The fredric brown collec.., p.11
The Fredric Brown Collection, page 11
It’s a new idea. They look at you.
Then, one by one, they think negatives.
“One chance in a hundred,” you say. There’s no change. “One chance in a thousand! I thought you were gamblers.”
Camelon thinks, “You tempt us except for one thing. If we leave you here alive you can leave a message for those who are due in thirty-nine days to pick you up, even though you yourself do not survive to meet them.”
You’d been hoping for that but they’d read your-mind. Damn beings who can read minds! Still, any chance at all is better than nothing. You say, “Take away all writing materials.”
Borl thinks at Camelon, “We can do better than that. Put a psychic block on his ability to write. A chance in a thousand is little, Camelon, to save our honor. As he says we are gamblers. Can’t we gamble that far?”
Camelon looks at David, at Dari. He turns to you and raises his hand. You lose consciousness.
You awaken suddenly and completely. The lights are dim. The inside of the dome looks different. You look around and realize that it has been stripped of most of the things that were there. And there is only one Tharn in the room with you—Camelon. You find you are lying on the cot and you sit up and look at him.
He thinks at you, “We are giving you one chance in a thousand, Bobthayer. We have calculated it carefully, everything is arranged. I will explain the circumstances and the odds.”
“Go ahead,” you say.
“We have left you enough food, enough water—barely enough to survive, it is true, but you will not die of’ hunger or thirst if you ration them carefully. We have studied your metabolism with great care. We know your exact limits of tolerance. We have, as Borl suggested, also blocked your ability to write so that you can leave no message. That, of course, has nothing to do with i your one chance out of a thousand of survival.”
“Where’s the catch? What’s the chance, then, if. you leave me enough food and enough water. Oxygen?”
“That’s right. We have taken out your oxygen system and are leaving one of our own type. It is much simpler. See those thirteen plastic containers on the table? Each one contains enough liquid oxygen to supply you—by very careful calculation—with enough oxygen to last you three days if you are extremely careful and take no exercise whatever.
“The oxygen is in a binder fluid that keeps it liquid and lets it evaporate at a constant and exact rate. The binder fluid also absorbs waste products. You need open one jar every three days—or whenever you find yourself in need of more oxygen than you are getting, which will be within a matter of minutes of three days.”
BUT where’s the catch? You wonder. Thirteen containers, each good for three days if you’re careful, add up to thirty-nine.
You don’t have to ask it aloud. Camelon thinks, “One of the containers is poisoned. There is an odorless undetectable gas that will evaporate with the oxygen. It is sufficiently poisonous to kill ten men of your weight and resistance, of your general metabolism. There is no way to tell it from the other jars without extremely special equipment and chemical knowledge beyond yours. The day you ’ open that container you die.”
“Fine,” you say. “But how does that give me a chance if I have to use all thirteen containers in order to live through?”
“There is a slight possibility—one which we have calculated very carefully —that you can survive on twelve containers of oxygen. If you can and if you choose the proper twelve—which you have one chance out of thirteen of doing —you will survive. The parley of the two chances adds up to one chance out of a thousand. We leave now. My companions await me in our ship.”
He doesn’t wish you good-bye and you don’t wish him good-bye either. You watch the inner door of the airlock close.
You go over and look at the thirteen containers of oxygen and they all look alike. The air is very thin and hard to breathe. You’re going to have to open one of them quite soon. The wrong one? The one than contains enough poison to kill ten men?
Maybe it would be better if you pick the wrong one first and get it over with. The poison is odorless and undetectable —maybe it’s painless too. You wish you’d wondered that while he was still here; he’d have answered it for you. Probably it is painless—or is that only wishful thinking?
You look around the rest of the place. They haven’t left a thing of value except those thirteen containers and the food and water. It doesn’t look like much food and water for that long a period. But it probably is enough, barely, if you ration it carefully. Probably they feared if they left any surplus water you might figure some way to get the oxygen out of it. They were wrong on that but they didn’t take any chances—except the thousand-to-one chance.
You’re panting, breathing like an asthmatic. You reach for a container to open it. If you do there’s one chance out of thirteen that you’ll be dead in hours, maybe in minutes. They didn’t tell you either how fast-acting the poison is.
You pull your hand back. You don’t want to take even one chance out of thirteen of dying until you’ve had a chance to think carefully. You go back to the cot and lie down to think because you remember that every muscular motion you make cuts your chances.
Have they missed anything, anything at all? The oxygen tank on back of your space-suit. You sit up suddenly and look and see that the space-suit itself is gone. There’s no advantage to the airlock— the air that enters it when you pull the lever comes from-this room. And the lock is empty now since it was last used for a departure.
The hydroponic garden is gone. So are the emergency tanks of oxygen that were in the storeroom in case of failure of the plants. You realize that you’ve got up and are wandering around again and you sit down. You cut your chances with every step you take.
One chance in a thousand—if you can use only twelve containers of oxygen there’s—you figure it out mentally— there must be one chance in about seventy-seven that you’ll live. That’s what, they must have figured. One chance in seventy-seven parlayed against one in thirteen is about one in a thousand.
But if you could use all thirteen containers your chances would be good, better than even. Not quite, a certainty because there-is always the possibility that something would go wrong, such as your losing your will power on rationing the food—or, more likely, the water—and dying of hunger or thirst in the last day or two.
You look for something to write with to see if they , made any mistake on the hypnotic block. You can’t find anything but you find out it doesn’t matter. You’ve got a finger, haven’t you? You try to write your name on the wall with your finger. You can’t. You know your name all right—Bob Thayer. But you haven’t the faintest idea how to write it.
You could talk the message if you had a recording machine, but you haven’t a recording machine or any materials which, by any stretch of the imagination, would let you make one. You’ve got only your brain. You sit down and use it.
YOU forget to wind your watch and then, because of the pain, you wind it too tight and break or jam the spring and you’ve lost track of time and then comes the time when you find that half of your supplies are gone and you hope that half of the thirty-nine days is gone too.
And then again you’re sick and delirious and part of the time you think you’re back on Earth and that you’ve just had a nightmare about creatures from a place called Tharngel and you dreamed within the nightmare that you were playing poker on the Moon and that you won.
Pain, thirst, hunger, struggle for breath, nightmare. And then one day you eat the last of the food and drink the last of the water and you wonder whether it’s the thirty-first day or the thirty-ninth and you lie down again and wait to find out.
And you sleep and in your dream you hear an earthshaking racket that could be the landing of the Relief except that you know you’re dreaming and in your dream the air gets even thinner as air rushes from the dome into the airlock and the airlock opens and Captain Thorkelsen is standing there beside you and you say, “Hi, Captain,” weakly and wake up to find out that you weren’t really asleep and then you black out. ‘
And when you come around again,, there is good breatheable air in the dome and there is food waiting for you to eat and water waiting for you to drink. And all four of them from the Relief are standing around watching you anxiously.
Thorkelsen grins down at you. “What have you been doing? Where are all the books and equipment ? What happened?”
“Got in a poker game,” you tell him. Your throat is dry, still almost too dry to talk, but you drink some water—carefully, a sip at a time.
And then you’re telling the story, a bit at a time, as you sip more water and eat a little and you begin to feel almost human again.
And from the way they listen and the way they watch you, you know that they believe it—that they’d believe you even if it weren’t for the evidence around them. And that Earth will believe and that everything’s all right, that forty years is a long time even to develop a new science when all of Earth is working at it. And you’ve still got the clues to give them a start and your gamble paid off. You won the poker game after all.
You get tired after a while and have to stop talking. Thorkelsen looks at you wonderingly. He says, “But, Good Lord, man, how did you do it? All those oxygen containers—if that’s what they were —are plumb empty. And you say enough poison to kill ten men was in one of them. You look like you’ve lost thirty pounds weight and you look like you’ll need a month’s rest before you can walk again but you’re alive. Did they miscalculate or what?”
You can’t keep your eyes open any longer—you’ve got to sleep. But maybe you can take time to explain.
“Simple, Cap,” you tell him. “Each container held enough oxygen for one man for three days and one of them also contained enough poison to kill ten men. But there were thirteen containers, so I opened them all and mixed them together, and then put them back and opened one approximately every three days. So every minute, from the opening of the first one, there’s been ten-thirteenths of enough poison in the air to kill a man. For thirty-nine days I’ve been breathing almost enough poison to kill me.
“Of course the effect could have been cumulative and it could have killed me anyway but on the other hand I might have built up immunity toward it. Didn’t seem to work either way—I’ve just been sick from it at a constant degree from the beginning. But it was plenty better than the one chance in a thousand they intended to give me, so tried it. And it worked.”
Vaguely you’re aware that Thorkelsen is saying something, but you can’t make out what it is and you don’t care because you’re practically asleep already, the wonderful sleep that you can have only when you’re breathing real air with enough oxygen and no poison. You’re going to sleep all the way back to Earth and never leave Earth again ever.
You would hardly pick Hanley to play hero—to say nothing of saving our Earth from alien invasion—yet Al Hanley, hero or no, did just that!
THERE WAS this Hanley, A1 Hanley, and you wouldn’t have thought to look at him that he was ever going to amount to much. And if you’d known his life history, up to the time the Darians came you’d never have guessed how thankful you’re going to be—once you’ve read this story—for Al Hanley.
At the time it happened Hanley was drunk. Not that that was anything unusual—he’d been drunk a long time and it was his ambition to stay that way although it had reached the stage of being a tough job. He had run out of money, then out of friends to borrow from. He had worked his way down his list of acquaintances to the point where he considered himself lucky to average two bits a head on them.
He had reached the sad stage of having to walk miles to see someone he knew slightly so he could try to borrow a buck or a quarter. The long walk would wear off the effects of the last drink, well, not completely but somewhat—so he was in the predicament of Alice when she was with the Red Queen and had to do all the running she could possibly do just to stay in the same place.
And panhandling strangers was out because the cops had been clamping down on it and if Hanley tried that he’d end up spending a drinkless night in the hoosegow, which would be very bad indeed. He was at the stage now where twelve hours without a drink would give him the bull horrors, which are to—the D. T.’s as a cyclone is to a zephyr.
D. T.’s are merely hallucinations. If you’re smart you know they’re not there. Sometimes they’re even companionship if you care for that sort of thing. But the bull horrors are the bull horrors. It takes more drinking than most people can manage to get them and they can come only when a man who’s been drunk for longer than he can remember is suddenly and completely deprived of drink for an extended period, as when he is in jail, say.
The mere thought of them had Hanley shaking. Shaking specifically the hand of an old friend, a bosom companion whom he had seen only a few times in his life and then under not-too-favorable circumstances. The old friend’s name was Kid Eggleston and he was a big but battered ex-pug who had more recently been bouncer in ,a saloon, where Hanley had met him naturally.
But you needn’t concentrate on remembering either his name or his history because he isn’t going to last very long as far as this story is concerned. In fact, in exactly one and one-half minutes he is going to scream arid then faint and we shall hear no more of him.
But in passing let me mention that if Kid Eggleston hadn’t screamed and fainted you might not be here now, reading this. You might be strip-mining glanic ore under a green sun at the far edge of the galaxy. You wouldn’t like that at all so remember that it was Hanley who saved—and is still saving—you from it. Don’t be too hard on him. If Three and Nine had taken the Kid things would be very different.
Three and Nine were from the planet Dar, which is the second (and only habitable) planet of the aforementioned green star at the far edge of the galaxy. Three and Nine were not, of course, their full names. Darians’ names are numbers and Throe’s full name or number was 389,057,792,869,223. Or, at least, that would be its translation into the decimal system.
I’m sure you’ll forgive me for calling him Three as well as for calling his companion Nine and for having them so address each other. They themselves would not forgive me. One Darian always addresses another by his full number and any abbreviation is not only discourteous but insulting. However Darians live much longer than we. They can afford the time and I can’t.
AT the moment when Hanley was shaking the Kid’s hand. Three and Nine were still about a mile away in an upward direction. They weren’t in an airplane or even in a space-ship (and definitely not in a flying saucer. Sure I know what flying saucers are but ask me about them some other time. Right now I want to stick to the Darians). They were in a space-time cube.
I suppose I’ll have to explain that. The Darians had discovered—as we may someday discover—that Einstein was right. Matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light without turning into energy. And you wouldn’t want to turn into energy, would you? Neither did the Darians when they started their explorations throughout the galaxy.
So they worked it out that one can travel in effect-faster than the speed of light if one travels through time simultaneously. Through the time-space continuum, that is, rather than through space itself. Their trip from Dar covered a distance of 163,000 light years.
But since they simultaneously traveled back into the past 1,630 centuries the elapsed time to them had been zero for the journey. On their return they had traveled 1,630 centuries into the future and arrived at their starting point in the space-time continuum. You see what I mean, I hope.
Anyway there was this cube, invisible to terrestrials, a mile over Philadelphia (and don’t ask me why they picked Philadelphia—I don’t know why anyone would pick Philadelphia for anything). It had been poised there for four days while Three and Nine had picked up and studied radio broadcasts until they were able to speak and understand the prevailing language.
Not, of course, anything at all about our civilization, such as it is, and our customs, such as they are. Can you imagine trying to picture the life of inhabitants of Earth by listening to a mixture of giveaway contests, soap operas, Charlie McCarthy and the Lone Ranger?
Not that they really cared what our civilization was as long as it wasn’t highly’ enough developed to be any threat to them—and they were pretty sure of that by the end of four days. You can’t blame them for getting that impression and anyway it was right;
“Shall we descend?” Three asked Nine.
“Yes,” Nine said to Three. Three curled himself around the controls.
“… sure and I. saw you fight,” Hanley was saying. “And you were good, Kid. You must’ve had a bad manager or you’d have hit the top. You had the stuff. How about, having a drink with me around the corner?”
“On you or on me, Hanley?”
“Well, at the moment I am a little broke, Kid. But I need a drink. For old times’ sake.”
“You need a drink like I need a hole in my head. You’re drunk now and you’d better sober up before you get the D. T.’s.”
“Got ‘em now,” Hanley said. “Think nothing of ‘em. Look, there they are coming up behind you.”
Illogically, Kid Eggleston turned and looked. He screamed and fainted. Three and Nine “were approaching. Beyond them was the shadowy outline of a monstrous cube twenty feet to a side. The way it, was there and yet wasn’t was a bit frightening. That must have been what scared the Kid.
There wasn’t anything frightening about Three and Nine. They were vermiform, about fifteen feet long (if stretched out) and about a foot thick in the middle, tapering at both ends. They were a pleasing light blue in color and had no visible sense organs so you couldn’t tell which end was which—and it didn’t really matter because both ends were exactly alike anyway.
