Amazing Vignettes Page 13

  “Why do you joke about the fourth dimension?” she asked and Larry thought he detected a note of pathetic curiosity in her voice.

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Larry countered, rather puzzled to find a beautiful girl taking such things seriously.

  “No,” the girl replied sadly, “not everyone. I don’t for one.”

  “I don’t even understand it,” Larry said. “So I’ve stopped joking. Now tell me about it.”

  “You must have heard all the analogies,” the girl said. “You must know that fourth dimensional people can go through matter as easily as you—as easily as three dimensional people draw a circle, that is, when they want to.”

  Larry had had a bit to drink and he knew he wasn’t at his sharpest but the whole point of this inane conversation escaped him. He wondered whether it was the girl or the liquor.

  “You know,” he said musingly, “if I hadn’t had five Martinis, I’d swear that I was sober. I’m sure I heard you speak just as if you were out of this world. Which you are—” he added hastily.

  “Yes,” she said, her calm, sweet face composed, “you’re right. I am out of this world.”

  Larry stepped closer to her and his arm, bolstered by the Martinis, reached out to encircle her waist. “Don’t worry about a thing, baby,” he said somewhat thickly, “I’m—”

  He broke off, for the girl whirled from his intended embrace.

  He looked up and saw her walk rapidly toward the doors. She didn’t pause before the french doors though both were closed.

  Larry blinked his eyes, twice, rapidly. The girl walked through the unopened doors . . .

  Two Full Years to Pay

  Leslie Phelps

  JERRY RAME sipped his coffee and toyed with the button of the video. Stell, his wife, sat opposite him in their small apartment and watched him covertly.

  “. . . and tonight the eleventh helicopter show starts,” the bland announcer was saying, “and this marks a new high in American transportation. The show will present a complete picture of the development of vehicles from the ox-cart to the latest in rockets. This show is well—” Jerry jabbed the off button.

  “What’s the matter?” Stell asked sympathetically.

  “I wish we could get a new heli,” Jerry said savagely. “The buggy on the roof’s falling apart.”

  “I do too, dear,” Stell replied, “but our budget won’t take it. Remember we swore we wouldn’t go into debt.” A faraway look came into her eyes, “But,” she sighed, “I wish we could.”

  “You’re right, Stell,” Jerry agreed sadly, “we’ve get to watch that budget. We’ll just have to make the ’87 do.”

  He glanced at his watch. “I guess I’d better go.” He started for the door toward the roof-garage. He remembered and came back to kiss Stell good-bye. “Say I’ve got an idea, honey,” he said enthusiastically. “Let’s have dinner together tonight and then go to the Heli-show. We haven’t been out for a while and it won’t hurt to look.”

  “I love you Jerry.” Stell said as he gently disengaged her arms from his neck. “I’ll see you tonight in the lobby about six. Take care of yourself dear.”

  That night the two of them finished dinner, a leisurely luxurious affair—and unaccustomed—and went over to the vast building that housed the super-Heli-show.

  They found themselves in a milling mass of people surging in and out of a thousand exhibits. Here was the “Turbine Eight” a super-powerful, fast clipper whose vast rotor blades and powerful jets sent her surging through air at three hundred miles an hour. There was a little “Junior” a small electric job propeller driven, its rotors wide and a mere eight feet in length.

  Jerry and Stella wandered through the. technological fairyland, stopping to gape and admire, inspect and question, avoiding the provocative and engaging offers of the barkers and the salesmen. “Come and get it, folks. This super-beauty can be yours for your old job as a down payment and twelve credits a month. Two full years to pay. Ride America’s finest. Heli down to Buenos Aires for the summer. Economy and comfort.”

  The words and catch-calls tumbled from the sellers.

  Then Jerry and Stell spotted their dream. It wasn’t particularly big nor powerful, but there was a sleek grace and visible beauty in the medium priced “Tornado”.

  “Oh, honey,” Stell breathed in Jerry’s ear. “I wish we owned that.”

  Jerry squeezed her arm. “I know,” he said breathlessly, “I feel the same way. But remember what you said about the budget?”

  Stell sighed. “Yes, I know. We can’t afford it,” she said resignedly.

  The two wandered around for a while not saying much, their minds still filled with the trim picture of the “Tornado”.

  They were walking toward the exits bound for the roof-lots finally.

  “Stell?” Jerry said softly, his arm around her waist.

  “Yes?” Stell answered quietly.

  “Maybe we could.”

  “Maybe we could what?”

  “You know. Two full years to pay.”

  “What about the budget?”

  “The hell with the budget. Think about our old crate.”

  “I have—and I don’t like it.”

  “Well?”

  “All right—if it’s all right with you.”

  “It is.”

  “Me too.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Abruptly the two of them turned around and precisely like Americans have done for a hundred years they went back and bought the latest model “Tornado”, the newest in the medium price range helicopter. And they didn’t worry about the budget any longer because they knew that somehow they’d make out. And Stell and Jerry drove home that night in a beautiful craft whose quiet blades purred overhead carrying them on to further dreams . . .

  The Ultra Welfare State

  Leslie Phelps

  OFTEN IN THE evening we’d sit around the Faculty Club after dinner, talking about everything under the Sun. A few of the older members of the faculty tended to be recluses, but every now and then, one of them would enter the conversation.

  I remember vividly the night we were talking about Orwell’s famous “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, thrilling story of the super welfare state wherein human beings were no more than cogs. It is a fanciful piece of science-fiction, but not so far removed from reality that it can’t send chills down a man’s back.

  I had just finished commenting; “Orwell painted a bleak picture,” I’d said, “but he could have carried the thing to its ultimate if he’d wanted to. Suppose he’d imagined the final State—sort of a variation on the termite society, where human beings would be designed for a given function?” I made the comment casually, appreciative of the chuckle that followed it.

  Frame, in biology, laughed. “That’s going too far, Lanner,” he said, “That stage will never—”

  “—No?” A voice broke in. It was Claridge, an old retired physicist who’d once done some important work in theoretical physics. This was the first time I’d heard him speak. He was one of those recluses I spoke of.

  His voice was tense but controlled. As if we weren’t there, he went on speaking.

  “You’re so wrong,” he said mockingly. “You don’t know. How can you? You were never there!” He mumbled a little and then his speech cleared.

  “When I slipped into the time warp and ended up in the Final Society, I found finality! Do you know what they did—what they do—fifty thousand years from now? They tailor human beings to their environment, to their job, to their work. They fit a man to his task just as the ants breed warriors and slaves, and breeders—the Final Society is sheer horror.”

  The words tumbled out of the man and we all sat back, shocked at what appeared to be a senseless, outburst. The words didn’t make sense until one thought about them for a moment.

  Some laughed hesitatingly. “I say,” Frink remarked, “aren’t you pulling our leg, chap?”

  Claridge turned toward him with burning eyes. “I’m no
t joking,” he insisted quietly, “I’m telling you the truth. I’ve lived in the Final Society. Where Man went from there, I don’t know. I don’t even care, but I hope he went to Hell!”

  “Just what were you in the Final Society, Dr. Claridge?” I asked, deciding to humor the old man’s foibles.

  “I was a machine-worker,” Claridge said simply. He paused. “Here—look!”

  We’d known that Claridge had only one arm, and I don’t know what we expected to see when he drew back his coat-sleeve. The arm-end was exposed for only a minute and then Claridge stamped angrily off. But that minute was enough. The “hand” at the end of the arm was a metallic claw ideally suited for gripping metal. But that wasn’t particularly startling. Apparently it joined the arm directly . . .

  The Ambusher

  A.T. Kedzie

  CARN SHIVERED a little as a lance of icy wind cut through a rent in his patched and faded quilted cotton uniform. He dug himself closer into the stone lined culvert and ignored the numbing cold. His mind was clear and keen and he had to be near the road to be able to hear the rumble of the tank when it left the City.

  We’re wearing them down, Carn thought, and an ironic smile crossed his frozen lips. But will we wear down first? The Commy units held the Cities in their iron grip. They had the fuel and the power and the machines plus a ruthlessness that paused at nothing. But the Freelies were making progress too.

  Carn thought of the tree vehicles his group had destroyed last week. In his mind’s eye he saw the eruption of flame and smoke when the three cars rolled into the field of fire of the few rocket throwers. The Commies didn’t know what had hit them.

  But the sadness weighed again. Cana remembered the low-flying Commy strafer catching the forty Freelies on the edge of Marshland and cutting them to ribbons with cannon-fire. But people were escaping the Cities every day and the Freelies were becoming bolder and more audacious with each passing day.

  He thought of himself. Armed with thirty pounds of crude dynamite and a simple burning fuse. Radio had picked up a Commy contact. A tankful of technicians was going to leave in four hours for St. George.

  You’ll end up in hell, Cam’s mind said, you’ll burn, boys. Oh, if the Freelies could only get one City. Only one! Well that was a long way off. We’ll knock you off one by one if it takes us an eternity.

  Faintly the sounds of distant vibration traveling far in the quiet cold set Carn alert. He pressed his numbed ear against the underside of the concrete strip. Yes, that was it. The sound of a motor, powerful and assured.

  Carn carefully examined his wooden box, wedging it firmly into the crevice in the stone nearest the center of the road. He attached a length of five minute fuse and then waited. While he waited he checked his single weapon, an old but serviceable bolt action Mauser rifle. The noise grew louder.

  Once he crept out of the culvert and stared down the curved stretch of road. The roar of the tank motor was loud and clear now. Carn could visualize the laughing Commies within. Warm and comfortable they were probably enthusiastically planning what they’d requisition in St. George and how the girls were and how their new C.O. would be.

  Like hell you will, Carn said half audibly as if the imagined thought was real. He laughed mirthlessly as he realized his anger.

  The thrump of rubber tread was perfect. Familiarity enabled Carn to calculate by judgment. This was not new. He waited for a hundred pulse beats and struck a match. He applied it to the fuse’s end, made sure that the innocent length of cord was ignited. Then he crawled from the culvert and ran as fast as he could through the knifing breeze toward the slight hummock a couple of hundred feet away. He worked the bolt of his rifle and waited for the oncoming Commy vehicle. No Commies were going to get away alive!

  The monstrous turtle of steel-alloy rolled smoothly along the snow-covered ribbon of highway. Inside ten or fifteen men anticipated their new work in one of the captive Cities. The tank rolled over the culvert.

  Cam’s heart was in his mouth. But it went. There was a cosmic explosion; the mass of metal seemed to rise ten feet in the air, roll over and come to a jumbled stop, a broken smouldering heap of metal.

  But some were alive. Carn saw a hatch slowly open and a figure emerge. There was a flame pistol in its hand and it dazedly stared around like some half-blind insect looking for its tormentor. Carn aimed carefully and fired. The figure dropped.

  Twice more Commies—those uninjured—tried to emerge. Twice again Carn cut them down. Carn waited expecting more to come out. But they didn’t. Slowly he made his way toward the wreckage. As soon as he was sure there was no life there, he’d leave, for there would be swift patrols out seeking vengeance.

  Ten minutes later he’d completed his distasteful task even when sparked by hatred. This was one more thing the Commies would extract revenge for, but there would be no end to it. It would continue until the last of them surrendered or died and left the Cities to the Freelies.

  Carn walked off briskly into the cold night. The wind seemed a little softer and the stars were shining brighter . . .

  Bad Luck Day

  Jon Barry

  FOR OVER sixty years Francesca Mary Rose stayed in her home on a certain day each year for she felt that it was her special jinx day. When she was just a young girl, she and her mother had spent several days preparing their home for-a special guest, for the man she intended to marry. After much preparation, Francesca sat all starched and ruffled and impatient, waiting for her fiancee to come down the road. Suddenly a strange horse and rider came pounding around the bend. It was his unpleasant task to inform her that there had been a train accident outside of town and that her beloved had been killed. For the next sixty years on the anniversary of his death, Francesca spent the day rereading love letters and caressing the trousseau that had been folded away for so many years. She had a peculiar feeling about that day and always said she felt safer to stay at home. But when two dear young friends of Francesca chose her jinx day for their wedding day, she decided that perhaps she had been rather foolish and superstitious all those years and decided to go to the wedding. A friend picked her up in his automobile to take her to the church. Just five minutes later the car was rammed into by a truck. Francesca was killed.

  The Inscrutable God

  Sandy Miller

  SPACEMEN are a superstitious lot.

  They wear rings and charms and amulets. They carry strange devices and their bodies are tattooed with prayers whose very sound is gibberish. They believe in omens, signs and portents and the mysterious is common to them even though they work with the finest machines that science can provide.

  Farrane was a spacemen, and even among that hyper-superstitous clan he was regarded as peculiar, for around his neck, suspended from a leather thong, bulky, weighty and awkward, he wore a heavy placque of metal. On this placque was inscribed in a strange Venerian dialect whose odd alphabetic characters look like little spears, a prayer to the god of Heat, the ultimate consuming god.

  They needled and joked and kidded with Farrane. They laughed at him and gibed at his strange and particularly prominent talisman. “You’ll get round-shouldered carrying that load of titanium around,” they’d joke. “You’ll make more money in a foundry,” they’d laugh, but Farrane would smile enigmatically and continue to do his work—he was an engineman third class—and say little, enduring the ribbing with perfect equanamity.

  The “girls” who infest every spaceman’s bar from Terra to Pluto, would ridicule Farrane but they’d be just as glad to take his credits as the next.

  But Farrane had the last laugh.

  Coane is a spaceport on the Callistan fringe group. It’s wild and wide open and the Terrans there who run the place are outnumbered a hundredfold by the weird powerful semi-humans, the natives, the Callistans. Great dragon-like creatures, their tentacular bodies are enough to drive a sane man mad. And when they manage to get liquor—which they occasionally do in spite of the strictest regulations—they are sheer hell. They go i
nsane with a killers’ lust and God help anyone in the vicinity.

  Farrane was in the. Green Lamp, a hangout as rugged as can be. He was quietly drinking, talking with a girl and ignoring the boisterous roistering crowd when a Callistan—“undulated” is the best word—in. He was completely drunk on Rome powerful beverage and before a single weapon could be drawn, he had cleared the room of living flesh using his seven arms and four steel bars,—small I-beams-they were—to crush into death’s insensibility, the roomful of humans.

  He paused before the terror-stricken Farrane who stood with an arm about the frightened girl. His hideous face wrinkled with thought and he brought back an arm to lever it across the humans. His single eye fell on Farrane’s amulet, the titanium plate with Venerian script. He stopped his arm in mid-air and turned away.

  They killed him a short time after, but the miraculous story of Farrane’s escape made the rounds. The queer link between the Callistan and the Venerian amulet hasn’t been explained but a half dozen anthropologists are working on the connection.

  They think the Callistan’s were once a higher people who visited or migrated from Venus.

  Farrane doesn’t talk about it. He just wears his amulet and smiles!

  The Mammoth Sleeper

  Charles Recour

  THE STALINGRAD MUSEUM was dark. Its ponderous bronze doors were closed for the night and only the peculiar legend in strange Cyrillic characters proclaimed that chaste granite was a repository for the panorama of natural history.

  In the vast rotunda of the huge building was the prize exhibit. It rested in a glass case of tremendous size looking for all the world, in its extreme simplicity, like a gigantic ice-cube—which in effect, it was. For behind the cage of three-inch glass reposed the carcass of one of the most imposing beasts to tread the Earth, and it was frozen solid in its huge refrigerator. The gigantic Wooly Mammoth poised with one leg raised, its trunk high in the air and its mighty tusks prepared to gouge ox-strike.