“I haven’t seen him, sir.”
“Of course not,” Spencer said.
For suddenly it all seemed to be coming clear, if he only could believe it.
There had been a look in young Cabell’s eyes that had been most disturbing. And now, all at once, he knew that look for exactly what it was.
It had been adulation!
The kind of look that was reserved for someone who had become a legend.
And he must be wrong, Spencer told himself, for he was not a legend—at least not at the moment.
There had been something else in young Cabell’s eyes. And once again he knew. Cabell had been a young man, but the eyes had been old eyes. They were eyes that had seen much more of life than a man of thirty had any right to see.
“What shall I say,” asked Miss Crane, “if he should come back?”
“Never mind,” said Spencer. “I am sure he won’t.”
For Cabell’s job was done, if it had been a job at all. It might have been, he told himself, a violation of the ethics, a pure piece of meddling, or it might have been a yielding to that temptation to play God.
Or, he thought, it might have been all planned.
Had they somewhere in the future worked out that formula he’d spoken of to Cabell—the formula that would allow legitimate manipulation of the past?
“Miss Crane,” he said, “would you be kind enough to type up a resignation for me? Effective immediately. Make it very formal. I am sore at Garside.”
Miss Crane did not bat an eyelash. She ran paper into her machine.
“Mr. Spencer, what reason shall I give?”
“You might say I’m going into business for myself.”
Had there been another time, he wondered, when it hadn’t gone this way? Had there been a time when Hudson had gotten in to see him and maybe had not died at all? Had there been a time when he’d handed over the Hudson concept to Past, Inc., instead of stealing it himself?
And if Cabell had not been here to take up the time, more than likely he would have gotten around to seeing Hudson before it was too late. And if he had seen the man, then it was more than likely that he would have passed the concept on through proper channels.
But even so, he wondered, how could they be sure (whoever they might be) that he’d not see Hudson first? He recalled distinctly that Miss Crane had urged that he see him first.
And that was it, he thought excitedly. That was exactly it! He might very well have seen Hudson first if Miss Crane had not been insistent that he should.
And standing there, he thought of all the years that Miss Crane must have worked at it—conditioning him to the point where he’d be sure to do exactly opposite to what she urged he do.
“Mr. Spencer,” said Miss Crane, “I have the letter finished. And there is something else. I almost forgot about it.”
She reached down into a drawer and took out something and laid it on the desk.
It was the portfolio that belonged to Hudson.
“The police,” said Miss Crane, “apparently overlooked it. It was very careless of them. I thought that you might like it.”
Spencer stood staring blankly at it.
“It would go so nicely,” said Miss Crane, “with the other stuff you have.”
There was a muted thumping on the floor and Spencer spun around. A white rabbit with long and droopy ears hopped across the carpet, looking for a carrot.
“Oh, how cute!” cried Miss Crane, very much unlike herself. “Is it the one that Mr. Nickerson sent back?”
“It’s the one,” said Spencer. “I had forgotten it.”
“Might I have it?”
“Miss Crane, I wonder …”
“Yes, Mr. Spencer?”
And what was he to say?
Could he blurt out that now he knew she was one of them?
It would take so much explanation and it could be so involved. And, besides, Miss Crane was not the sort of person that you blurted things out to.
He gulped. “I was wondering, Miss Crane, if you’d come and work for me. I’ll need a secretary.”
Miss Crane shook her head. “No, I’m getting old. I’m thinking of retiring. I think, now that you are leaving, I shall just disappear.”
“But, Miss Crane, I’ll need you desperately.”
“One of these days soon,” said Miss Crane, “when you need a secretary, there’ll be an applicant. She’ll wear a bright green dress and she’ll be wearing these new glasses and be carrying a snow-white rabbit with a bow around its neck. She may strike you as something of a hussy, but you hire her. Be sure you hire her.”
“I’ll remember,” Spencer said. “I’ll be looking for her. I’ll hire no one else.”
“She will not,” warned Miss Crane, “be a bit like me. She’ll be much nicer.”
“Thank you, Miss Crane,” said Spencer, just a bit inanely.
“And don’t forget this,” said Miss Crane, holding out the portfolio.
He took it and headed for the door.
At the door he stopped and turned back to her.
“I’ll be seeing you,” he said.
For the first time in fifteen years, Miss Crane smiled at him.
Madness from Mars
Clifford D. Simak once listed this story as one of two “truly horrible examples of an author’s fumbling agony in the process of finding himself.” Cliff was speaking of the journey he made from being someone whose career was in journalism to being a creator of good fiction—which has to have been a long, painful exercise in self-education. And yet, when I read those words, I am puzzled—for to me, this story in particular is a deeply emotional, deeply affecting portrait of an unpreventable tragedy.
—dww
The Hello Mars IV was coming home, back from the outward reaches of space, the first ship ever to reach the Red Planet and return. Telescopes located in the Crater of Copernicus Observatory on the Moon had picked it up and flashed the word to Earth, giving its position. Hours later, Earth telescopes had found the tiny mote that flashed in the outer void.
Two years before, those same telescopes had watched the ship’s outward voyage, far out until its silvery hull had dwindled into nothingness. From that day onward there had been no word or sign of Hello Mars IV—nothing until the lunar telescopes, picking up again that minute speck in space, advised Earth of its homecoming.
Communication with the ship by Earth had been impossible. On the Moon, powerful radio stations were capable of hurling ultra-short wave messages across the quarter million miles to Earth. But man as yet had found no means of communicating over fifty million miles of space. So Hello Mars IV had arrowed out into the silence, leaving the Moon and the Earth to speculate and wonder over its fate.
Now, with Mars once again swinging into conjunction, the ship was coming back—a tiny gnat of steel pushing itself along with twinkling blasts of flaming rocket-fuel. Heading Earthward out of that region of silent mystery, spurning space-miles beneath its steel-shod heels. Triumphant, with the red dust of Mars still clinging to its plates—a mote of light in the telescopic lenses.
Aboard it were five brave men—Thomas Delvaney, the expedition’s leader; Jerry Cooper, the red-thatched navigator; Andy Smith, the world’s ace cameraman, and two space-hands, Jimmy Watson and Elmer Paine, grim old veterans of the Earth-Moon run.
There had been three other Hello Mars ships—three other ships that had never come back—three other flights that had ended in disaster. The first had collided with a meteor a million miles out from the Moon. The second had flared briefly, deep in space, a red splash of flame in the telescopes through which the flight was watched—the fuel tanks had exploded. The third had simply disappeared. On and on it had gone, boring outward until lost from sight. That had been six years ago, but men still wondered what had happened.
Four years later—two years ago—the Hello Mars IV had taken off. Today it was returning, a gleaming thing far out in space, a shining symbol of man’s conquest of the planets. It had reached Mars—and it was coming back. There would be others, now—and still others. Some would flare against the black and be lost forever. But others would win through, and man, blindly groping, always outward, to break his earthly bonds, at last would be on the pathway to the stars.
Jack Woods, Express reporter, lit a cigarette and asked: “What do you figure they found out there, Doc?”
Dr. Stephen Gilmer, director of the Interplanetary Communications Research Commission, puffed clouds of smoke from his black cigar and answered irritably:
“How in blue hell would I know what they found? I hope they found something. This trip cost us a million bucks.”
“But can’t you give me some idea of what they might have found?” persisted Woods. “Some idea of what Mars is like. Any new ideas.”
Dr. Gilmer wrangled the cigar viciously.
“And have you spread it all over the front page,” he said. “Spin something out of my own head just because you chaps are too impatient to wait for the actual data. Not by a damn sight. You reporters get my goat sometimes.”
“Ah, Doc, give us something,” pleaded Gary Henderson, staff man for the Star.
“Sure,” said Don Buckley, of the Spaceways. “What do you care? You can always say we misquoted you. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Gilmer gestured toward the official welcoming committee that stood a short distance away.
“Why don’t you get the mayor to say something, boys?” he suggested. “The mayor is always ready to say something.”
“Sure,” said Gary, “but it never adds up to anything. We’ve had the mayor’s face on the front page so much lately that he thinks he owns the paper.”
“Have you any idea why they haven’t radioed us?” asked Woods. “They’ve been in sending distance for several hours now.”
Gilmer rolled the cigar from east to west. “Maybe they broke the radio,” he said.
Nevertheless there were little lines of worry on his face. The fact that there had been no messages from the Hello Mars IV troubled him. If the radio had been broken it could have been repaired.
Six hours ago the Hello Mars IV had entered atmosphere. Even now it was circling the Earth in a strenuous effort to lose speed. Word that the ship was nearing Earth had brought spectators to the field in ever-increasing throngs. Highways and streets were jammed for miles around.
Perspiring police cordons struggled endlessly to keep the field clear for a landing. The day was hot, and soft drink stands were doing a rushing business. Women fainted in the crowd and some men were knocked down and trampled. Ambulance sirens sounded.
“Humph,” Woods grunted. “We can send space-ships to Mars, but we don’t know how to handle crowds.”
He stared expectantly into the bright blue bowl of the sky.
“Ought to be getting in pretty soon,” he said.
His words were blotted out by a mounting roar of sound. The earsplitting explosions of roaring rocket tubes. The thunderous drumming of the ship shooting over the horizon.
The bellow from the crowd competed with the roaring of the tubes as the Hello Mars IV shimmered like a streak of silver light over the field. Then fading in the distance, it glowed redly as its forward tubes shot flame.
“Cooper sure is giving her everything he has,” Woods said in awe. “He’ll melt her down, using the tubes like that.”
He stared into the west, where the ship had vanished. His cigarette, forgotten, burned down and scorched his fingers.
Out of the tail of his eye he saw Jimmy Andrews, the Express photographer.
“Did you get a picture?” Woods roared at him.
“Picture, hell,” Andrews shouted back. “I can’t shoot greased lightning.”
The ship was coming back again, its speed slowed, but still traveling at a terrific pace. For a moment it hung over the horizon and then nosed down toward the field.
“He can’t land at that speed,” Woods yelled. “It’ll crack wide open!”
“Look out,” roared a dozen voices and then the ship was down, its nose plowing into the ground, leaving in its wake a smoking furrow of raw earth, its tail tilting high in the air, threatening to nose over on its back.
The crowd at the far end of the field broke and stampeded, trampling, clawing, pushing, shoving, suddenly engulfed in a hysteria of fear at the sight of the ship plowing toward them.
But the Hello Mars IV stopped just short of the police cordon, still right side up. A pitted, battered ship—finally home from space—the first ship to reach Mars and return.
The newspapermen and photographers were rushing forward. The crowd was shrieking. Automobile horns and sirens blasted the air. From the distant rim of the city rose the shrilling of whistles and the far-away roll of clamoring bells.
As Woods ran a thought hammered in his head. A thought that had an edge of apprehension. There was something wrong. If Jerry Cooper had been at the controls, he never would have landed the ship at such speed. It had been a madman’s stunt to land a ship that way. Jerry was a skilled navigator, averse to taking chances. Jack had watched him in the Moon Derby five years before and the way Jerry could handle a ship was beautiful to see.
The valve port in the ship’s control cabin swung slowly open, clanged back against the metal side. A man stepped out—a man who staggered jerkily forward and then stumbled and fell in a heap.
Dr. Gilmer rushed to him, lifted him in his arms.
Woods caught a glimpse of the man’s face as his head lolled in Gilmer’s arms. It was Jerry Cooper’s face—but a face that was twisted and changed almost beyond recognition, a face that burned itself into Jack Woods’ brain, indelibly etched there, something to be remembered with a shudder through the years. A haggard face, with deeply sunken eyes, with hollow cheeks, with drooling lips that slobbered sounds that were not words.
A hand pushed at Woods.
“Get out of my way,” shrilled Andrews. “How do you expect me to take a picture?”
The newsman heard the camera whirr softly, heard the click of changing plates.
“Where are the others?” Gilmer was shouting at Cooper.
The man looked up at him vacantly, his face twisting itself into a grimace of pain and fear.
“Where are the others?” Gilmer shouted again, his voice ringing over the suddenly hushed stillness of the crowd.
Cooper jerked his head toward the ship.
“In there,” he whispered and the whisper cut like a sharp-edged knife.
He mumbled drooling words, words that meant nothing. Then with an effort he answered.
“Dead,” he said.
And in the silence that followed, he said again:
“All dead!”
They found the others in the living quarters back of the locked control room. All four of them were dead—had been dead for days. Andy Smith’s skull had been crushed by a mighty blow.
Jimmy Watson had been strangled, with the blue raised welts of blunt fingers still upon his throat. Elmer Paine’s body was huddled in a corner, but upon him there were no marks of violence, although his face was contorted into a visage of revulsion, a mask of pain and fear and suffering. Thomas Delvaney’s body sprawled beside a table. His throat had been opened with an old fashioned straightedge razor. The razor, stained with blackened blood, was tightly clutched in the death grip of his right hand.
In one corner of the room stood a large wooden packing box. Across the smooth white boards of the box someone had written shakily, with black crayon, the single word “Animal.” Plainly there had been an attempt to write something else—strange wandering crayon marks below the single word. Marks that scrawled and stopped and made no sense.
That night Jerry Cooper died, a raving maniac.
A banquet, planned by the city to welcome home the conquering heroes, was cancelled. There were no heroes left to welcome back.
What was in the packing box?
“It’s an animal,” Dr. Gilmer declared, “and that’s about as far as I would care to go. It seems to be alive, but that is hard to tell. Even when moving fast—fast, that is, for it—it probably would make a sloth look like chain lightning in comparison.”
Jack Woods stared down through the heavy glass walls that caged the thing Dr. Gilmer had found in the packing box marked “Animal.”
It looked like a round ball of fur.
“It’s all curled up, sleeping,” he said.
“Curled up, hell,” said Gilmer. “That’s the shape of the beast. It’s spherical and it’s covered with fur. Fur-Ball would be a good name for it, if you were looking for something descriptive. A fur coat of that stuff would keep you comfortable in the worst kind of weather the North Pole could offer. It’s thick and it’s warm. Mars, you must remember, is damned cold.”
“Maybe we’ll have fur-trappers and fur-trading posts up on Mars,” Woods suggested. “Big fur shipments to Earth and Martian wraps selling at fabulous prices.”
“They’d kill them off in a hurry if it ever came to that,” declared Gilmer. “A foot a day would be top speed for that baby, if it can move at all. Oxygen would be scarce on Mars. Energy would be something mighty hard to come by and this boy couldn’t afford to waste it by running around. He’d just have to sit tight and not let anything distract him from the mere business of just living.”
“It doesn’t seem to have eyes or ears or anything you’d expect an animal to have,” Woods said, straining his eyes the better to see the furry ball through the glass.
“He probably has sense-perceptions we would never recognize,” declared Gilmer. “You must remember, Jack, that he is a product of an entirely different environment—perhaps he rose from an entirely different order of life than we know here on Earth. There’s no reason why we must believe that parallel evolution would occur on any two worlds so remotely separated as Earth and Mars.