Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (50 page)

They got the circle pushed back to the sidewalk, finally. There was a lot
of brass inside by then. And half a dozen men, some in uniform, some not,
were starting, very carefully, to work on the ship. Photographs first, and
then measurements, and then one man with a big suitcase of paraphernalia
was carefully scratching at the metal and making tests of some kind.

"A metallurgist, Beautiful," Bill Wheeler explained to the Siamese, who
wasn't watching at all. "And I'll bet you ten pounds of liver to one
miaouw he finds that's an alloy that's brand new to him. And that it's got
some stuff in it he can't identify.

"You really ought to be looking out, Beautiful, instead of lying there
like a dope. This is a
day,
Beautiful. This may be the beginning of
the end—or of something new. I wish they'd hurry up and get it
open."

Army trucks were coming into the circle now. Half a dozen big planes were
circling overhead, making a lot of noise. Bill looked up at them
quizzically.

"Bombers, I'll bet, with payloads. Don't know what they have in mind
unless to bomb the park, people and all, if little green men come out of
that thing with ray guns and start killing everybody. Then the bombers
could finish off whoever's left."

But no little green men came out of the cylinder. The men working on it
couldn't, apparently, find an opening in it. They'd rolled it over now and
exposed the underside, but the underside was the same as the top. For all
they could tell, the underside
was
the top.

And then Bill Wheeler swore. The army trucks were being unloaded, and
sections of a big tent were coming out of them, and men in khaki were
driving stakes and unrolling canvas.

"They
would
do something like that, Beautiful," Bill complained
bitterly. "Be bad enough if they hauled it off, but to leave it there to
work on and still to block off our view—"

The tent went up. Bill Wheeler watched the top of the tent, but nothing
happened to the top of the tent and whatever went on inside he couldn't
see. Trucks came and went; high brass and civvies came and went.

And after a while the phone rang. Bill gave a last affectionate rumple to
the cat's fur and went to answer it.

"Bill Wheeler?" the receiver asked. "This is General Kelly speaking. Your
name has been given to me as a competent research biologist. Tops in your
field. Is that correct?"

"Well," Bill said. "I'm a research biologist. It would be hardly modest
for me to say I'm tops in my field. What's up?"

"A spaceship has just landed in Central Park."

"You don't say," said Bill.

"I'm calling from the field of operations; we've run phones in here, and
we're gathering specialists. We would like you and some other biologists
to examine something that was found inside the—uh—spaceship.
Grimm of Harvard was in town and will be here, and Winslow of New York
University is already here. It's opposite Eighty-third Street. How long
would it take you to get here?"

"About ten seconds, if I had a parachute. I've been watching you out of my
window." He gave the address and the apartment number. "If you can spare a
couple of strong boys in imposing uniforms to get me through the crowd,
it'll be quicker than if I try it myself. Okay?"

"Right. Send 'em right over. Sit tight."

"Good," said Bill. "
What
did you find inside the cylinder?"

There was a second's hesitation. Then the voice said, "Wait till you get
here."

"I've got instruments," Bill said. "Dissecting equipment. Chemicals.
Reagents. I want to know what to bring. Is it a little green man?"

"No," said the voice. After a second's hesitation again, it said, "It
seems to be a mouse. A dead mouse."

"Thanks," said Bill. He put down the receiver and walked back to the
window. He looked at the Siamese cat accusingly. "Beautiful," he demanded,
"was somebody ribbing me, or—"

There was a puzzled frown on his face as he watched the scene across the
street. Two policemen came hurrying out of the tent and headed directly
for the entrance of his apartment building. They began to work their way
through the crowd.

"Fan me with a blowtorch, Beautiful," Bill said. "It's the McCoy." He went
to the closet and grabbed a valise, hurried to a cabinet and began to
stuff instruments and bottles into the valise. He was ready by the time
there was a knock on the door.

He said, "Hold the fort, Beautiful. Got to see a man about a mouse." He
joined the policemen waiting outside his door and was escorted through the
crowd and into the circle of the elect and into the tent.

There was a crowd around the spot where the cylinder lay. Bill peered over
shoulders and saw that the cylinder was neatly split in half. The inside
was hollow and padded with something that looked like fine leather, but
softer. A man kneeling at one end of it was talking.

"—not a trace of any activating mechanism, any mechanism at
all,
in fact. Not a wire, not a grain or a drop of any fuel. Just a hollow
cylinder, padded inside. Gentlemen, it
couldn't
have traveled by
its own power in any conceivable way. But it came here, and from outside.
Gravesend says the material is definitely extraterrestrial. Gentlemen, I'm
stumped."

Another voice said, "I've an idea, Major." It was the voice of the man
over whose shoulder Bill Wheeler was leaning, and Bill recognized the
voice and the man with a start. It was the President of the United States.
Bill quit leaning on him.

"I'm no scientist," the president said. "And this is just a possibility.
Remember the one blast, out of that single exhaust hole? That might have
been the destruction, the dissipation, of whatever the mechanism or the
propellant was. Whoever, whatever, sent or guided this contraption might
not have wanted us to find out what made it run. It was constructed, in
that case, so that, upon landing, the mechanism destroyed itself utterly.
Colonel Roberts, you examined that scorched area of ground. Anything that
might bear out that theory?"

"Definitely, sir," said another voice. "Traces of metal and silica and
some carbon, as though it had been vaporized by terrific heat and then
condensed and uniformly spread. You can't find a chunk of it to pick up,
but the instruments indicate it. Another thing—"

Bill was conscious of someone speaking to him. "You're Bill Wheeler,
aren't you?"

Bill turned. "Professor Winslow!" he said. "I've seen your picture, sir,
and I've read your papers in the
Journal.
I'm proud to meet you and
to—"

"Cut the malarkey," said Professor Winslow, "and take a gander at this."
He grabbed Bill Wheeler by the arm and led him to a table in one corner of
the tent.

"Looks for all the world like a dead mouse," he said, "but it isn't. Not
quite. I haven't cut in yet; waited for you and Grimm. But I've taken
temperature tests and had hairs under the mike and studied musculature.
It's—well, look for yourself."

Bill Wheeler looked. It looked like a mouse all right, a very small mouse,
until you looked closely. Then you saw little differences, if you were a
biologist.

Grimm got there and—delicately, reverently—they cut in. The
differences stopped being little ones and became big ones. The bones
didn't seem to be made of bone, for one thing, and they were bright yellow
instead of white. The digestive system wasn't too far off the beam, and
there was a circulatory system and a white milky fluid in it, but there
wasn't any heart. There were, instead, nodes at regular intervals along
the larger tubes.

"Way stations," Grimm said. "No central pump. You might call it a lot of
little hearts instead of one big one. Efficient, I'd say. Creature built
like this couldn't have heart trouble. Here, let me put some of that white
fluid on a slide."

Someone was leaning over Bill's shoulder, putting uncomfortable weight on
him. He turned his head to tell the man to get the hell away and saw it
was the President of the United States. "Out of this world?" the president
asked quietly.

"And how," said Bill. A second later he added, "Sir," and the president
chuckled. He asked, "Would you say it's been dead long or that it died
about the time of arrival?"

Winslow answered that one. "It's purely a guess, Mr. President, because we
don't know the chemical makeup of the thing or what its normal temperature
is. But a rectal thermometer reading twenty minutes ago, when I got here,
was ninety-five three, and one minute ago it was ninety point six. At that
rate of heat loss, it couldn't have been dead long."

"Would you say it was an intelligent creature?"

"I wouldn't say for sure, sir. It's too alien. But I'd guess—definitely
no. No more so than its terrestrial counterpart, a mouse. Brain size and
convolutions are quite similar."

"You don't think it could, conceivably, have designed that ship?"

"I'd bet a million to one against it, sir."

It had been midafternoon when the spaceship had landed; it was almost
midnight when Bill Wheeler started home. Not from across the street, but
from the lab at New York U., where the dissection and microscopic
examinations had continued.

He walked home in a daze, but he remembered guiltily that the Siamese
hadn't been fed, and hurried as much as he could for the last block.

She looked at him reproachfully and said "Miaouw, miaouw, miaouw, miaouw"
so fast he couldn't get a word in edgewise until she was eating some liver
out of the icebox.

"Sorry, Beautiful," he said then. "Sorry, too, I couldn't bring you that
mouse, but they wouldn't have let me if I'd asked, and I didn't ask
because it would probably have given you indigestion."

He was still so excited that he couldn't sleep that night. When it got
early enough, he hurried out for the morning papers to see if there had
been any new discoveries or developments.

There hadn't been. There was less in the papers than he knew already. But
it was a big story, and the papers played it big.

He spent most of three days at the New York U. lab, helping with further
tests and examinations until there just weren't any new ones to try and
darn little left to try them on. Then the government took over what was
left, and Bill Wheeler was on the outside again.

For three more days he stayed home, tuned in on all news reports on the
radio and video and subscribed to every newspaper published in English in
New York City. But the story gradually died down. Nothing further
happened; no further discoveries were made, and if any new ideas
developed, they weren't given out for public consumption.

It was on the sixth day that an even bigger story broke—the
assassination of the President of the United States. People forgot the
spaceship.

Two days later, the Prime Minister of Great Britain was killed by a
Spaniard, and the day after that a minor employee of the Politburo in
Moscow ran amuck and shot a very important official.

A lot of windows broke in New York City the next day when a goodly portion
of a county in Pennsylvania went up fast and came down slowly. No one
within several hundred miles needed to be told that there was—or had
been—a dump of A-bombs there. It was in sparsely populated country,
and not many people were killed, only a few thousand.

That was the afternoon, too, that the president of the stock exchange cut
his throat and the crash started. Nobody paid too much attention to the
riot at Lake Success the next day because of the unidentified submarine
fleet that suddenly sank practically all the shipping in New Orleans
harbor.

It was the evening of that day that Bill Wheeler was pacing up and down
the front room of his apartment. Occasionally he stopped at the window to
pet the Siamese named Beautiful and to look out across Central Park,
bright under lights and cordoned off by armed sentries, where they were
pouring concrete for the antiaircraft gun emplacements.

He looked haggard.

He said, "Beautiful, we saw the start of it, right from this window. Maybe
I'm crazy, but I still think that spaceship started it. God knows how.
Maybe I should have fed you that mouse. Things couldn't have gone to pot
so
suddenly
without help from somebody or something."

He shook his head slowly. "Let's dope it out, Beautiful. Let's say
something came in on that ship besides a dead mouse. What could it have
been? What could it have done and be doing?

"Let's say that the mouse was a laboratory animal, a guinea pig. It was
sent in the ship, and it survived the journey but died when it got here.
Why? I've got a screwy hunch, Beautiful."

He sat down in a chair and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. He
said, "Suppose the superior intelligence—from Somewhere—that
made that ship came in with it. Suppose it wasn't the mouse—let's
call it a mouse. Then, since the mouse was the only physical thing in the
spaceship, the being, the invader, wasn't physical. It was an entity that
could live apart from whatever body it had back where it came from. But
let's say it could live in
any
body, and it left its own in a safe
place back home and rode here in one that was expendable, that it could
abandon on arrival. That would explain the mouse and the fact that it died
at the time the ship landed.

"Then the
being,
at that instant, just jumped into the body of
someone here—probably one of the first people to run toward the ship
when it landed. It's living in somebody's body—in a hotel on
Broadway or a flophouse on the Bowery or anywhere—pretending to be a
human being. That make sense, Beautiful?"

He got up and started to pace again.

"And having the ability to control other minds, it sets about to make the
world—the Earth—safe for Martians or Venusians or whatever
they are. It sees—after a few days of study—that the world is
on the brink of destroying itself and needs only a push. So it could give
that push.