The Collection (38 page)

Ellen looked down at where the street ought to be, at where
the restaurant front ought to be, and then back the way we'd come as though
wondering if the Penny Arcade tent was still there.

^"
It isn
^'
t,
^"
I
said.

Ma asked,
^"
It isn
^'
t what?
^"

^"
Isn
^'
t there,
^"
I
explained.

Ma glowered at me.
^"
What isn't where?
^"

^"
The tent," I said, a bit peeved.
^"
The
movie company. The whole shebang. And especially Sam Heideman. It was when I
remembered about Sam Heideman—five years ago in Luna City we heard he was
dead—so he wasn't there. None of it was there. And the minute I realized that,
they pulled it all out from under us."

"'They?' What do you mean,
`they,'
Pop
Wherry?
Who is 'they'?"

"You mean who
are
`they'?" I said, but the
look Ma gave me made me wince.

^"
Let
^'
s not talk here,
^"
I went on. "Let
^'
s get back to the ship as quick as we can,
first. You can lead us there, Johnny, without the street?
^"

He nodded, forgetting to salute or
^"
sir"
me. We started off, none of us talking. I wasn
^'
t worried about
Johnny getting us back; he'd been all right until we
^'
d hit the tent;
he
^'
d been following our course with his wrist-compass.

After we got to where the end of the street had been, it got
easy because we could see our own footprints in the clay, and just had to
follow them. We passed the rise where there had been the purple bush with the
propeller birds, but the birds weren
^'
t there now, nor was the purple
bush.

But the
Chitterling
was still there, thank Heavens. We
saw it from the last rise and it looked just as we had left it. It looked like
home, and we started to walk faster.

I opened the door and stood aside for Ma and Ellen to go in
first. Ma had just started in when we heard the voice. It said, 'We bid you farewell.
^"

I said,
^"
We bid you farewell, too. And the
hell with you.
^"

I motioned Ma to go on into the ship. The sooner I was out
of this place, the better I
^'
d like it.

But the voice said,
^'
Wait,
^"
and
there was something about it that made us wait. 'We wish to explain to you so
that you will not return.
^"

Nothing had been further from my mind, but I said, "Why
not?
^"

^"
Your civilization is not compatible with
ours. We have studied your minds to make sure. We projected images from the images
we found in your minds, to study your reactions to them. Our first images, our
first thought-projections, were confused.

But we understood your minds by the time you reached the farthest
point of your walk. We were able to project beings similar to yourselves.
^"

^"
Sam Heideman, yeah,
^"
I
said.
^"
But how about the da—the woman? She couldn
^'
t
have been in the memory of any of us because none of us knew her.
^"

^"
She was a composite—what you would call an
idealization. That, however, doesn
^'
t matter. By studying you we
learned that your civilization concerns itself with things, ours with thoughts.
Neither of us has anything to offer the other. No good could come through
interchange, whereas much harm might come. Our planet has no material resources
that would interest your race.

I had to agree with that, looking out over that monotonous
rolling clay that seemed to support only those few tumble-weedlike bushes, and
not many of them. It didn
^'
t look like it would support anything
else. As for minerals, I hadn't seen even a pebble.

"Right you are,
^"
I called back.
^"
Any
planet that raises nothing but tumbleweeds and cockroaches can keep itself, as
far as we're concerned. So
^—
" Then something dawned on me.
"Hey, just a minute. There must be something else or who the devil am I
talking to?
^"

^"
You are talking,
^"
replied
the voice,
^"
to what you call cockroaches, which is another
point of incompatibility between us. To be more precise, you are talking to a
thought-projected voice, but we are projecting it. And let me assure you of one
thing—that you are more repugnant physically to us than we are to you.
^"

I looked down then and saw them, three of them, ready to pop
into holes if I made a move.

Back inside the ship, I said, "Johnny, blast off.
Destination, Earth.
^"

He saluted and said,
^"
Yes, sir,
^"
and went into the pilot
^'
s compartment and shut the door. He didn
^'
t
come out until we were on an automatic course, with Sirius dwindling behind us.

Ellen had gone to her room. Ma and I were playing cribbage.

^"
May I go off duty, sir?
^"
Johnny asked, and walked stiffly to his room when I answered, "Sure."

After a while, Ma and I turned in. Awhile after that we
heard noises. I got up to investigate, and investigated.

I came back grinning.
^"
Everything's okay,
Ma," I said. "It's Johnny Lane and he's as drunk as a hoot owl!"
And I slapped Ma playfully on the fanny.

^"
Ouch, you old fool,
^"
she
sniffed.
^"
I
^'
m
sore there from the curb
disappearing from under me. And what
^'
s wonderful about Johnny
getting drunk?
You
aren
^'
t, are you?
^"

^"
No,
^"
I admitted,
regretfully perhaps.
^"
But, Ma, he told me to go to blazes. And
without saluting. Me, the owner of the ship.
^"

Ma just looked at me. Sometimes women are smart, but
sometimes they
^'
re pretty dumb.

^"
Listen, he isn
^'
t going to keep
on getting drunk,
^"
I said. "This is an occasion. Can't you
see what happened to his pride and dignity?
^"

^"
You mean because he—"

^"
Because he fell in love with the
thought-projection of a cockroach," I pointed out.
^"
Or
anyway he thought he did. He has to get drunk once to forget that, and from now
on, after he sobers up, he
^'
s going to be human. I
^'
ll bet
on it, any odds. And I
^'
ll bet too that once he
^'
s human,
he
^'
s going to
see
Ellen and realize how pretty she is. I
^'
ll
bet he
^'
s head-over-heels before we get back to Earth. I'll get a
bottle and we'll drink a toast on it. To Nothing Sirius!
^"

And for once I was right. Johnny and Ellen were engaged
before we got near enough to Earth to start decelerating.

Miss Macy sniffed.
^"
Why is everyone worrying
so? They
^'
re not
doing
anything to us, are they?
^"

In the cities, elsewhere, there was blind panic. But not in
Miss Macy
^'
s garden. She looked up calmly at the monstrous mile-high
figures of the invaders.

A week ago, they'd landed, in a spaceship a hundred miles
long that had settled down gently in the Arizona desert. Almost a thousand of
them had come out of that spaceship and were now walking around.

But, as Miss Macy pointed out, they hadn
^'
t hurt
anything or anybody. They weren't quite
substantial
enough to affect people.
When one stepped on you or stepped on a house you were in, there was sudden
darkness and until he moved his foot and walked on you couldn't see; that was
all.

They had paid no attention to human beings and all attempts
to communicate with them had failed, as had all attacks on them by the army and
the air force. Shells fired at them exploded right inside them and didn
^'
t
hurt them. Not even the H-bomb dropped on one of them while he was crossing a
desert area had bothered him in the slightest.

They had paid no attention to us at all.

"And that," said Miss Macy to her sister who was
also Miss Macy since neither of them was married, "is proof that they
don't mean us any harm, isn't it?"

"I hope so, Amanda," said Miss Macy's sister.
"But look what they
^'
re doing now.
^"

It was a clear day, or it had been one. The sky had been
bright blue and the almost humanoid heads and shoulders of the giants, a mile
up there, had been quite clearly visible. But now it was getting misty, Miss
Macy saw as she followed her sister
^'
s gaze upward. Each of the two
big figures in sight had a tanklike object in his hands and from these objects
clouds of vaporous matter were emerging, settling slowly toward Earth.

Miss Macy sniffed again.
^"
Making clouds.
Maybe that
^'
s how they have fun.
Clouds
can
^'
t hurt
us. Why do people worry so?
^"

She went back to her work.

^"
Is that a liquid fertilizer you
^'
re
spraying, Amanda?" her sister asked.

"No," said Miss Macy. "It's
insecticide."

I am crazy.

Charlie Swann is going crazy, too. Maybe more than I am,
because it was his dingbat. I mean, he made it and he thought he knew what it
was and how it worked.

You see, Charlie was just kidding me when he told me it
worked on the Yehudi principle. Or he thought he was.
^"
The
Yehudi principle?
^"
I said.

^"
The Yehudi principle,
^"
he
repeated.
^"
The principle of the little man who wasn't there. He
does it."

^"
Does what?
^"
I wanted to
know.

The dingbat, I might interrupt myself to explain, was a
head-band. It fitted neatly around Charlie
^'
s noggin and there was a
round black box not much bigger than a pillbox over his forehead. Also there
was a round flat copper disk on each side of the band that fitted over each of
Charlie
^'
s temples, and a strand of wire that ran down behind his ear
into the breast pocket of his coat, where there was a little dry cell battery.

It didn
^'
t look as if it would do anything, except
maybe either cure a headache or make it worse. But from the excited look on
Charlie
^'
s face, I didn't think it was anything as commonplace as
that.

^"
Does what?
^"
I wanted to
know.

^"
Whatever you want,
^"
said
Charlie.
^'
Within reason, of course. Not like moving a building or
bringing you a locomotive. But any little thing you want done, he does
it."

^'
Who does?"

^"
Yehudi.
^"

I closed my eyes and counted to five, by ones. I
wasn't
going
to ask,
^"
Who
^'
s Yehudi?"

I shoved aside a pile of papers on the bed—I
^'
d
been going through some old clunker manuscripts seeing if I could find
something good enough to rewrite from a new angle—and sat down.

^"
O.K.,
^"
I said.
^"
Tell
him to being me a drink.
^"

"What kind?"

I looked at Charlie, and he didn't look like he was kidding.
He had to be, of course, but—

^"
Gin buck," I told him. "A gin
buck, with gin in it, if Yehudi knows what I mean.
^"

^"
Hold out your hand,
^"
Charles said.

I held out my hand. Charlie, not talking to me, said,
^"
Bring
Hank a gin buck, strong." And then he nodded his head.

Something happened either to Charlie or to my eyes, I didn't
know which. For just a second, he got sort of misty. And then he looked normal
again.

And I let out a kind of a yip and pulled my hand back,
because my hand was wet with something cold. And there was a splashing noise
and a wet puddle on the carpet right at my feet. Right under where my hand had
been.

Charlie said,
^"
We should have asked for it
in a glass.
^"

I looked at Charlie and then I looked at the puddle on the
floor and then I looked at my hand. I stuck my index finger gingerly into my
mouth and tasted.

Gin buck. With gin in it. I looked at Charlie again. He
asked, "Did I blur?"

^"
Listen, Charlie,
^"
I said.
^"
I
^'
ve
known you for ten years, and we went to Tech together and— But if you pull
another gag like that I'll blur you, all right. I'll—"

^"
Watch closer this time,
^"
Charlie said. And again, looking off into space and not talking to me at all,
he started talking.
^"
Bring us a fifth of gin, in a bottle. Half
a dozen lemons, sliced, on a plate. Two quart bottles of soda and a dish of ice
cubes. Put it all on the table over there.
^"