The Fredric Brown Megapack (18 page)

When he awoke, almost frozen, in the parked taxi, that human factor dawned upon him. The driver was so sound asleep that no amount of shaking could arouse him. Dr. Hale’s watch had stopped, so he had no idea where he was or what time it was.

Unfortunately, too, he didn’t know how to drive a car. He took a quick drink to keep from freezing and then got out of the cab, and as he did so, a car stopped.

It was a policeman—what is more it was a policeman in a million.

Yelling over the roar of the storm, Hale hailed him. “I’m Dr. Hale,” he shouted. “We’re lost, where am I?”

“Get in here before you freeze,” ordered the policeman. “Do you mean Dr. Milton Hale, by any chance?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve read all your books, Dr. Hale,” said the policeman. “Physics is my hobby, and I’ve always wanted to meet you. I want to ask you about the revised value of the quantum.”

“This is life or death,” said Dr. Hale. “Can you take me to the nearest airport, quick?”

“Of course, Dr. Hale.”

“And look—there’s a driver in that cab, and he’ll freeze to death unless we send aid.”

“I’ll put him in the back seat of my car and then run the cab off the road. We’ll take care of details later.”

“Hurry, please.”

The obliging policeman hurried. He got in and started the car.

“About the revised quantum value, Dr. Hale,” he began, then stopped talking.

Dr. Hale was sound asleep. The policeman drove to Waterbury Airport, one of the largest in the world since the population shift from New York City in the 1960s and ’70s had given it a central position. In front of the ticket office, he gently awakened Dr. Hale.

“This is the airport, sir,” he said.

Even as he spoke, Dr. Hale was leaping out of the car and stumbling into the building, yelling, “Thanks,” over his shoulder and nearly falling down in doing so.

The warm-up roaring of the motors of a super-stratoliner out on the field lent wings to his heels as he dashed for the ticket window.

“What plane’s that?” he yelled.

“Washington Special, due out in one minute. But I don’t think you can make it.”

Dr. Hale slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the ledge. “Ticket,” he gasped. “Keep change.”

He grabbed the ticket and ran, getting into the plane just as the doors were being closed. Panting, he fell into a seat, the ticket still clutched in his hand. He was sound asleep before the hostess strapped him in for the blind takeoff.

An hour later, the hostess awakened him. The passengers were disembarking.

Dr. Hale rushed out of the plane and ran across the field to the airport building. A big clock told him that it was nine o’clock, and he felt elated as he ran for the door marked “Taxis.” He got into the nearest one.

“White House,” he told the driver. “How long’ll it take?”

“Ten minutes.”

Dr. Hale gave a sigh of relief and sank back against the cushions. He didn’t go back to sleep this time. He was wide awake now. But he closed his eyes to think out the words he’d use in explaining matters.…

“Here you are, sir.”

Dr. Hale gave a sigh of relief and sank back against the cab into the building. It didn’t look as he had expected it to look. But there was a desk, and he ran up to it.

“I’ve got to see the President, quick. It’s vital.” The clerk frowned. “The President of what?”

Dr. Hale’s eyes went wide. “The President of wh—say, what building is this? And what town?” The clerk’s frown deepened. “This is the White House Hotel,” he said. “Seattle, Washington.”

Dr. Hale fainted. He woke up in a hospital three hours later. It was then midnight, Pacific Time, which meant it was three o’clock in the morning on the Eastern seaboard. It had, in fact, been midnight already in Washington, D.C., and in Boston, when he had been leaving the Washington Special in Seattle.

Dr. Hale rushed to the window and shook his fists, both of them, at the sky. A futile gesture.

Back in the East, however, the storm had stopped by twilight, leaving a light mist in the air. The star-conscious public had thereupon deluged the weather bureaus with telephoned requests about the persistence of the mist.

“A breeze off the ocean is expected,” they were told. “It is blowing now, in fact, and within an hour or two will have cleared off the light fog.”

By eleven-fifteen the skies of Boston were clear.

Untold thousands braved the bitter cold and stood staring upward at the unfolding pageant of the no-longer-eternal stars. It almost looked as though—an incredible development had occurred.

And then, gradually, the murmur grew. By a quarter to twelve, the thing was certain, and the murmur hushed and then grew louder than ever, waxing toward midnight. Different people reacted differently, of course, as might be expected. There was laughter as well as indignation, cynical amusement as well as shocked horror. There was even admiration.

Soon, in certain parts of the city, a concerted movement on the part of those who knew an address on Fremont Street began to take place. Movement afoot and in cars and public vehicles, converging.

At five minutes of twelve, Rutherford R. Sniveley sat waiting within his house. He was denying himself the pleasure of looking until, at the last moment, the thing was complete.

It was going well. The gathering murmur of voices, mostly angry voices, outside his house told him that. He heard his name shouted.

Just the same, he waited until the twelfth stroke of the clock before he stepped out upon the balcony. Much as he wanted to look upward, he forced himself to look down at the street first. The milling crowd was there and it was angry. But he had only contempt for the milling crowd.

Police cars were pulling up, too, and he recognized the mayor of Boston getting out of one of them, and the chief of police was with him. But so what? There wasn’t any law covering this.

Then having denied himself the supreme pleasure long enough, he turned his eyes up to the silent sky, and there it was. The four hundred and sixty-eight brightest stars, spelling out:

USE SNIVELY’S SOAP

For just a second did his satisfaction last. Then his face began to turn an apoplectic purple.

“My heavens!” said Mr. Sniveley. “It’s spelled wrong!” His face grew more purple still, and then, as a tree falls, he fell backward through the window.

An ambulance rushed the fallen magnate to the nearest hospital, but he was pronounced dead—of apoplexy—upon entrance.

But misspelled or not, the eternal stars held their positions as of that midnight. The aberrant motion had stopped, and again the stars were fixed. Fixed to spell—SNIVELY’S SOAP.

Of the many explanations offered by all and sundry who professed some physical and astronomical knowledge, none was more lucid—or closer to the actual truth—than that put forth by Wendell Mehan, president emeritus of the New York Astronomical Society.

“Obviously, the phenomenon is a trick of refraction,” said Dr. Mehan. “It is manifestly impossible for any force contrived by man to move a star. The stars, therefore, still occupy their old places in the firmament.

“I suggest that Sniveley must have contrived a method of refracting the light of the stars, somewhere in or just above the atmospheric layer of the earth, so that they appear to have changed their positions. This is done, probably, by radio waves or similar waves, sent on some fixed frequency from a set—or possibly a series of four hundred and sixty-eight sets—somewhere upon the surface of the earth. Although we do not understand just how it is done, it is no more unthinkable that light rays should be bent by a field of waves than by a prism or by gravitational force.

“Since Sniveley was not a great scientist, I imagine that his discovery was empiric rather than logical—an accidental find. It is quite possible that even the discovery of his projector will not enable present-day scientists to understand its secret, any more than an aboriginal savage could understand the operation of a simple radio receiver by taking one apart.

“My principal reason for this assertion is the fact that the refraction obviously is a fourth-dimensional phenomenon, or its effect would be purely local to one portion of the globe. Only in the fourth dimension could light be so refracted.…”

There was more but it is better to skip to his final paragraph:

“This effect cannot possibly be permanent—more permanent, that is, than the wave-projector which causes it. Sooner or later, Sniveley’s machine will be found and shut off or will break down or wear out of its own volition. Undoubtedly it includes vacuum tubes which will someday blow out, as do the tubes in our radios.…”

The excellence of Dr. Mehan’s analysis was shown two months and eight days later, when the Boston Electric Co. shut off, for non-payment of bills, service to a house situated at 901 West Rogers Street, ten blocks from the Sniveley mansion. At the instant of the shut-off, excited reports from the night side of Earth brought the news that the stars had flashed back to their former positions instantaneously.

Investigation brought out that the description of one Elmer Smith, who had purchased that house six months before, corresponded with the description of Rutherford R. Sniveler, and undoubtedly Elmer Smith and Rutherford R. Sniveler were one and the same person.

In the attic was found a complicated network of 468 radio-type antennae, each antenna of different length and running in a different direction. The machine to which they were connected was not larger, strangely, than the average ham’s radio projector, nor did it draw appreciably more current, according to the electric company’s record.

By special order of the President of the United States, the projector was destroyed without examination of its internal arrangement. Clamorous protests against this high-handed executive order arose from many sides. But inasmuch as the projector had already been broken up, the protests were to no avail.

Serious repercussions were, on the whole, amazingly few.

Persons in general appreciated the stars more but trusted them less. Roger Phlutter got out of jail and married Elsie.

Dr. Milton Hale found he liked Seattle and stayed there. Two thousand miles away from his sister, Agatha, he found it possible for the first time to defy her openly. He enjoys life more but, it is feared, will write fewer books.

There is one fact remaining which is painful to consider, since it casts a deep reflection upon the basic intelligence of the human race. It is proof, though, that the president’s executive order was justified, despite scientific protest.

That fact is as humiliating as it is enlightening. During the two months and eight days during which the Sniveler machine was in operation, sales of Sniveley Soap increased nine-hundred-twenty percent.

HAPPY ENDING

Written with Mack Reynolds

There were four men in the lifeboat that came down from the space-cruiser. Three of them were still in the uniform of the Galactic Guards.

The fourth sat in the prow of the small craft looking down at their goal, hunched and silent, bundled up in a greatcoat against the coolness of space—a greatcoat which he would never need again after this morning. The brim of his hat was pulled down far over his forehead, and he studied the nearing shore through dark-lensed glasses. Bandages, as though for a broken jaw, covered most of the lower part of his face.

He realized suddenly that the dark glasses, now that they had left the cruiser, were unnecessary. He slipped them off. After the cinematographic grays his eyes had seen through these lenses for so long, the brilliance of the color below him was almost like a blow. He blinked and looked again.

They were rapidly settling toward a shoreline, a beach. The sand was a dazzling, unbelievable white such as had never been on his home planet. Blue the sky and water, and green the edge of the fantastic jungle. There was a flash of red in the green, as they came still closer, and he realized suddenly that it must be a
marigee
, the semi-intelligent Venusian parrot once popular as a pet throughout the solar system.

Throughout the system blood and steel had fallen from the sky and ravished the planets, but now it fell no more.

And now this. Here, in this forgotten portion of an almost completely destroyed world, it had not fallen at all.

Only in some place like this, alone, was safety for him. Elsewhere—anywhere—imprisonment or, more likely, death. There was danger, even here. Three of the crew of the space-cruiser knew. Perhaps, someday, one of them would talk. Then they would come for him, even here.

But that was a chance he could not avoid. Nor were the odds bad, for three people out of a whole solar system knew where he was. And those three were loyal fools.

The lifeboat came gently to rest. The hatch swung open, and he stepped out and walked a few paces up the beach. He turned and waited while the two spacemen who had guided the craft brought his chest out and carried it across the beach and to the corrugated-tin shack just at the edge of the trees. That shack had once been a space-radar relay station. Now the equipment it had held was long gone, the antenna mast taken down. But the shack still stood. It would be his home for a while. A long while. The two men returned to the lifeboat preparatory to leaving.

And now the captain stood facing him, and the captain’s face was a rigid mask. It seemed with an effort that the captain’s right arm remained at his side, but that effort had been ordered. No salute.

The captain’s voice, too, was rigid with unemotion. “Number One…”

“Silence!” And then, less bitterly. “Come further from the boat before you again let your tongue run loose. Here.” They had reached the shack.

“You are right, Number…”

“No. I am no longer Number One. You must continue to think of me as
Mister
Smith, your cousin, whom you brought here for the reasons you explained to the under-officers, before you surrender your ship. If you
think
of me so, you will be less likely to slip in your speech.”

“There is nothing further I can do—Mister Smith?”

“Nothing. Go now.”

“And I am ordered to surrender the—”

“There are no orders. The war is over, lost. I would suggest thought as to what spaceport you put into. In some you may receive humane treatment. In others—”

The captain nodded. “In others, there is great hatred. Yes. That is all?”

“That is all. And, Captain, your running of the blockade, your securing of fuel
en route
, have constituted a deed of high valor. All I can give you in reward is my thanks. But now go. Goodbye.”

“Not goodbye,” the captain blurted impulsively, “but
hasta la vista
,
auf Wiedersehen
,
until the day
…you will permit me, for the last time to address you and salute?”