I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories (23 page)

Spencer shoved the Hudson papers to one side and picked up the notes. The pages were filled with cryptic penciled lines, with long strings of mathematical abstractions, roughly drawn sketches. They were no help.

And that other paper, Spencer wondered—the one he'd left in the portfolio, that one that had to do with ethics? Might it not also bear a close relationship to the Hudson concept? Might there not be in it something of importance bearing on this new approach?

Time travel perforce was hedged around with a pattern of ethics which consisted mainly of a formidable list of “thou shalt nots.”

Thou shalt not transport a human being from the past.

Thou shalt not snitch a thing until it has been lost.

Thou shalt not inform anyone in the past of the fact there is time travel.

Thou shalt not interfere in any way with the patterns of the past.

Thou shalt not try to go into the future—and don't ask why, because that's a dirty question.

VIII

The buzzer sounded. He flipped the switch.

“Yes, Miss Crane.”

“Mr. Garside is here to see you. Mr. Hawkes and Mr. Snell are with him.”

He thought he detected in her voice a sense of satisfaction.

“All right. Ask them to come in.”

He gathered the papers off his desk and put them in his briefcase, then settled back as they came in. “Well, gentlemen. It seems I am invaded.”

Even as he said it, he knew it had not been the proper thing to say. They did not even smile. And he knew that it was bad. Any time you got Legal and Public Relations together, it couldn't be anything but bad.

They sat down. “We thought,” said Snell, in his most polished P.R. manner, “that if we got together and tried to talk things out …”

Hawkes cut him short. He said to Spencer, accusingly: “You have managed to place us in a most embarrassing position.”

“Yes, I know,” said Spencer. “Let's tick off the items. One of my men brought back a human from the past. A man died in my office. I forgot to be polite to a stuffed shirt who came charging in to help us run our business.”

“You seem,” said Garside, “to take it all quite lightly.”

“Perhaps I do,” said Spencer. “Let's put it slightly stronger. I just don't give a damn. You cannot allow pressure groups to form your policy.”

“You are talking now, of course,” said Garside, “about the Ravenholt affair.”

“Chris,” said Snell, enthusiastically, “you hit it on the button. Here is a chance to really sell the public on us. I don't believe we've really sold them. We are dealing in something which to the average man seems to smell of magic. Naturally he is stand-offish.”

“More to the point,” said Hawkes, impatiently, “if we turn down this project—this …”

“Project God,” said Spencer.

“I'm not sure I like your phrasing.”

“Think up a name yourself,” said Spencer calmly. “That is what we call it.”

“If we fail to go ahead with it, we'll be accused of being atheists.”

“How would the public ever know that we turned it down?” asked Spencer.

“You can be sure,” Snell said bitterly, “that Ravenholt will make a point of making known our turning down of it.”

Spencer smashed his fist upon the desk in sudden anger. He yelled, “I told you how to handle Ravenholt!”

“Hal,” Garside told him quietly, “we simply cannot do it. We have our dignity.”

“No,” said Spencer, “I suppose you can't. But you can sell out to Ravenholt and whoever's backing him. You can rig the survey of religious origins. You can falsify reports.”

The three of them sat in stricken silence. Spencer felt a twinge of momentary wonder for having dared to say it. It was not the way one was supposed to talk to brass.

But he had to say one more thing. “Chris. You are going to disregard the report I made and go ahead with it, aren't you?”

Garside answered with smooth urbanity: “I'm afraid I'll have to.”

Spencer looked at Hawkes and Snell and he saw the secret smiles that lurked just behind their lips—the sneering contemptuous smile of authority ascendant.

He said slowly, “Yes, I guess you will. Well, it's all in your laps now. You figure out the answers.”

“But it's your department.”

“Not any more, it isn't. I've just quit the job.”

“Now see here, Hal,” Garside was saying, “you can't do a thing like that! Without any notice! Just flying off the handle! We may have our little differences, but that is no excuse …”

“I've decided,” Spencer told him, “that I somehow have to stop you. I cannot allow you to go ahead with Project God. I warn you, if you do, that I shall discredit you. I shall prove exactly and without question everything you've done. And meanwhile, I am planning to go into business for myself.”

“Time travel, perhaps.” They were mocking him.

“I had thought of it.”

Snell grinned contemptuously. “You can't even get a license.”

“I think I can,” said Spencer.

And he knew he could. With a brand new concept, there'd be little trouble.

Garside got up from his chair. “Well,” he said to Spencer, “you've had your little tantrum. When you cool down a bit, come up and talk to me.”

Spencer shook his head.

“Goodbye, Chris,” he said.

He did not rise. He sat and watched them go.

Strangely, now that it was over—or just beginning—there was no tenseness in him. It had fallen all away and he felt abiding calm.

There was money to be raised, there were technicians and engineers to hire, there were travelers to be found and trained, and a whole lot more than that.

Thinking of it all, he had a momentary pang of doubt, but he shrugged it off. He got up from his chair and walked out into the office.

“Miss Crane,” he said, “Mr. Cabell was supposed to come back this afternoon.”

“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.

“From what little we know of Mars,” he went on, rolling the black cigar between his lips, “it's just about the kind of animal we'd expect to find there. Mars has little water—by Earth standards, practically none at all. A dehydrated world. There's oxygen there, but the air is so thin we'd call it a vacuum on Earth. A Martian animal would have to get along on very little water, very little oxygen.

“Well, when he got it, he'd want to keep it. The spherical shape gives him a minimum surface-per-volume ratio, makes it easier for him to conserve water and oxygen. He probably is mostly lungs. The fur protects him from the cold. Mars must be devilish cold at times. Cold enough at night to freeze carbon dioxide. That's what they had him packed in on the ship.”

“No kidding,” said Woods.

“Sure,” said Gilmer. “Inside the wooden box was a steel receptacle and that fellow was inside of that. They had pumped out quite a bit of the air, made it a partial vacuum, and packed frozen carbon dioxide around the receptacle. Outside of that, between the box and the ice, was paper and felt to slow up melting. They must have been forced to repack him and change air several times during the trip back.