I moved around the room very carefully, looking for anything out of the ordinary. And then I found it.
It was a black box, nothing more, about four inches square. It was sitting on one of his shelves. Just a bare black box, a little cube of metal—but what metal!
Beyond the blackness was a strange unearthly shimmer, an eye-teasing pattern of shifting molecules within the metal itself. The box had a sleek, alien appearance. I knew it hadn’t been in the cabin when we left Earth.
With a sudden rush of excitement I realized my mad guess had been right. Donaldson had found something and kept news of it back from the rest of us. And perhaps it was linked to the deaths of Max Feld and Leo Mickens.
Cautiously I reached out to examine the box. I lifted it. It was oddly heavy, and strange to the touch.
But no sooner did I have it in my hands when the door opened behind me. Donaldson had come back.
“What are you doing with that?” he shouted.
“I—”
He crossed the cabin at top speed and seized the box from my hands. And suddenly the monster appeared.
It materialized right in the cabin, between Donaldson and me, its vast bulk pressing against the walls. I felt its noisome breath on me, sensed its evil reek.
“Donaldson!”
But Donaldson was no longer there. I was alone in the cabin with the creature.
I backed away into the far corner, my mouth working in terror. I tried to call for help, but couldn’t get a word out. And the beast squirmed and changed like a vast amoeba, writhing and twisting from one grey oily shape to another.
I sank to the floor, numb with horror—and then realized that the monster wasn’t approaching.
It was just staying there, making faces at me.
Making faces. Like a bogeyman.
It was trying to scare me to death. That was how Max Feld had died, that was how Leo Mickens had died.
But I wasn’t going to die that way.
I rose and confronted the thing. It just remained in the middle of the cabin, blotting everything out behind it, stretching from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, changing from one hell-shape to another and hoping I’d curl up and die.
I stepped forward.
Cautiously I touched the monster’s writhing surface. It was like touching a cloud. I sank right in.
The monster changed, took the dragon form again—much smaller, of course, to fit the cabin. Teeth gnashed the air before my nose—but didn’t bite into my throat as they promised to do. Nervelessly I stood my ground.
Then I waded into the heart of the monster, right into its middle with the grey oiliness billowing out all around me. There seemed to be nothing material, nothing to grapple hold of. It was like fighting a dream.
But then I hit something solid. My groping hands closed around warm flesh. I started to squeeze.
I had a throat. A living core of flesh within the monster? It might be. I constricted my fingers, dug them in, heard strangled gasps coming from further in. I couldn’t see, but I hung on.
Then a human voice said, “Damn you—you’re choking me!” And the monster thinned.
Through the diminishing smoke of the dream-creature, I saw Donaldson, and I was clutching his throat. He still held the black box in his hand, but it was slipping from his grasp, slipping…
He dropped it. It clattered to the floor and I kicked it far across the cabin. The monster vanished completely.
It was just the two of us, there in the cabin. I heard fists pounding on the door from outside, but I ignored them. This was between me and Donaldson.
“What is that thing?” I asked, facing him, tugging at his throat. I shook him. “Where’d you find that hell-thing?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he wheezed.
My fingers tightened. Suddenly he drew up his foot and lashed out at my stomach. I let go of his throat and fell back, the wind knocked out of me. As I staggered backward, he darted for the fallen box, but I recovered and brought my foot down hard on his outstretched hand.
He snarled in pain. I felt his other fist crash into my stomach again. I was almost numb, sick, ready to curl up in a knot and close my eyes. But I forced myself to suck in breath and hit him.
His head snapped back. I hit him again, and he reeled soggily. His neat, precise lips swelled into a bloody mass. His fists moved hazily; I blackened one of his eyes, and he groaned and slumped. Fury was in my fists; I was avenging the honor of the Exploratory Wing against the one man who had broken its oaths.
“Enough…enough…”
But I hit him again and again, till he sagged to the floor. I picked up the black metal box, fondled it in my hands. Then, tentatively, I threw a thought at it.
Monster.
The monster appeared in all its ugliness.
Vanish.
It vanished.
“That’s how it works, isn’t it?” I said. “It’s a thought projector. That monster never existed outside your own mind, Donaldson.”
“Don’t hit me again,” he whined. I didn’t. He was beneath contempt.
I threw open the door and saw the other crewmen huddled outside, their faces pale. “It’s all over,” I said. “Here’s your monster.”
I held out the black box.
We held court on Donaldson that night, and he made full confession. That first day, he had stumbled over an alien treasure in the cave beyond the hill—that, and the thought-converter. The idea came to him that perhaps, as sole survivor of the expedition, he could turn some of the treasure to his own uses.
So he utilized the thought-converter in a campaign to pick us off one by one without aiming suspicion at himself. Only his clumsy way of pretending to see the creature himself had given him away; else he might have killed us all.
Our rulebook gave no guide on what to do about him—but we reached a decision easily enough.
When we left Pollux V, taking with us samples of the treasure, and other specimens of the long-dead race (including the thought-converter) we left Donaldson behind, on the bare, lifeless planet, with about a week’s supply of food and air.
No one ever learned of his treachery. We listed him as a casualty, along with Max and Leo, when we returned to Earth. The Exploratory Wing had too noble a name to tarnish by revealing what Donaldson had done…and none of us will ever speak the truth. The Wing means too much to us for that.
And I think they’re going to award him a posthumous medal…
PUPPETS WITHOUT STRINGS
(1957)
The arrangement with Hamling, since it was contractual and required 50,000 words a month from the Garrett-Silverberg fiction factory, took priority in my monthly output of short stories throughout 1956. But I continued to maintain my connections with Amazing Stories and its companion Fantastic as well, although on a reduced basis. In those heady days of the summer of 1955 Garrett had set us both up as regular writers for those two magazines, which then were edited by Howard Browne, a skillful mystery-story writer who somehow had found himself editing two science-fiction magazines even though he had a fairly vigorous dislike for science fiction. He went about his job conscientiously, but scarcely made an effort to hide the intensity of his boredom with robots, spaceships, time machines, and all the rest of that science-fiction stuff. Browne was an amiable man who took an avuncular liking to 21-year-old me, and, since I very quickly demonstrated that I could be a reliable supplier of stories for his two copy-hungry magazines, he bought everything I brought him on my regular Monday morning visits to his Manhattan office. The records show that I had twenty stories published in the two Browne titles in 1956 alone, some of them collaborations with Garrett but most of them solo work.
Toward the end of 1956 Howard resigned from his editorial post to return to his real love, writing detective novels, and his place was taken by Paul W. Fairman, his associate editor and also one of his regular writers. As it happened, Fairman and I didn’t get along particularly well. Like Browne, he had no great love for
science fiction; he carried out his chores as editor with no more enthusiasm than a shoe salesman or a bank clerk might have shown, and though he was a prolific producer of s-f, most of his work was doggedly uninspired, routine formula stuff that he dutifully cranked out to fill the pages of Browne’s and Hamling’s magazines. Fairman knew that it was my ambition to write science fiction of a more than routine sort, and I suppose that caused him to feel some resentment over my presence on the staff of his own magazines, as though he thought, “This kid is slumming,” and didn’t like it.
So I continued to bring stories to Fairman, as I had to Browne, and he continued to buy them, because his two monthly magazines demanded a steady flow of material, but the welcome I got at his office was a cool one, and the stories became fewer and farther between as other markets, one of them paying twice as much as Fairman’s magazines for similar material, emerged to absorb my vast output. In my enormously prolific year of 1957 I had a dozen stories in Amazing and Fantastic, but most of them were bunched in the first half of the year, and a good many of those may have been left over from the Browne regime. From September through December I had just two stories published in Fairman’s magazines, and by the time 1958 came around I was no longer dealing with them at all.
One of the last I wrote for Fairman was “Puppets Without Strings,” which I delivered in April, 1957 and which he ran in the August, 1957 issue of Fantastic. (That issue reached the newsstands in June, and the brief two-month gap between delivery and publication would indicate that there was a 4400-word gap in the issue Fairman was putting together the day I brought my story in, and he sent it immediately to the printer. That was how things worked in those days.)
“Puppets Without Strings” is a fantasy, more or less, rather more quietly told than most of the furious action stories I was writing for the pulp magazines then. Its theme was hardly original. Heinlein had dealt with it in a 1941 short story called “They,” and Fritz Leiber in a powerful novella, “You’re All Alone,” in the August, 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures, the ancestor of Fantastic, and those are only the first two that come to mind. The Leiber story had had a strong effect on me when I read it at the age of fifteen, and I still remember the dramatic cover blurb for it: “In a world of puppets known as men…YOU’RE ALL ALONE.” Whether I was consciously setting out to rewrite “You’re All Alone” seven years later for Paul Fairman, or simply working from a subterranean memory of the story, I have no idea at this late date. But the connection between the two is impossible to deny.
Fairman ran my story under the title, “Call Me Zombie!”, which he may have chosen to use as a flashy headline on the cover; but since it is not really a zombie story at all, I have chosen here to revert to the title I originally gave it.
——————
The troop-train let Phil Marsh off at Grand Central, and he stood in the midst of a jostling mob of his ex-buddies, wondering whether to call Marylin or not. She wasn’t expecting him until Friday; it was only Wednesday, now.
Someone nudged him. Harry Davenport. “Let’s go get a beer,” Davenport said. “Our first as civilians again.”
“No. My wife—”
“Your wife can wait. She isn’t figuring on having you come home till Friday, anyway. Give the gal a decent amount of time to say goodbye to her boy friends, huh? What’s a few more minutes?”
Marsh scowled. “I don’t like jokes like that—”
“Jakes? Who knows?” Davenport said. “Strange are the ways of servicemen’s wives.”
Marsh heaved his duffel-bag higher on his shoulder and glared coldly at Davenport. He and Davenport had been drafted around the same time and had spent two years in the same outfit; still, Marsh felt he hardly knew the tall, hard-faced man at his side. And suddenly he didn’t want to know him any more. There was something about Davenport—
“So? You coming for a beer with me?”
“The hell with a beer. I’m going home. I haven’t seen my wife in two years, and I can’t get home soon enough.”
Davenport’s cold eyes twinkled. “I’m warning you, you better call first. You never can tell what you’ll find if you come popping in on her like that!”
There wasn’t room in the crowd for Marsh to hit him. Angry, he shouldered his way through the mob, went past the cotton-candy booths and the newsstands, found fifteen cents in his pocket and bought a token. At least that hadn’t changed; they were talking about raising the fare to twenty cents, but they hadn’t.
The new fluorescents made the IRT track incredibly bright and airy, though they showed up all the dirt. Marsh stood all the way into Brooklyn, got off at his old station, walked the familiar five-block walk to his house. It all looked pretty much the same, though he didn’t recognize any of the kids playing out in front.
He paused for a moment outside the house, fumbling through his civilian belongings for his house-key, still angered at what Davenport had said.
He knew Marylin better than that. Grinning in anticipation of her surprise, he ran up the stairs, jiggled the key into the lock, and opened the door.
“Hey! Guess who’s home, Marylin! I—” His voice died away.
She was standing in the middle of the floor, stock-still, eyes open, mouth gaping, looking very much like a department-store-dummy version of herself. Marsh had never seen anyone so dead-looking and yet so alive.
It was as if she had been turned off when he went away—and hadn’t been turned back on yet.
No more than a fraction of a second passed before she was awake and smiling warmly, but that fraction of a second was enough. Life flowed back into her; the change was apparent. But Marsh felt a cold chill as she skipped across the floor to wrap herself jubilantly around him.
“Phil! Phil! You said Friday, and it’s only Wednesday! Darling, I was going to have the place all fixed up to surprise you, with ribbons and streamers and things—but I guess this is a much better surprise—isn’t it?”
“Of course,” he said, without any warmth at all. His mind kept going back to the thing he’d seen when he opened the door—the puppet-Marylin who’d awakened into the real one when she realized he was watching her.
He couldn’t help thinking of Davenport’s warning—you never can tell what you’ll find if you come popping in on her like that. Maybe, Marsh thought, Davenport hadn’t been talking about possible infidelity. Maybe it was something uglier and deeper and more horrible than that.
Marylin’s hand brushed his cheek lightly. “I can’t believe you’re really back. My mind is sort of geared to Friday—I was counting the days and the hours and tomorrow I was going to start counting the minutes.”
“They processed us through quicker. That was all there was to it. The Friday discharges gained two days—and we even get paid for them!” Marsh tried to smile, but the thought of—that—dampened his lightheadedness.
“You seem strange,” Marylin said. “Cold…almost frightened. Is there something wrong? Darling, two years…I hope they didn’t do anything to you!”
He jerked out of his strange mood with an effort. “No—it’s just being home, that’s all. And thinking.” He looked around. “The place is fixed up nice. You’ve been taking care of it for me.”
And it looks just the way it did when I went away. Complete to the cigarette-ashes in the ashtray, and the dishes in the sink.
Like a stage-set, he thought weirdly. Stage-sets don’t change unless someone changes them.
“There’s beer in the icebox,” Marylin said. “Your favorite brand. I was stocking up for Friday.”
“Let’s go have some, then. My throat feels pretty dry.”
He followed her into the kitchen. He was remembering something else, now—a long discussion he had had with Harry Davenport, a year or so back. He had forgotten about it. But now, as if triggered, it rose to the front of his mind.
It wasn’t long after Basic, and they had been stationed in Germany on a do-nothing post where the chief activity was drinking the dark German beer
(very tasty) and ogling the passing German frauleins (very hefty).
Marsh and Davenport had had an afternoon to kill in Hamburg; they were serving as chauffeurs for some of the brass, and while the high-level conference went on across the street the chauffeurs were free to cool their heels until wanted.
They were in one of those German combination hotel-bars and pickup-joints, drinking authentic Bock beer and saying very little. Marsh hadn’t been in the Army long enough to be used to the idea of being separated from his wife, and he was lonely and not very talkative. Being with Davenport didn’t help; the big man always seemed half a million miles away and frosty as the top of Everest. Marsh knew hardly anything about him, despite constant contact with him.
But then a German girl came waddling along, the kind who looked to have grown fat and healthy on a diet of sauerbraten and beer. She was young—twenty-five or thereabouts—and might have been pretty with fifty less pounds aboard. Marsh stared broodingly at her. Her fat smiling face bore no sign of intelligence.
And after her came another, and another. Pleasant plump girls who seemed to be cut from a cookie-tin.
“Look at them,” he said. “Waddling along ten or twenty an hour, and all of them alike. Like so many puppets without strings, moving along a fixed path and not knowing what the hell for. Damn, I’m getting philosophical in my old age, huh?” He swilled down more of the dark, rich beer.
But Davenport looked at him, cold amusement in his face. “Maybe they are.”
“Huh? Are what?”
“Puppets. Like you said.”
Marsh shook his head in confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s an old theory of mine. That most of the world’s people are golems—dummies, with no real life of their own. That just a few of us are really alive, and the rest of us just toys, playthings to give an appearance of reality to the world surrounding the real few.”