The Third Science Fiction Megapack Read online

  The chair recognized a man in the fifth row.

  “Mr. Mayor, why don’t we all track him down and a lot of us attack him at once? Some of us would die, sure, but he couldn’t strike us all dead at one time. Somebody’s bound to succeed.”

  “Why not try a high-powered rifle from a long way off?” someone else suggested, frantically.

  “Let’s bomb him,” still another offered.

  The mayor waved them quiet and turned to Prof. Tomlin. The professor got to his feet again.

  “I’m not sure that would work, gentlemen,” he said. “The humanoid is able to keep track of hundreds of things at the same time. No doubt he could unleash his power in several directions almost at once.”

  “But we don’t know!”

  “It’s worth a try!”

  At that moment George walked into the room and the clamor died at its height. He went noiselessly down an aisle to the platform, mounted it and turned to the assembly. He was a magnificent blue figure, eyes flashing, chest out, head proud. He eyed them all.

  “You are working yourselves up needlessly,” he said quietly. “It is not my intention, nor is it the intention of any Seventh Order Humanoid, to kill or cause suffering. It’s simply that you do not understand what it would mean to dedicate yourselves to the fulfillment of the Seventh Order destiny. It is your heritage, yours because you have advanced in your technology so far that Earth has been chosen by us as a station. You will have the privilege of creating us. To give you such a worthwhile goal in your short lives is actually doing you a service―a service far outweighed by any of your citizens. Beside a Seventh Order Humanoid, your lives are unimportant in the great cosmic scheme of things―”

  “If they’re so unimportant, why did you bother to take two of them?”

  “Yeah. Why don’t you bring back Dick Knight and Sergeant Phillips?”

  “Do you want to be buried lying down or standing up?”

  The collective courage rallied. There were catcalls and hoots, stamping of feet.

  Suddenly from the balcony over George’s head a man leaned over, a metal folding chair in his hands, aiming at George’s head. An instant later the man disappeared in a flash and the chair dropped toward George. He moved only a few inches and the chair thudded to the platform before him. He had not looked up.

  For a moment the crowd sat stunned. Then they rose and started for the blue man. Some drew guns they had brought. The hall was filled with blinding flashes, with smoke, with a horrible stench, screams, swearing, cries of fear and pain. There was a rush for the exits. Some died at the feet of their fellow men.

  In the end, when all were gone, George of Zanthar still stood on the platform, alone. There was no movement except the twitching of the new dead, the trampled, on the floor.

  * * * *

  Events happened fast after that. The Illinois National Guard mobilized, sent a division to Brentwood to hunt George down. He met them at the city square. They rumbled in and trained machine guns and tank rifles on him. The tanks and personnel flashed out of existence before a shot was fired.

  Brentwood was ordered evacuated. The regular Army was called in. Reconnaissance planes reported George was still standing in the city square. Jet planes materialized just above the hills and made sudden dives, but before their pilots could fire a shot, they were snuffed out of the air in a burst of fire.

  Bombers first went over singly, only to follow the jets’ fate. A squadron bloomed into a fiery ball as it neared the target. A long-range gun twenty miles away was demolished when its ammunition blew up shortly before firing.

  Three days after George had killed his first man, action ceased. The countryside was deathly still. Not a living person could be seen for several miles around. But George still stood patiently in the square. He stood there for three more days and yet nothing happened.

  On the fourth day, he sensed that a solitary soldier had started toward the city from five miles to the east. In his mind’s eye he followed the soldier approaching the city. The soldier, a sergeant, was bearing a white flag that fluttered in the breeze; he was not armed. After an hour he saw the sergeant enter the square and walk toward him. When they were within twenty feet of one another, the soldier stopped and saluted.

  “Major General Pitt requests a meeting with you, sir,” the soldier said, trembling and trying hard not to.

  “Do not be frightened,” George said. “I see you intend me no harm.”

  The soldier reddened. “Will you accompany me?”

  “Certainly.”

  The two turned toward the east and started to walk.

  * * * *

  Five miles east of Brentwood lies a small community named Minerva. Population: 200. The highway from Brentwood to Chicago cuts the town in two. In the center of town, on the north side of the road, stands a new building―the Minerva Town Hall―built the year before with money raised by the residents. It was the largest and most elaborate building in Minerva, which had been evacuated three days before.

  On this morning the town hall was occupied by army men. Maj. Gen. Pitt fretted and fumed at the four officers and twenty enlisted men waiting in the building.

  “It’s an indignity!” he railed at the men who were forced to listen to him. “We have orders to talk appeasement with him! Nuts! We lose a few men, a few planes and now we’re ready to meet George halfway. What’s this country coming to? There ought to be something that would knock him out. Why should we have to send in after him? It’s disgusting!”

  The major general, a large man with a bristling white mustache and a red face, stamped back and forth in the council room. Some of the officers and men smiled to themselves. The general was a well known fighting man. Orders he had received hamstrung him and, as soldiers, they sympathized with him.

  “What kind of men do we have in the higher echelons?” He asked everybody in general and nobody in particular. “They won’t even let us have a field telephone. We’re supposed to make a report by radio. Now isn’t that smart?” He shook his head, looked the men over. “An appeasement team, that’s what you are, when you ought to be a combat team to lick hell out of George.

  “Why were you all assigned to this particular duty? I never saw any of you before and I understand you’re all strangers to each other, too. Hell, what will they do next? Appeasement. I never appeased anybody before in my whole life. I’d rather spit in his eye. What am I supposed to talk about? The weather? What authority do I have to yak with a walking collection of nuts and bolts!”

  An officer strode into the room and saluted the general. “They’re coming, sir,” he said.

  “Who’s coming?…My God, man,” the general spluttered angrily, “be specific. Who the hell are ‘they’?”

  “Why, George and Sergeant Matthews, sir. You remember, the sergeant who volunteered to go into Brentwood―”

  “Oh, them. Well, all I have to say is this is a hell of a war. I haven’t figured out what I am going to say yet.”

  “Shall I have them wait, sir?”

  “Hell, no. Let’s get this over with. I’ll find out what George has to say and maybe that’ll give me a lead.”

  Before George entered the Council chamber, he already knew the mind of each man. He saw the room through their eyes. He knew everything about them, what they were wearing, what they were thinking. All had guns, yet none of them would kill him, although at least one man, Maj. Gen. Pitt, would have liked to.

  They were going to talk appeasement, George knew, but he could also see that the general didn’t know what line the conversation would take or what concessions he could make on behalf of his people.

  Wait―there was one man among the twenty-three who had an odd thought. It was a soldier he had seen looking through a window at him. This man was thinking about eleven o’clock, for George could see in the man’s mind various symbols for fifteen minutes from then―the hands of a clock, a watch, the numerals 11. But George could not see any significance to the thought.

 
; When he entered the room with the sergeant, he was ushered to a table. He sat down with Maj. Gen. Pitt, who glowered at him. Letting his mind roam the room, George picked up the numerals again and identified the man thinking them as the officer behind and a little to the right of the general.

  What was going to happen at eleven? The man had no conscious thought of harm to anyone, yet the idea kept obtruding and seemed so out of keeping with his other thoughts George assigned several of his circuits to the man. The fact that the lieutenant looked at his watch and saw that it was 10:50 steeled George still more. If there was to be trouble, it would come from this one man.

  “I’m General Pitt,” the general said drily. “You’re George, of course. I have been instructed to ask you what, exactly, your intentions are toward the United States and the world in general, with a view toward reaching some sort of agreement with you and others of your kind, who will, as you say invade the Earth.”

  “Invade, General Pitt,” George replied, “is not the word.”

  “All right, whatever the word is. We’re all familiar with the plan you’ve been talking about. What we want to know is, where do you go from here?”

  “The fact that there has been no reluctance on the part of the armed forces to talk of an agreement―even though I see that you privately do not favor such a talk, General Pitt―is an encouraging sign. We of Zanthar would not want to improve a planet which could not be educated and would continually oppose our program. This will make it possible for me to turn in a full report in a few days now.”

  “Will you please get to the point?”

  George could see that the lieutenant was looking at his watch again. It was 10:58. George spread his mind out more than twenty miles, but could find no installation, horizontally or vertically, that indicated trouble. None of the men in the room seemed to think of becoming overly hostile.

  “Yes, General. After my message goes out, there ought to be a landing party on Earth within a few weeks. While waiting for the first party, there must be certain preparations―”

  George tensed. The lieutenant was reaching for something. But it somehow didn’t seem connected with George. It was something white, a handkerchief. He saw that the man intended to blow his nose and started to relax except that George suddenly became aware of the fact the man did not need to blow his nose!

  Every thought-piercing circuit became instantly energized in George’s mind and reached out in all directions…

  There were at least ten shots from among the men. They stood there surprised at their actions. Those who had fired their guns now held the smoking weapons awkwardly in their hands.

  George’s eyes were gone. Smoke curled upward from the two empty sockets where bullets had entered a moment before. The smoke grew heavier and his body became hot. Some of him turned cherry red and the chair on which he had been sitting started to burn. Finally, he collapsed toward the table and rolled to the floor.

  He started to cool. He was no longer the shiny blue-steel color he had been―he had turned black. His metal gave off cracking noises and some of it buckled here and there as it cooled.

  * * * *

  A few minutes later, tense military men and civilians grouped around a radio receiver in Chicago heard the report and relaxed, laughing and slapping each other on the back. Only one sat unmoved in a corner. Others finally sought him out.

  “Well, Professor, it was your idea that did the trick. Don’t you feel like celebrating?” one of them asked.

  Prof. Tomlin shook his head. “If only George had been a little more benign, we might have learned a lot from him.”

  “What gave you the idea that killed him?”

  “Oh, something he said about the unconscious and subconscious,” Prof. Tomlin replied. “He admitted they were not penetrable. It was an easy matter to instill a post-hypnotic suggestion in some proven subjects and then to erase the hypnotic experience.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “It wasn’t too difficult, really. It was finding the solution that was hard. We selected more than a hundred men, worked with them for days, finally singled out the best twenty, then made them forget their hypnosis. A first lieutenant―I’ve forgotten his name―had implanted in him a command even he was not aware of. His subconscious made him blow his nose fifteen minutes after he saw George. Nearly twenty others had post-hypnotic commands to shoot George in the eyes as soon as they saw the lieutenant blow his nose. Of course we also planted a subconscious hate pattern, which wasn’t exactly necessary, just to make sure there would be no hesitation, no inhibition, no limiting moral factor.

  “None of the men ever saw each other before being sent to Minerva. None realized that they carried with them the order for George’s annihilation. The general, who was not one of the hypnotics, was given loose instructions, as were several others, so they could not possibly know the intention. Those of us who had conducted the hypnosis had to stay several hundred miles away so that we could not be reached by George’s prying mind…”

  * * * *

  In a pasture next to a wood near Brentwood, a metal box buried in the ground suddenly exploded, uprooting a catalpa tree.

  On a planet many millions of miles away, a red light―one of many on a giant control board―suddenly winked out.

  A blue humanoid made an entry in a large book: System 29578, Planet Three Inhabited.

  Too dangerous for any kind of development.

  MONKEY ON HIS BACK, by Charles V. De Vet

  He was walking endlessly down a long, glass-walled corridor. Bright sunlight slanted in through one wall, on the blue knapsack across his shoulders. Who he was, and what he was doing here, was clouded. The truth lurked in some corner of his consciousness, but it was not reached by surface awareness.

  The corridor opened at last into a large high-domed room, much like a railway station or an air terminal. He walked straight ahead.

  At the sight of him a man leaning negligently against a stone pillar, to his right but within vision, straightened and barked an order to him, “Halt!” He lengthened his stride but gave no other sign.

  Two men hurried through a doorway of a small anteroom to his left, calling to him. He turned away and began to run.

  Shouts and the sound of charging feet came from behind him. He cut to the right, running toward the escalator to the second floor. Another pair of men were hurrying down, two steps at a stride. With no break in pace he veered into an opening beside the escalator.

  At the first turn he saw that the aisle merely circled the stairway, coming out into the depot again on the other side. It was a trap. He glanced quickly around him.

  At the rear of the space was a row of lockers for traveler use. He slipped a coin into a pay slot, opened the zipper on his bag and pulled out a flat briefcase. It took him only a few seconds to push the case into the compartment, lock it and slide the key along the floor beneath the locker.

  There was nothing to do after that—except wait.

  The men pursuing him came hurtling around the turn in the aisle. He kicked his knapsack to one side, spreading his feet wide with an instinctive motion.

  Until that instant he had intended to fight. Now he swiftly reassessed the odds. There were five of them, he saw. He should be able to incapacitate two or three and break out. But the fact that they had been expecting him meant that others would very probably be waiting outside. His best course now was to sham ignorance. He relaxed.

  He offered no resistance as they reached him.

  They were not gentle men. A tall ruffian, copper-brown face damp with perspiration and body oil, grabbed him by the jacket and slammed him back against the lockers. As he shifted his weight to keep his footing someone drove a fist into his face. He started to raise his hands; and a hard flat object crashed against the side of his skull.

  The starch went out of his legs.

  * * * *

  “Do you make anything out of it?” the psychoanalyst Milton Bergstrom, asked.

  John
Zarwell shook his head.“Did I talk while I was under?”

  “Oh, yes. You were supposed to. That way I follow pretty well what you’re reenacting.”

  “How does it tie in with what I told you before?”

  Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned face betrayed no emotion other than an introspective stillness of his normally alert gaze. “I see no connection,” he decided, his words once again precise and meticulous.“We don’t have enough to go on. Do you feel able to try another comanalysis this afternoon yet?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell opened the collar of his shirt. The day was hot, and the room had no air conditioning, still a rare luxury on St. Martin’s. The office window was open, but it let in no freshness, only the mildly rank odor that pervaded all the planet’s habitable area.

  “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The serum is quite harmless, John.” He maintained a professional diversionary chatter as he administered the drug. “A scopolamine derivative that’s been well tested.”

  The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet assumed abruptly the near transfluent consistency of a damp sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave and rolled gently toward the far wall.

  Bergstrom continued talking, with practiced urbanity. “When psychiatry was a less exact science,”his voice went on, seeming to come from a great distance, “a doctor had to spend weeks, sometimes months or years interviewing a patient. If he was skilled enough, he could sort the relevancies from the vast amount of chaff. We are able now, with the help of the serum, to confine our discourses to matters cogent to the patient’s trouble.”

  The floor continued its transmutation, and Zarwell sank deep into viscous depths. “Lie back and relax. Don’t…”

  The words tumbled down from above. They faded, were gone.

  * * * *

  Zarwell found himself standing on a vast plain. There was no sky above, and no horizon in the distance. He was in a place without space or dimension. There was nothing here except himself—and the gun that he held in his hand.