the yard… in the soothing earth, I could forget…

***

(News Clipping: From Philadelphia Banner)

RADIO COMMUNICATIONS ENGINEER DEAD

Howard E. Edwards, Suicide

Philadelphia, Feb. 18. The body of Howard E. Edwards, B.S., PhD., Member I. R. E., eminent authority on Radio Communications, aged 56, was found this morning in the back yard of his residence, 1427 Raines Avenue. The body was almost completely buried in a long narrow hole in the ground.

At first, foul-play was suspected, but later it appeared that Edwards had dug himself into the ground and died of suffocation, as his nostrils and mouth were filled with dirt.

Dr. P. A. Hofner, who examined the body, found no wounds, stated that Edwards had been dead for about two days, and pronounced the death as a clear case of suicide, the strange means employed probably due to an unbalanced mental condition.

Elaborate radio apparatus upon which Edwards had been working had been smashed to bits.

Read Full Post »

The science fiction short story below by Arnold Marmor, like another Marmor story I posted back in January, is more evidence he was a fan of black humor.

I included bio information with the January story. Marmor was an interesting character.

———

Marty the Martian

By Arnold Marmor
Published in Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy, August 1954

It’s still very clear in my mind. The whole episode. The afternoon visit to Marsten’s office, the trip to Mars, and the journey back.

It was one of those warm summer afternoons. All one craved for was a patch of green grass to recline on and maybe a faint breeze to tingle one’s forehead. I was sure of the grass and hopeful for the breeze. But one of Marsten’s messengers popped up and the grass and the breeze would have to wait. After all, Marsten was my boss.

He had his office in the Empire State Building. Norbert Marsten was the owner of the Marsten Circus, the greatest, biggest, loudest circus in the world. And if you don’t believe it, ask Mr. Marsten.

“Sit down, Nick,” he invited, speaking from one corner of his mouth as the other corner was busy chewing a dollar cigar. Marsten was a small man with sleek black, hair. A small man with big ideas.

I sat down.

“Nick, you’re the best ‘bring ’em back alive’ man I’ve got. The best.”

This was very true. “You’ve got a job for me,” I said.

“That’s correct.”

“So why the buildup? Tell me what you want.”

“I want something that no other circus has.”

“You must be kidding. You have every known animal there is. Why, the bushmaster I brought you two months ago is the longest — “

“It isn’t exactly an animal I want.”

“Oh? You mean you want a performer? What the hell have I got to do — “

“What I want is out of this world.”

“A different kind of act? I still say — “

“I want a Martian.”

I was glad I didn’t have a mirror in front of my face. I could imagine how foolish I looked with my mouth hanging open.

“I even have a name picked out for him,” Marsten persisted. “Marty, the Martian. What do you think of that?”

I stood up slowly. “Let me know when you’ve recovered.”

Marsten came around the desk. “Sit down. Now listen to me. Did you ever hear of a man named Hendrick Ritter?”

“No.”

“The greatest scientist in the world. He’s been working for me for over a year. I hired him to do one particular job for me: to concoct a fuel that will get a space ship to Mars and back. Well, it’s done. Did you ever hear of a man named Sam Young?”

“Same answer as before.”

“He’s a designer for air ships. The best in the business. He’s finished a job for me. And, Nick, it’s already built. And I’ve got Joe Roane working for me.”

“I’ve heard of him,” I said.

“The greatest pilot in the world,” Marsten said.

“The greatest this, the greatest that. And for what? Why, the ship probably won’t get off the ground.”

Marsten chewed furiously on his cigar. “But what if it does get off the ground? What if it does get to Mars?”

“All right. So what? How do you know there’s life on Mars?”

“There is. I hired the greatest — “

“Oh, no,” I groaned. “I believe you, I believe you. So now we’re on Mars.”

“You capture a Martian and bring him back.”

“What if he doesn’t care to be captured?”

“What do I pay you for?”

I thought this out, then said, “To capture Martians.”

“Exactly.”

“You wouldn’t settle for a moon maiden, would you? I heard they’re cute. And sexy.”

“A Martian.” He was very adamant. “I’ll have the greatest attraction in the world. Nick, I’m the kind who gets what he wants. I’ve spent over three million dollars on this project and I’m ready to spend another three million. Just get me my Martian and you’ll be a rich man. You’ll be rich enough to quit working for me and to tell me to go to hell. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d like that very much.”

Two weeks later we went to Arizona. A week after that we took off. I didn’t really think we would. But we did.

Just me and Joe Roane. Two men in a space ship.

A huge metal tube hurtling through the longest and blackest of nights.

Joe Roane was a good-looking chap. Good-looking, young, and excited. He was the first to pilot a ship to Mars. He was looking ahead to the glory that awaited him.

We landed on Mars.

We put on helmets that Ritter and Young had made for us. We stepped down the metal ladder.

They were there, waiting for us.

I’d rather have faced a bushmaster or a rhino.

They stood on three legs. They had globe bellies, tiny heads, and no necks. They were of a color I had never seen before. They had two arms with two hands attached to each arm. I suppose they were hands. They were more like claws.

I stood frozen solid. Joe Roane screamed and turned to run back up the ladder. A beam flashed and Joe fell forward, silent and very dead.

After that it was all a blank.

When I came to I was strapped down by metal clasps on a long board made of some kind of marble. I was alone for some time.

I don’t remember how long it was before one of them appeared. He stood by my side, looking down at me. His eyes were purple. There were no whites. “You have come a long way,” he said.

“You — you speak English?”

“We used a 64-V machine on you. We learned your language, your thoughts, your name. We know about Norbert Marsten. A very enterprising man, it seems.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“We haven’t decided yet. So you were going to take one of us back with you for Marsten’s circus. To exhibit one of us to your stupid race. My followers wanted to kill you when this information was learned. But I believe I have a better idea.”

He went away. I yelled for him to come back. I yelled till my throat was dry. Eventually he did come back. He came back with Joe Roane and… myself.

“I want you to meet Klar and Grat,” he said. “They have taken over your bodies; you will take theirs—and return to Marsten. We have a transformer machine to accomplish this. Only we never had an opportunity to use it until you were so gracious as to visit us.” He spoke on, telling me of his idea. I shuddered and wished for death. I begged him to kill me.

Then a contraption was fitted over me and it hummed and I passed out. I remember the trip back to earth.

I’m no longer Nick Faber. I’m Marty the Martian. What a cute title Marsten had hung on me. I’ve got a nice home and I get plenty to eat. Only my home is a cage and it’s made of glass. People come from all over the world just to see me. And Marsten has been to see me every day. He chews on his big cigar and there’s a smile on his face a yard wide.

I’ve tried to talk to my keepers but all I can manage is some crazy kind of gibberish. I also see Klar and Grat. But they’re only there when Marsten is around. They’re keeping very close to him.

My being transformed into a Martian was just part of it. Klar and Grat were going to carry out the rest of it.

On one dark night, and very soon, Klar, Grat, and Marsten were going to disappear.

Maybe I was the greatest attraction on earth. But Norbert Marsten was going to be the greatest attraction on Mars.

Read Full Post »