The fredric brown collec.., p.14
The Fredric Brown Collection, page 14
Something was missing. Shorty suddenly remembered what it was. “Where’s the time machine?” he asked.
“Huh? Oh, right here.” The little man reached out a hand to his left and it disappeared up to the elbow.
“Oh,” said Shorty. “I wondered what it looked like.”
“Looked like?” said the little man. “How could it look like anything? I told you that there isn’t any such thing as a time machine. There couldn’t be; it would be a complete paradox. Time is a fixed dimension. And when I proved that to myself, that’s what drove me crazy.”
“When was that?”
“About four million years from now, around 1951. I had my heart set on making one, and went batty when I couldn’t.”
“Oh,” said Shorty. “Listen, how come I couldn’t see you, up there in the future, and I can here? And which world of four million years ago is this, yours or mine?”
“The same thing answers both of those questions. This is neutral ground; it’s before there was a bifurcation of sanity and insanity. The dinosaurs are awfully dumb; they haven’t got brains enough to be insane, let alone normal. They don’t know from anything. They don’t know there couldn’t be a time machine. That’s why we can come here.”
“Oh,” said Shorty again. And that held him for a while. Somehow it didn’t seem particularly strange any more that he should be waiting to see a dinosaur hunted with a sling shot. The mad part of it was that he should be waiting for a dinosaur at all. Granting that, it wouldn’t have seemed any sillier to have sat here waiting for one with a—
“Say,” he said, “if using a sling shot on those things is sporting, did you ever try a fly swatter?”
The little man’s eyes lighted up. “That,” he said, “is an idea. Say, maybe you really are eligible for—”
“No,” said Shorty hastily. “I was just kidding, honest. But, listen—”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“I don’t mean that; I mean—well, listen, pretty soon I’m going to wake up or something, and there are a couple questions I’d like to ask while… while you’re still here.”
“You mean while you’re still here,” said the little man. “I told you that your getting in on this with me was a pure accident, and one moreover that I’m going to have to take up with Napo—”
“Damn Napoleon,” said Shorty. “Listen, can you answer this so I can understand it? Are we here, or aren’t we? I mean, if there’s a time machine there by you, how can it be there if there can’t be a time machine? And am I, or am I not, still back in Professor Dolohan’s classroom, and if I am, what am I doing here? And—oh, damn it; what’s it all about?” The little man smiled wistfully.
“I can see that you are quite thoroughly mixed up. I might as well straighten you out. Do you know anything about logic?”
“Well, a little, Mr… uh—”
“Call me Dopey. And if you know a little about logic, that’s your trouble. Just forget it and remember that I’m crazy, and that makes things different, doesn’t it? A crazy person doesn’t have to be logical. Our worlds are different, don’t you see? Now you’re what we call a normal; that is, you see things the same as everybody else. But we don’t. And since matter is most obviously a mere concept of mind—”
“Is it?”
“Of course.”
“But that’s according to logic. Descartes—”
The little man waved his sling shot airily. “Oh, yes. But not according to other philosophers. The dualists. That’s where the logicians cross us up. They divide into two camps and take diametrically opposite sides of a question, and they can’t both be wrong. Silly, isn’t it? But the fact remains that matter is a concept of consciousness, even if some people who aren’t really crazy think it is. Now there is a normal concept of matter, which you share, and a whole flock of abnormal ones. The abnormal ones sort of get together.”
“I don’t quite understand. You mean that you have a secret society of… uh… lunatics, who… uh… live in a different world, as it were?”
“Not as it were,” corrected the little man emphatically, “but as it weren’t. And it isn’t a secret society, or anything organized that way. It just is. We project into two universes, in a manner of speaking. One is normal; our bodies are born there, and of course, they stay there. And if we’re crazy enough to attract attention, we get put into asylums there. But we have another existence, in our minds. That’s where I am, and that’s where you are at the moment, in my mind. I’m not really here, either.”
“Whew!” said Shorty. “But how could I be in your—”
“I told you; the machine slipped. But logic hasn’t much place in my world. A paradox more or less doesn’t matter, and a time machine is a mere bagatelle. Lots of us have them. Lots of us have come back here hunting with them. That’s how we killed off the dinosaurs and that’s why—”
“Wait,” said Shorty. “Is this world we’re sitting in, the Jurassic, part of your… uh… concept, or is it real? It looks real, and it looks authentic.”
“This is real, but it never really existed. That’s obvious. If matter is a concept of mind, and the saurians hadn’t any minds, then how could they have had a world to live in, except that we thought it up for them afterward?”
“Oh,” said Shorty weakly. His mind was going in buzzing circles. “You mean that the dinosaurs never really—”
“Here comes one,” said the little man.
Shorty jumped. He looked around wildly and couldn’t see anything that looked like a dinosaur.
“Down there,” said the little man, “coming through those bushes. Watch this shot.”
Shorty looked down as his companion raised the sling shot. A small lizard-like creature, but hopping erect as no lizard hops, was coming around one of the stunted bushes. It stood about a foot and a half high.
There was a sharp pinging sound as the rubber snapped, and a thud as the stone hit the creature between the eyes. It dropped, and the little man went over and picked it up.
“You can shoot the next one,” he said.
Shorty gawked at the dead saurian. “A struthiomimus!” he said. “Golly. But what if a big one comes along? A brontosaurus, say, or a Tyrannosaurus Rex?”
“They’re all gone. We killed them off. There’s only the little ones left, but it’s better than hunting rabbits, isn’t it? Well, one’s enough for me this time. I’m getting bored, but I’ll wait for you to shoot one if you want to.”
Shorty shook his head. “Afraid I couldn’t aim straight enough with that sling shot. I’ll skip it. Where’s the time machine?”
“Right here. Take two steps ahead of you.”
Shorty did, and the lights went out again.
“Just a minute,” said the little man’s voice, “I’ll set the levers. And you want off where you got on?”
“Uh… it might be a good idea. I might find myself in a mess otherwise. Where are we now?”
“Back in 1958. That guy is still telling his class what he thinks happened to the dinosaurs. And that red-headed girl— Say, she really is a honey. Want to pull her hair again?”
“No,” said Shorty. “But I want off in 1953. How’s this going to get me there?”
“You got on here, from 1953, didn’t you? It’s the warp. I think this will put you off just right.”
“You think?” Shorty was startled. “Listen, what if I get off the day before and sit down on my own lap in that classroom?”
The voice laughed. “You couldn’t do that; you’re not crazy. But I did, once. Well, get going. I want to get back to—”
“Thanks for the ride,” said Shorty. “But—wait—I still got one question to ask. About those dinosaurs.”
“Yes? Well, hurry; the warp might not hold.”
“The big ones, the really big ones. How the devil did you kill them with sling shots? Or did you?”
The little man chuckled. “Of course, we did. We just used bigger sling shots, that’s all. Good-by.”
Shorty felt a push, and light blinded him again. He was standing in the aisle of the classroom.
“Mr. McCabe,” said the sarcastic voice of Professor Dolohan, “class is not dismissed for five minutes yet. Will you be so kind as to resume your seat? And were you, may I ask, somnambulating?”
Shorty sat down hastily. He said, “I… uh— Sorry, professor.”
He sat out the rest of the period in a daze. It had seemed too vivid for a dream, and his fountain pen was still gone. But, of course, he could have lost that elsewhere. Yet the whole thing had been so vivid that it was a full day before he could convince himself that he’d dreamed it, and a week before he could forget about it, for long at a time.
Only gradually did the memory of it fade. A year later, he still vaguely remembered that he’d had a particularly screwy dream. But not five years later; no dream is remembered that long.
He was an associate professor now, and had his own class in paleontology. “The saurians,” he was telling them, “died out in the late Jurassic age. Becoming too large and unwieldy to supply themselves with food—”
As he talked, he was staring at the pretty red-headed graduate student in the back row. And wondering how he could get up the nerve to ask her for a date.
There was a bluebottle fly in the room; it had risen in a droning spiral from a point somewhere at the back of the room. It reminded Professor McCabe of something, and while he talked, he tried to remember what it was. And just then the girl in the back row jumped suddenly and yipped.
“Miss Willis,” said Professor McCabe, “is something wrong?”
“I… I thought something pulled my hair, professor,” she said. She blushed, and that made her more of a knockout than ever. “I… I guess I must have dozed off.”
He looked at her—severely, because the eyes of the class were upon him. But this was just the chance he’d been waiting and hoping for. He said, “Miss Willis, will you please remain after class?”
HORROR CAME to Cherrybell at a little after noon on a blistering hot day in August.
Perhaps that is redundant; any August day in Cherrybell, Arizona, is blistering hot. It is on Highway 89 about forty miles south of Tucson and about thirty miles north of the Mexican border. It consists of two filling stations, one on each side of the road to catch travelers going in both directions, a general store, a beer-and-wine-license-only tavern, a tourist-trap type trading post for tourists who can’t wait until they reach the border to start buying serapes and huaraches, a deserted hamburger stand, and a few ‘dobe houses inhabited by Mexican-Americans who work in Nogales, the border town to the south, and who, for God knows what reason, prefer to live in Cherrybell and commute, some of them in Model T Fords. The sign on the highway says, “Cherrybell, Pop. 42,” but the sign exaggerates; Pop died last year—Pop Anders, who ran the now-deserted hamburger stand—and the correct figure is 41.
Horror came to Cherrybell mounted on a burro led by an ancient, dirty and gray-bearded desert rat of a prospector who later —nobody got around to asking his name for a while—gave the name of Dade Grant. Horror’s name was Garth. He was approximately nine feet tall but so thin, almost a stick man, that he could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. Old Dade’s burro carried him easily, despite the fact that his feet dragged in the sand on either side. Being dragged through the sand for, as it later turned out, well over five miles hadn’t caused the slightest wear on the shoes—more like buskins, they were—which constituted all that he wore except for a pair of what could have been swimming trunks, in robin’s-egg blue. But it wasn’t his dimensions that made him horrible to look upon; it was his skin. It looked red, raw. It looked as though he had been skinned alive, and the skin replaced upside down, raw side out. His skull, his face, were equally narrow or elongated; otherwise in every visible way he appeared human—or at least humanoid. Unless you counted such little things as the fact that his hair was a robin’s-egg blue to match his trunks, as were his eyes and his boots. Blood red and light blue.
Casey, owner of the tavern, was the first one to see them coming across the plain, from the direction of the mountain range to the east. He’d stepped out of the back door of his tavern for a breath of fresh, if hot, air. They were about a hundred yards away at that time, and already he could see the utter alienness of the figure on the lead burro. Just alienness at that distance, the horror came only at closer range. Casey’s jaw dropped and stayed down until the strange trio was about fifty yards away, then he started slowly toward them. There are people who run at the sight of the unknown, others who advance to meet it. Casey advanced, however slowly, to meet it.
Still in the wide open, twenty yards from the back of the little tavern, he met them. Dade Grant stopped and dropped the rope by which he was leading the burro. The burro stood still and dropped its head. The stick-man stood up simply by planting his feet solidly and standing, astride the burro. He stepped one leg across it and stood a moment, leaning his weight against his hands on the burro’s back, and then sat down in the sand. “High-gravity planet,” he said. “Can’t stand long.”
“Kin I get water for my burro?” the prospector asked Casey. “Must be purty thirsty by now. Hadda leave water bags, some other things, so it could carry—” He jerked a thumb toward the red-and-blue horror.
Casey was just realizing that it was a horror. At a distance the color combination seemed a bit outre, but close— The skin was rough and seemed to have veins on the outside and looked moist (although it wasn’t) and damn if it didn’t look just like he had his skin peeled off and put back upside down. Or just peeled off, period. Casey had never seen anything like it and hoped he wouldn’t ever see anything like it again.
Casey felt something behind him and looked over his shoulder. Others had seen now and were coming, but the nearest of them, a pair of boys, were ten yards behind him. “Muchachos,” he called out. “Agua por el burro. Un pazal. Pronto?
He looked back and said, “What—? Who—?”
“Name’s Dade Grant,” said the prospector, putting out a hand, which Casey took absently. When he let go of it it jerked back over the desert rat’s shoulder, thumb indicating the thing that sat on the sand. “His name’s Garth, he tells me. He’s an extra something or other, and he’s some kind of minister.”
Casey nodded at the stick-man and was glad to get a nod in return instead of an extended hand. “I’m Manuel Casey,” he said. ‘What does he mean, an extra something?”
The stick-man’s voice was unexpectedly deep and vibrant. “I am an extraterrestrial. And a minister plenipotentiary.”
Surprisingly, Casey was a moderately well-educated man and knew both of those phrases; he was probably the only person in Cherrybell who would have known the second one. Less surprisingly, considering the speaker’s appearance, he believed both of them. ‘What can I do for you, sir?” he asked. “But first, why not come in out of the sun?”
“No, thank you. It’s a bit cooler here than they told me it would be, but I’m quite comfortable. This is equivalent to a cool spring evening on my planet. And as to what you can do for me, you can notify your authorities of my presence. I believe they will be interested.”
Well, Casey thought, by blind luck he’s hit the best man for his purpose within at least twenty miles. Manuel Casey was half-Irish, half-Mexican. He had a half-brother who was half-Irish and half assorted-American, and the half-brother was a bird colonel at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. He said, “Just a minute, Mr. Garth, I’ll telephone. You, Mr. Grant, would you want to come inside?”
“Naw, I don’t mind sun. Out in it all day every day. An’ Garth here, he ast me if I’d stick with him till he was finished with what he’s gotta do here. Said he’d gimme somethin’ purty vallable if I did. Somethin’—a ‘lectrononic—”
“An electronic battery-operated portable ore indicator,” Garth said. “A simple little device, indicates presence of a concentration of ore up to two miles, indicates kind, grade, quantity and depth.”
Casey gulped, excused himself, and pushed through the gathering crowd into his tavern. He had Colonel Casey on the phone in one minute, but it took him another four minutes to convince the colonel that he was neither drunk nor joking.
Twenty-five minutes after that there was a noise in the sky, a noise that swelled and then died as a four-man helicopter sat down and shut off its rotors a dozen yards from an extraterrestrial, two men and a burro. Casey alone had had the courage to rejoin the trio from the desert; there were other spectators, but they still held well back.
Colonel Casey, a major, a captain and a lieutenant who was the. helicopter’s pilot all came out and ran over. The stick-man stood up, all nine feet of him; from the effort it cost him to stand you could tell that he was used to a much lighter gravity than Earth’s. He bowed, repeated his name and identification of himself as an extraterrestrial and a minister plenipotentiary. Then he apologized for sitting down again, explained why it was necessary, and sat down.
The colonel introduced himself and the three who had come with him. “And now, sir, what can we do for you?”
The stick-man made a grimace that was probably intended as a smile. His teeth were the same light blue as his hair and eyes. “You have a cliché, `take me to your leader.’ I do not ask that. In fact, I must remain here. Nor do I ask that any of your leaders be brought here to me. That would be impolite. I am perfectly willing for you to represent them, to talk to you and let you question me. But I do ask one thing.
“You have tape recorders. I ask that, before I talk or answer questions, you have one brought. I want to be sure that the message your leaders eventually receive is full and accurate.”
“Fine,” the colonel said. He turned to the pilot. “Lieutenant, get on the radio in the whirlybird and tell them to get us a tape recorder faster than possible. It can be dropped by para— No, that’d take longer, rigging it for a drop. Have them send it by another helicopter.” The lieutenant turned to go. “Hey,” the colonel said. “Also fifty yards of extension cord. We’ll have to plug it in inside Manny’s tavern.”
