The Fredric Brown Megapack (14 page)

“Yes, sir. I’m almost ready.”

Ten men and one extraterrestrial humanoid sat in a rough circle, with the microphone hanging from a small tripod in the approximate center. The humans were sweating profusely; the humanoid shivered slightly. Just outside the circle, the burro stood dejectedly, its head low. Edging closer, but still about five yards away, spread out now in a semicircle, was the entire population of Cherrybell who had been at home at the time; the stores and the filling stations were deserted.

The technical sergeant pushed a button and the tape recorder’s reel started to turn. “Testing…testing,” he said. He held down the rewind button for a second and then pushed the playback button. “Testing…testing,” said the recorder’s speaker. Loud and clear. The sergeant pushed the rewind button, then the erase one to clear the tape. Then the stop button. “When I push the next button, sir,” he said to the colonel, “we’ll be recording.”

The colonel looked at the tall extraterrestrial, who nodded, and then the colonel nodded at the sergeant. The sergeant pushed the recording button.

“My name is Garth,” said the stick-man, slowly and clearly. “I am from a planet of a star which is not listed in your star catalogs, although the globular cluster in which it is one of ninety thousand stars, is known to you. It is, from here, in the direction of the center of the galaxy at a distance of a little over four thousand light-years.

“However, I am not here as a representative of my planet or my people, but as minister plenipotentiary of the Galactic Union, a federation of the enlightened civilizations of the galaxy, for the good of all. It is my assignment to visit you and decide, here and now, whether or not you are to be welcomed to join our federation.

“You may now ask questions freely. However, I reserve the right to postpone answering some of them until my decision has been made. If the decision is favorable, I will then answer all questions, including the ones I have postponed answering meanwhile. Is that satisfactory?”

“Yes,” said the colonel. “How did you come here? A spaceship?”

“Correct. It is overhead right now, in orbit twenty-two thousand miles out, so it revolves with the earth and stays over this one spot. I am under observation from it, which is one reason I prefer to remain here in the open. I am to signal it when I want it to come down to pick me up.”

“How do you know our language so fluently? Are you telepathic?”

“No, I am not. And nowhere in the galaxy is any race telepathic except among its own members. I was taught your language, for this purpose. We have had observers among you for many centuries—by
we,
I mean the Galactic Union, of course. Quite obviously I could not pass as an Earthman, but there are other races who can. Incidentally, they are not spies, or agents; they have in no way tried to affect you; they are observers and that is all.”

“What benefits do we get from joining your union, if we are asked and if we accept?” the colonel asked.

“First, a quick course in the fundamental social sciences which will end your tendency to fight among yourselves and end or at least control your aggressions. After we are satisfied that you have accomplished that and it is safe for you to do so, you will be given space travel, and many other things, as rapidly as you are able to assimilate them.”

“And if we are not asked, or refuse?”

“Nothing. You will be left alone; even our observers will be withdrawn. You will work out your own fate—either you will render your planet uninhabited and uninhabitable within the next century, or you will master social science yourselves and again be candidates for membership and again be offered membership. We will check from time to time and if and when it appears certain that you are not going to destroy yourselves, you will again be approached.”

“Why the hurry, now that you’re here? Why can’t you stay long enough for our leaders, as you call them, to talk to you in person?”

“Postponed. The reason is not important but it is complicated, and I simply do not wish to waste time explaining.”

“Assuming your decision is favorable, how will we get in touch with you to let you know
our
decision? You know enough about us, obviously, to know that I can’t make it.”

“We will know your decision through our observers. One condition of acceptance is full and uncensored publication in your newspapers of this interview, verbatim from the tape we are now using to record it. Also of all deliberations and decisions of your government.”

“And other governments? We can’t decide unilaterally for the world.”

“Your government has been chosen for a start. If you accept we shall furnish the techniques that will cause the others to fall in line quickly—and those techniques do not involve force or the threat of force.”

“They must be
some
techniques,” said the colonel wryly, “if they’ll make one certain country I don’t have to name fall into line quickly, without even a threat.”

“Sometimes the offer of reward is more significant than the use of threat. Do you think the country you do not wish to name would like your country colonizing planets of far stars before they even reach Mars? But that is a minor point, relatively. You may trust the techniques.”

“It sounds almost too good to be true. But you said that you are to decide, here and now, whether or not we are to be invited to join. May I ask on what factors you will base your decision?”

“One is that I am—was, since I already have—to check your degree of xenophobia. In the loose sense in which you use it, that means fear of strangers. We have a word that has no counterpart in your vocabulary: it means fear of and revulsion toward
aliens.
I—or at least a member of my race—was chosen to make the first overt contact with you. Because I am what you could call roughly humanoid—as you are what I would call roughly humanoid—I am probably more horrible, more repulsive to you than many completely different species would be. Because to you, I am a caricature of a human being, I am more horrible to you than a being who bears no remote resemblance to you.

“You may think you do feel horror at me, and revulsion, but believe me, you have passed that test. There
are
races in the galaxy who can never be members of the federation, no matter how they advance otherwise, because they are violently and incurably xenophobic; they could never face or talk to an alien of any species. They would either run screaming from him or try to kill him instantly. From watching you and these people”—he waved a long arm at the civilian population of Cherrybell not far outside the circle of the conference—“I know you feel revulsion at the sight of me, but believe me it is relatively slight and certainly curable. You have passed that test satisfactorily.”

“And are there other tests?”

“One other. But I think it is time that I—” Instead of finishing the sentence, the stick man lay back flat on the sand and closed his eyes.

The colonel started to his feet. “What in
hell?”
he said. He walked quickly around the mike’s tripod and bent over the recumbent extraterrestrial, put an ear to the bloody-appearing chest.

As he raised his head, Dade Grant, the grizzled prospector, chuckled. “No heartbeat, Colonel, because no heart. But I may leave him as a souvenir for you and you’ll find much more interesting things inside him than heart and guts. Yes, he is a puppet whom I have been operating—as your Edgar Bergen operates his—what’s his name?—oh yes. Charlie McCarthy. Now that he has served his purpose, he is deactivated. You can go back to your place, Colonel.”

Colonel Casey moved back slowly. “Why?” he asked.

Dade Grant was peeling off his beard and wig. He rubbed a cloth across his face to remove make-up and was revealed as a handsome young man. He said, “What he told you, or what you were told through him, was true as far as it went. He is only a simulacrum, yes, but he is an exact duplicate of a member of one of the intelligent races of the galaxy, the one toward whom you would be disposed—if you were violently and incurably xenophobic—to be most horrified by, according to our psychologists. But we did not bring a real member of his species to make first contact because they have a phobia of their own, agoraphobia—fear of space. They are highly civilized and members in good standing of the federation, but they never leave their own planet.

“Our observers assure us you don’t have
that
phobia. But they were unable to judge in advance the degree of your xenophobia and the only way to test it was to bring along something in lieu of someone to test it against, and presumably to let him make the initial contact.”

The colonel sighed audibly. “I can’t say this doesn’t relieve me in one way. We could get along with humanoids, yes, and will when we have to. But I’ll admit it’s a relief to learn that the master race of the galaxy is, after all, human instead of only humanoid. What is the second test?”

“You are undergoing it now. Call me—” He snapped his fingers. “What’s the name of Bergen’s second-string puppet, after Charlie McCarthy?”

The colonel hesitated, but the tech sergeant supplied the answer. “Mortimer Snerd.”

“Right. So call me Mortimer Snerd, and now I think it is time that I—” He lay back flat on the sand and closed his eyes just as the stick-man had done a few minutes before.

The burro raised its head and put it into the circle over the shoulder of the tech sergeant. “That takes care of the puppets, Colonel,” it said. “And now what’s this bit about it being important that the master race be human or at least humanoid? What is a master race?”

NIGHTMARE IN YELLOW

He awoke when the alarm clock rang, but lay in bed a while after he’d shut it off, going a final time over the plans he’d made for embezzlement that day and for murder that evening.

Every little detail had been worked out, but this was the final check. Tonight at forty-six minutes after eight he’d be free, in every way. He’d picked that moment because this was his fortieth birthday and that was the exact time of day, of the evening rather, when he had been born. His mother had been a bug on astrology, which was why the moment of his birth had been impressed on him so exactly. He wasn’t superstitious himself but it had struck his sense of humor to have his new life begin at forty, to the minute.

Time was running out on him, in any case. As a lawyer who specialized in handling estates, a lot of money passed through his hands—and some of it had passed into them. A year ago he’d “borrowed” five thousand dollars to put into something that looked like a sure-fire way to double or triple the money, but he’d lost it instead. Then he’d “borrowed” more to gamble with, in one way or another, to try to recoup the first loss. Now he was behind to the tune of over thirty thousand; the shortage couldn’t be hidden more than another few months and there wasn’t a hope that he could replace the missing money by that time. So he had been raising all the cash he could without arousing suspicion, by carefully liquidating assets, and by this afternoon he’d have running-away money to the tune of well over a hundred thousand dollars, enough to last him the rest of his life.

And they’d never catch him. He’d planned every detail of his trip, his destination, his new identity, and it was foolproof. He’d been working on it for months.

His decision to kill his wife had been relatively an afterthought. The motive was simple: he hated her. But it was only after he’d come to the decision that he’d never go to jail, that he’d kill himself if he was ever apprehended, that it came to him that—since he’d die anyway if caught—he had nothing to lose in leaving a dead wife behind him instead of a living one.

He’d hardly been able to keep from laughing at the appropriateness of the birthday present she’d given him (yesterday, a day ahead of time); it had been a new suitcase. She’d also talked him into celebrating his birthday by letting her meet him downtown for dinner at seven. Little did she guess how the celebration would go after that. He planned to have her home by eight forty-six and satisfy his sense of the fitness of things by making himself a widower at that exact moment. There was a practical advantage, too, of leaving her dead. If he left her alive but asleep she’d guess what had happened and call the police when she found him gone in the morning. If he left her dead her body would not be found that soon, possibly not for two or three days, and he’d have a much better start.

Things went smoothly at his office; by the time he went to meet his wife everything was ready. But she dawdled over drinks and dinner and he began to worry whether he could get her home by eight forty-six. It was ridiculous, he knew, but it had become important that his moment of freedom should come then and not a minute earlier or a minute later. He watched his watch.

He would have missed it by half a minute if he’d waited till they were inside the house. But the dark of the porch of their house was perfectly safe, as safe as inside. He swung the black-jack viciously once, as she stood at the front door, waiting for him to open it. He caught her before she fell and managed to hold her upright with one arm while he got the door open and then got it closed from the inside.

Then he flicked the switch and yellow light leaped to fill the room, and, before they could see that his wife was dead and that he was holding her up, all the assembled birthday party guests shouted
“Surprise!”

JAYCEE

“Walter, what’s a Jaycee?” Mrs. Ralston asked her husband, Dr. Ralston, across the breakfast table.

“Why—I believe it used to be a member of what they called a Junior Chamber of Commerce. I don’t know if they still have them or not. Why?”

“Martha said Henry was muttering something yesterday about Jaycees, fifty million Jaycees. And swore at her when she asked what he meant.” Martha was Mrs. Graham and Henry her husband, Dr. Graham. They lived next door and the two doctors and their wives were close friends.

“Fifty million,” said Dr. Ralston musingly. “That’s how many Jaycees there are.”

He should have known; he and Dr. Graham together were responsible for parthies—parthenogenetic births. Twenty years ago, in 1980, they had together engineered the first experiment in human parthenogenesis, the fertilization of a female cell without the help of a male one. The offspring of that experiment, named John, was now twenty years old and lived with Dr. and Mrs. Graham next door; he had been adopted by them after the death of his mother in an accident some years before.

No other parthie was more than half John’s age. Not until John was ten, and obviously healthy and normal, had the authorities let down bars and permitted any woman who wanted a child and who was either single or married to a sterile husband to have a child parthenogenetically. Due to the shortage of men—the disastrous testerosis epidemic of the 1970s had just killed off almost a third of the male population of the world—over fifty million women had applied for parthenogenetic children and borne them. Luckily for redressing the balance of the sexes, it had turned out that all parthenogenetically conceived children were males.