C. M. Kornbluth, page 23
Battle ascertained by judicious inquiry that the pocket-fuzz machine actually did exist. It had been a swipe from the war-science of the invaders from Ceres.
The thing was broken down at the moment, but when they got it into shape again—!
He had uneasy pictures of a vast number of speculators all waking up with the same hunch on which way the market would jump. All bidding simultaneously for the same securities would make a ticklish situation that could be touched off by judicious inspiration of an investment banker—any investment banker—who could be dreamed into thinking his bank was without assets. Bank closes and banker commits suicide.
Panic on the market; the vast number of speculators find themselves with securities at fantastically high prices and worth fantastically near nothing at all. Vast number of speculators sell out and are ruined, for then three more banks close and three more bankers commit suicide.
President declares bank-holiday; the great public withdraws savings as soon as the banks open again, therefore the banks close again. The great public holes up for a long, hard winter. With loose cash lying around crime is on the upswing and martial law is declared, at which Leftist organizations explode and start minor insurrections in industrial cities.
Mexico attacks across the Rio Grande; the invaders from the asteroid had a contingent of expert hypnotists ready to leave for Chihuahua where the southern republic’s army as stationed.
And then the protoplasmo-high carbon proteidic-discellular converter would get turned on. The population of Manhattan would turn into pocket fuzz—or at least separate large-molecule units resembling very closely the stuff you find in pockets or handbags after two or three weeks of use.
Manhattan is fortified by the wee folk from the asteroid who build several more of the flug-machines, aiming them at the other boroughs and moving their twenty-mile field of effectiveness at the rate of a state each day. The North American continent would be clear of any and all protoplasmic life at the end of a week, they estimated.
And the hell of it was that they were right. But Battle was whistling cheerily as he forged a pass with the aid of the seal from his lady’s desk.
HE HAD CREPT out into the open, been perceived by the eagle-eye of old Cromleigh, lifted on a pair of tweezers and whistled into a waiting Rolls.
Once again his natural size in the New Jersey lab he stretched comfortably.
“Thanks for being so prompt,” he yawned. “Thanks a lot. They were coming after me, by the sound of footsteps in the distance.”
“Now you see why I had to be quiet and do this thing on the sly?”
demanded the financier. “If I’d told all I know they’d have called me mad and locked me up the way his family treated poor old John Dee.
(But don’t let that get out, Lieutenant.) Now tell me what you found there—begin at the beginning. How much do they know about finance and manipulation? Have they got their records in a safe place?”
Battle lit a cigarette; he hadn’t taken any with him for fear of firing the sofa. Luxuriously he drew in a draft of the smoke clear down to his toenails and let it trickle from the corners of his mouth. “One question at a time,” he said.
“And I’ll ask the first few of them. Mr. Cromleigh, why won’t you let me bomb the sofa ?”
The old man twisted his hands nervously together. “Because a bomb in the smoking-room would kill Old Jay when he hears about it; the man always goes to Lhasa in Tibet when July Fourth rolls around. He’s been that way since the Wall Street Massacre in `24 or `5. Because I’m not cold-blooded. And because, dammit, those little people I saw were cute.”
“Yeah!” agreed Battle reminiscently. “That she was. To begin at the beginning, your dream was substantially correct. They’re little people from an asteroid. They have war-machinery and no hearts whatsoever.
They’re listening twenty-four hours a day. Not a word spoken in the room escapes them and it all goes onto records.”
“Good—good God!” whispered Cromleigh, cracking his freckled knuckles. “What that information must be worth!” He rose. “Let’s get back to Manhattan for a drink, Lieutenant,” he said shakily. “And there’s another aspect I want to discuss with you. Your first trip was a sort of foray. It was mostly to convince me that I wasn’t mad. And to size up the ground as well. Now can we discuss planting a permanent spy in the sofa? To keep tabs on them and move only when necessary?”
“Delightful,” said Battle thoughtfully. “I have friends. My own club you probably do not know of, but it is the best of its kind.”
CROMLEIGH, NERVOUSLY tapping his desk with a pencil, was alone in the great New Jersey lab as far as could be seen. Grotesque machinery lined the walls; during the day there would be eight score technicians working, checking and double-checking their results, bringing new honor and glory to the Cromleigh Vacumaxie Sweeper and the rest of the string of electric products. His sugar plants and labs were far away in Pasadena; the Cromleigh Iron Works were going full blast in the ore basin of the continent. He looked like a very worried man.
From the shadows, with completely noiseless tread, stole a figure.
“Good evening, sir,” said Battle. “I’ve brought all of the Sabre Club that’s available on two hours’ notice.
“Miss Millicent, this is Mr. Cromleigh,” he announced, leading forth from the shadows a tall, crisp woman. When she spoke it was with a faint, Southern drawl:
“Pleased t’ know you. Any frien’ of Lieutenant Battle’s …” She trailed back into the darkness and vanished completely.
“Doctor Mogilov, former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kazan.” A slight, smiling man bowed out from the darkness; he was smooth-shaven and looked very un-Russian. In a pronounced Cambridge dialect he said: “Delighted,” and put one hand on the butt of a revolver slung from his slender waist.
“And Alex Vaughn, Yorkshire born and bred.” The Englishman said thickly, in the peculiar speech that makes the clear-headed, big-boned men of York sound always a little intoxicated: “Ah coom wi’ russi-veh-shins, soor. Lut thawt bay oondair-stud.”
“He says,” interpreted the Lieutenant, “that he comes with reservations; let that be understood. And that completes the present roster of the Sabre Club present in New York.”
“Only three?” complained Cromleigh. “And one a woman? You gave me to understand that they could completely smash the invaders.”
“Yes,” said the Lieutenant, his voice heavy with added meaning. “Any invaders.”
“No doubt—” said Cromleigh. Then some message in Battle’s eyes alarmed him unaccountably; his hand trembled on the desk-top and gripped the edge to steady itself.
“That did it!” snapped Battle. He swung on Ole Cromleigh “How long have we?” he grated, pulling a gun and aiming for the financier’s throat.
In a voice hoarse with hatred Cromleigh yelled: “Just two minutes more, you meddling scum! Then—”
“Lights!” yelled Battle. “Turn the damned lights on, Miss Millicent !” As the overhead indirects flared up, bathing the huge lab in a lambent, flaming radiance, the four figures of the Sabre Club members, the Billionaire Clubman and one other leaped into sharp reality.
It was the figure of the sofa. “We took the liberty,” said Battle, his gun not swerving an inch, “of removing this object from the smoking room.
It’s going lock, stock and barrel into the enlarging machine you have here.”
“You fool!” roared Cromleigh. “Don’t you know—” The descending gun butt cut off any further conversation.
“Hurry up!” grated the Lieutenant. He hefted the sofa to his broad shoulders.
“That trembling hand was a signal if ever I saw one. His friends’ll be here any minute. Open that damned machine and plug in the power!”
The Russian philosopher, muttering wildly to himself, swung wide the gates of the box-like magnifier through which Battle had come only a few hours before.
“Thank God there’s plenty of room!” groaned Battle. “And if this doesn’t work, prepare for Heaven, friends!” He turned on the machine full power and speed, took Miss Millicent by the arm and dragged her to the far end of the vast lab.
DURING THE INCREDIBLY long three minutes that ensued, they made ready their weapons for what might prove to be a siege, while Battle explained in rapid-fire undertones what he had had no time for during the plane-ride from Manhattan.
As he checked the load of his quickfirers he snapped: “Invaders—fooey!
Anybody could tell that those women were fresh from an office. They had the clerical air about them. The only invader—as a carefully logical process of deduction demonstrated—was the gruesome creature who’s been posing as Cromleigh. Just murdered the old guy—I suppose—and took over his body. Him and his friends whom he just signaled. He’s the only baby who hypnotized the Phi Beta Kappas they use for busboys.
“Why did he risk sending me in there? The inevitable mark of a louse.
Doesn’t trust anybody, not even his own office-staff dyed a pale green and reduced to half gnat-size. So he sent me in for a spy on them. The whole cock-and-bull story of the creatures from an asteroid was so that there’d be no suspicion directed at him in case some bright waiter should find the louse-people. Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s from an asteroid himself. Crazy business! Craziest damned business!”
“How about the financial angle?” asked Vaughn, who could be intelligible when money was involved.
“I picked that bird’s pocket slick as a whistle just before I conked him.
Feels like a hundred grand.”
“Here they come !” snapped Miss Millicent.
“They” were creatures of all shapes and sizes who were streaming through the only door to the lab, at the other end of the room.
“Awk!” gulped the lady involuntarily. “They” were pretty awful. There were a hundred or so of them, many much like men, a few in an indescribable liquid-solid state that sometimes was gaseous. The luminous insides of these churned wildly about; there were teeth inside them two feet long.Others were gigantic birds, still others snakes, still others winged dragons.
“That settles it,” grunted the Russian philosopher as he flicked his gun into and out of its holster faster than the eye could follow. “That settles it. They are amoebic, capable of assuming any shape at all. One is changing now—awk!” He persevered. “Indubitably possessed of vast hypnotic powers over unsuspecting minds only. Otherwise they would be working on us.”
“They” were rolling in a flood of shifting, slimy flesh down the floor of the lab.
“The machine! The sofa!” cried Miss Millicent. Battle breathed a long sigh of relief as the cabinet-like expander exploded outward and the sofa it held kept on growing—and growing—and growing—and growing! It stopped just as it filled the segment of the lab that it occupied.
With a squeaking of tortured timbers the laws of cross-sectional sufferance power asserted themselves and the hundred-yard-high sofa collapsed in a monstrous pile of rubble.
“Sit very still,” said the Lieutenant. “Be quite quiet and blow the head off any hundred-yard centipede that wanders our way.”
There were agonized yells from the other side of the couch’s ruins.
“That couch,” Battle informed them, “was just plain lousy. Full of centipedes, lice, what have you. And when a louse smells blood—God help any invaders around, be they flesh, fish, fowl or amoebic!”
AFTER TEN MINUTES there was complete quiet.
“What about the insects?” asked Vaughn.
“They’re dead,” said Battle, rising and stretching. “Their respiratory system can’t keep up with the growth. They were good for about ten minutes, then they keel over. Their tracheae can’t take in enough oxygen to keep them going, which is a very good thing for the New Jersey countryside.”
He strolled over to the vast pile of rubble and began turning over timbers, Miss Millicent assisting him.
“Ah!” he grunted. “Here it is!” He had found the body of an apple-green young lady whose paint was beginning to peel, revealing a healthy pink beneath. With many endearing terms he brought her out of her swoon as Miss Millicent’s eyebrows went higher and higher.
Finally she exploded, as the two were cozily settled on a mountainous upholstery-needle that had, at some time, got lost in the sofa.
“Just when, Lieutenant, did you find out that these people weren’t invaders from an asteroid?”
Rattle raised his eyebrows and kissed the girl. “Have no fear, darling,”
he said. “A gentleman never—er—kisses—and tells.
Gomez [The Explorers, Ballantine, 1954]
Now that I’m a cranky, constipated old man I can afford to say that the younger generation of scientists makes me sick to my stomach. Short-order fry cooks of destruction, they hear through the little window the dim order: “Atom bomb rare, with cobalt sixty!” and sing it back and rattle their stinking skillets and sling the deadly hash—just what the customer ordered, with never a notion invading their smug, too-heated havens that there’s a small matter of right and wrong that takes precedence even over their haute cuisine.
There used to be a slew of them who yelled to high heaven about it.
Weiner, Urey, Szilard, Morrison—dead now, and worse. Unfashionable.
The greatest of them you have never heard of. Admiral MacDonald never did clear the story. He was Julio Gomez, and his story was cleared yesterday by a fellow my Jewish friends call Malach Hamovis, the Hovering Angel of Death. A black-bordered letter from Rosa advised me that Malach Hamovis had come in on runway six with his flaps down and picked up Julio at the age of thirty-nine. Pneumonia.
“But,” Rosa painfully wrote, “Julio would want you to know he died not too unhappy, after a good though short life with much of satisfaction . .
.”
I think it will give him some more satisfaction, wherever he is, to know that his story at last is getting told.
It started twenty-two years ago with a routine assignment on a crisp October morning. I had an appointment with Dr. Sugarman, the head of the physics department at the University. It was the umpth anniversary of something or other—first atomic pile, the test A-bomb, Nagasaki—I don’t remember what, and the Sunday editor was putting together a page on it. My job was to interview the three or four University people who were Manhattan District grads.
I found Sugarman in his office at the top of the modest physics building’s square gothic tower, brooding through a pointed-arch window at the bright autumn sky. He was a tubby, jowly little fellow. I’d been seeing him around for a couple of years at testimonial banquets and press conferences, but I didn’t expect him to remember me. He did, though, and even got the name right.
“Mr. Vilchek?” he beamed. “From the Tribune?”
“That’s right, Dr. Sugarman. How are you?”
“Fine; fine. Sit down, please. Well, what shall we talk about?”
“Well, Dr. Sugarman, I’d like to have your ideas on the really fundamental issues of atomic energy, A-bomb control and so on. What in your opinion is the single most important factor in these problems?”
His eyes twinkled; he was going to surprise me. “Education!” he said, and leaned back waiting for me to register shock.
I registered. “That’s certainly a different approach, doctor. How do you mean that, exactly?”
He said impressively: “Education—technical education—is the key to the underlying issues of our time. I am deeply concerned over the unawareness of the general public to the meaning and accomplishments of science. People underrate me—underrate science, that is —because they do not understand science. Let me show you something.” He rummaged for a moment through papers on his desk and handed me a sheet of lined tablet paper covered with chicken-track handwriting. “A letter I got,” he said. I squinted at the penciled scrawl and read:
October 12
Esteemed Sir:
Beg to introduce self to you the atomic Scientist as a youth 17 working with diligence to perfect self in Mathematical Physics. The knowledge of English is imperfect since am in New-York 1 year only from Puerto Rico and due to Father and Mother poverty must wash the dishes in the restaurant. So es teemed sir excuse imperfect English which will better.
I hesitate intruding your valuable Scientist time but hope you sometime spare minutes for diligents such as I. My difficulty is with neutron cross-section absorptionof boron steel in Reactor which theory I am working out Breeder reactors demand
for boron steel, compared with neutron cross-section absorption of for any Concrete with which I familiarize myself. Whence arises relationship
indicating only a fourfold breeder gain. Intuitively I dissatisfy with this gain and beg to intrude your time to ask wherein I neglect. With the most sincere thanks.
J. Gomez
% Porto Bello Lunchroom
124th St. & St. Nicholas Ave.
New-York, New-York
I laughed and told Dr. Sugarman appreciatively: “That’s a good one. I wish our cranks kept in touch with us by mail, but they don’t. In the newspaper business they come in-and demand to see the editor. Could I use it, by the way? The readers ought to get a boot out of it.”
