He handed it to me—an old and crumpled paper, so brittle with age I was afraid it might crumble to dust in my very hands.
“There was quite a bit of rubble back of the cabinet,” said Herb. “Some other papers. Old, too, but this one was the oldest.”
I looked at the date. April 16, 1985.
That yellowed paper was almost five hundred years old! It had come off the press less than thirty-five years after Herb and I had taken off with the time machine!
Lying behind the filing cabinet all those years. The cabinet was large and heavy to move, and janitors in newspaper offices aren’t noted for outstanding tidiness.
But there was something bothering me. A little whisper way back in my head, somewhere down at the base of my brain, that kept telling me there was something I should remember.
I tossed the old paper on a desk and walked to a window. Most of the glass was broken out, and what wasn’t broken out was coated so thick with grime you couldn’t see through it. I looked out through the place where there wasn’t any glass.
There the city lay—almost as I remembered it. There was Jackson’s tower, the tallest in the city back in 1950, but now dwarfed by three or four others. The spire of the old cathedral was gone, and I missed that, for it had been a pretty thing. I used to sit and watch it from this very window through the mist of early-spring rain or through the ghostly white of the winter’s first snowfall. I missed the spire, but Jackson’s tower was there, and so were a lot of other buildings I could place.
And every one of them looked lonely. Lonely and not quite understanding—like a dog that’s been kicked out of a chair he thinks of as his own. Their windows gaping like dead eyes. No cheerful glow of light within them. Their colors dulled by the wash of seasons that had rolled over them.
This was worse, I told myself, than if we’d found the place all smashed to hell by bombs. Because, brutal as it is, one can understand a bombed city. And one can’t understand, or feel comfortable in a city that’s just been left behind to die.
And the people!
Thinking about them gave me the jitters. Were all the people like old Daniel Boone? We had seen how he and his family lived, and it wasn’t pretty. People who had backed down the scale of progress. People who had forgotten the printed word, had twisted the old truths and the old history into screwy legends.
It was easy enough to understand how it had happened. Pull the economic props from under a civilization and there’s hell to pay. First you have mad savagery and even madder destruction as class hatred flames unchecked. And when that hatred dies down after an orgy of destruction there is bewilderment, and then some more savagery and hatred born of bewilderment.
But, sink as low as he may, man always will climb again. It’s the nature of the beast. He’s an ornery cuss.
But man, apparently, hadn’t climbed again. Civilization, as Herb and I knew it, had crashed all of three hundred years before—and man still was content to live in the shadow of his former greatness, not questioning the mute evidences of his mighty past, uninspired by the soaring blocks of stone that reared mountainous above him.
There was something wrong. Something devilish wrong.
Dust rose and tickled my nose, and suddenly I realized my throat was hot and dry. I wanted a beer, if I could only step down the street to the Dutchman’s—
Then it smacked me straight between the eyes, the thing that had been whispering around in the back of my head all day.
I remembered Billy Larson’s face and the way his ears wiggled when he got excited and how hopped up he had been about a sunspot story.
“By Heaven, Herb, I got it,” I yelled, turning from the window.
Herb’s mouth sagged, and I knew he thought that I was nuts.
“I know what happened now,” I said. “We have to get a telescope.”
“Look here, Mike,” said Herb, “if you feel—”
But I didn’t let him finish.
“It’s the sunspots,” I yelled at him.
“Sunspots?” he squeaked.
“Sure,” I said. “There aren’t any.”
My hunch had been right.
There weren’t any sunspots. No black dots on that great ball of flame.
It had taken two days before we found a pair of powerful field glasses in the rubbish of what once had been a jewelry store. Most of the stores and shops were wiped clean. Raided time after time in the violence which must have followed the breakdown of government, they later would have been looted systematically.
“Herb,” I said, “there must have been something in what Billy said. Lots of sunspots and we have good times. No sunspots and we have bad times.”
“Yeah,” said Herb, “Billy was plenty smart. He knew his science, all right.”
I could almost see Billy, his ears wiggling, his eyes glowing, as he talked to me that morning.
Wall Street followed the sunspot cycle, he had said. Business boomed when sunspots were riding high, went to pot when they blinked out.
I remembered asking him what would happen if someone passed a law against sunspots. And now it seemed that someone had!
It was hard to believe, but the evidence was there. The story lay in those musty files up in the Globe office. Stories that told of the world going mad when business scraped rock bottom. Of governments smashing, of starving hordes sweeping nation after nation.
I put my head down between my hands and groaned. I wanted a glass of beer. The kind Louie used to push across the bar, cool and with a lot of foam on top. And now there wasn’t any beer. There hadn’t been for centuries. All because of sunspots!
Ultraviolet light. Endocrine glands and human behavior. Words that scientists rolled around in their mouths and nobody paid much attention to. But they were the things that had played the devil with the human race.
Herb chuckled behind me. I swung around on him, my nerves on edge.
“What’s the matter with you?” I demanded.
“Boy,” said Herb, “this Wash Tubbs can get himself into some of the damnedest scrapes!”
“What you got there?” I asked, seeing he was reading a paper.
“Oh, this,” he said. “This is that old paper we found up at the office. The one published in ‘85. I’m going to take it back and give it to J.R. But right now I’m reading the funnies—”
I grunted and hunkered down, turning my mind back to the sunspots. It sounded wacky, all right, but that was the only explanation.
It didn’t seem right that a body of matter ninety-three million miles away could rule the lives of mankind—but, after all, all life depended on the Sun. Whiff out the Sun and there wouldn’t be any life. Those old savages who had worshiped the Sun had the right idea.
Say, then, that sunspots had gone out of style. What would happen? Exactly what those files back at the Globe office had shown.
Depression, ever deepening. Business failures, more and more men out of work, taxes piling higher and higher as a panicky government fought to hold off the day of reckoning.
I heard Herb making some strangling sounds and swung around again. I was getting annoyed with Herb.
But the look on Herb’s face halted the words that were bubbling on my lips. His face was stark. It was white as a sheet and his eyes were frozen wide.
He shoved the paper at me, babbling, a shaking finger pointing at a small item.
I grabbed the sheet and squinted to make out the faded type. Then I read, slowly, but with growing horror:
LANGER DIES
“James Langer, convicted in 1951 of tampering with the time machine in which Mike Hamilton and Herb Harding, Globe newsmen, set out on a flight into the future the preceding year, died in Rocky Point prison today at the age of sixty-five.
“Langer, at his trial, confessed he had bribed the guard placed in charge of the machine, to allow hi
m to enter the plane in which it was installed. There, he testified, he removed that portion of the mechanism which made it possible for the machine to move backward in time.
“Langer, at that time, was an employee of the Standard, which went out of business a few years later.
“National indignation aroused by the incident resulted in the passage by Congress of a law prohibiting further building or experimentation with time machines. Heartbroken, Dr. Ambrose Ackerman, inventor of the machine, died two weeks after the trial.”
I sat numb for a few minutes, my hand tightening in a terrible grip upon the paper, grinding its yellowed pages into flaking shreds.
Then I looked at Herb, and as I looked into his fear-stricken face I remembered something.
“So,” I said, and I was so mad that I almost choked.
“So, you just had a few drinks with the boys that night before we left. You just met up with some Standard boys and had a few.”
I remembered the way Jimmy Langer had laughed in my face as I was leaving the Dutchman’s. I remembered how nervous the guard had been that morning.
“You didn’t spill your guts, did you?” I rasped.
“Look, Mike—” said Herb, getting up off the ground.
“You got drunk, damn you,” I yelled at him, “and your brains ran right out of your mouth. You told that Standard crowd everything you knew. And Old Man Johnson sent Langer out to do the dirty work.”
I was mad, mad clear down to the soles of my boots.
“Damn you, Mike—” said Herb, and right then I let him have it. I gave him a poke that shook him clear down to the ground, but he came right back at me. Maybe he was mad, too.
He clipped me alongside the jaw and I plastered him over the eye, and after that we went at it hammer and tongs.
Herb wasn’t any slouch with his dukes, and he kept me pretty busy. I gave him everything I had, but he always came back for more, and he pasted me a few that set my head to ringing.
But I didn’t mind—all I wanted was to give Herb a licking he’d remember right down to the day he breathed his last.
When we quit it was just because neither one of us could fight another lick. We lay there on the ground, gasping and glaring at one another. One of Herb’s eyes was closed, and I knew I had lost a couple of teeth and my face felt like it bad been run through a meat grinder.
Then Herb grinned at me.
“If I could have stayed on my feet a bit longer,” he gasped, “I’d have murdered you.”
And I grinned back at him.
Probably we should have stayed back in 2450. We had a chance back there. Old Daniel Boone didn’t know too much, but at least he was civilized in a good many ways. And no doubt there still were books, and we might have been able to find other useful things.
We might have made a stab at rebuilding civilization, although the cards would have been stacked against us. For there’s something funny about that sunspot business. When the sunspots stopped rearing around out on the Sun, something seemed to have run out of men—the old double-fisted, hell-for-leather spirit that had taken them up through the ages.
But we figured that men would make a come-back. We were pretty sure that somewhere up in the future we’d find a race that had started to climb back.
So we went ahead in time. Even if we couldn’t go back, we could still go ahead.
We went five hundred years and found nothing. No trace of Daniel Boone’s descendants. Maybe they’d given up raising squashes and had moved out where the hunting was better. The city still stood, although some of the stones had crumbled and some of the buildings were falling to pieces.
We traveled another five hundred years, and this time a horde of howling savages, men little more advanced than the tribes which roamed over Europe in the old Stone Age, charged out of the ruins at us, screaming and waving clubs and spears.
We just beat them to the plane.
In two thousand years the tribe had disappeared, and in its place we saw skulking figures that slunk among the mounds that once had been a city. Things that looked like men.
And after that we found nothing at all. Nothing, that is, except a skeleton that looked like it might once have been a human being.
Here at last we stop. There’s no use of going farther, and the gas in the tank of our plane is running low.
The city is a heap of earthy mounds, bearing stunted trees. Queer animals shuffle and slink over and among the mounds. Herb says they are mutations—he read about mutations somewhere in a book.
To the west stretch great veldts of waving grass, and across the river the hills are forested with mighty trees.
But Man is gone. He rose, and for a little while he walked the Earth. But now he’s swept away.
Back in 1950, Man thought he was the whole works. But he wasn’t so hot, after all. The sunspots took him to the cleaners. Maybe it was the sunspots in the first place that enabled him to rise up on his hind legs and rule the roost. Billy said that sunspots could do some funny things.
But that doesn’t matter now. Man is just another has-been.
There’s not much left for us to do. Just to sit and think about J.R. rubbing his hands together. And Billy Larson wiggling his ears. And the way Jimmy Langer laughed that night outside the Dutchman’s place.
Right now I’d sell my soul to walk into the Dutchman’s place and say to Louie: “It’s a hell of a world, Louie.”
And hear Louie answer back: “It sure as hell is, Mike.”
Drop Dead
“Drop Dead” first appeared in the July 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s enough to give a space explorer ulcers.
—dww
The critters were unbelievable. They looked like something from the maudlin pen of a well-alcoholed cartoonist.
One herd of them clustered in a semicircle in front of the ship, not jittery or belligerent—just looking at us. And that was strange. Ordinarily, when a spaceship sets down on a virgin planet, it takes a week at least for any life that might have seen or heard it to creep out of hiding and sneak a look around.
The critters were almost cow-size, but nohow as graceful as a cow. Their bodies were pushed together as if every blessed one of them had run full-tilt into a wall. And they were just as lumpy as you’d expect from a collision like that. Their hides were splashed with large squares of pastel color—the kind of color one never finds on any self-respecting animal: violet, pink, orange, chartreuse, to name only a few. The overall effect was of a checkerboard done by an old lady who made crazy quilts.
And that, by far, was not the worst of it.
From their heads and other parts of their anatomy sprouted a weird sort of vegetation, so that it appeared each animal was hiding, somewhat ineffectively, behind a skimpy thicket. To compound the situation and make it completely insane, fruits and vegetables—or what appeared to be fruits and vegetables—grew from the vegetation.
So we stood there, the critters looking at us and us looking back at them, and finally one of them walked forward until it was no more than six feet from us. It stood there for a moment, gazing at us soulfully, then dropped dead at our feet.
The rest of the herd turned around and trotted awkwardly away, for all the world as if they had done what they had come to do and now could go about their business.
Julian Oliver, our botanist, put up a hand and rubbed his balding head with an absentminded motion.
“Another whatisit coming up!” he moaned. “Why couldn’t it, for once, be something plain and simple?”
“It never is,” I told him. “Remember that bush out on Hamal V that spent half its life as a kind of glorified tomato and the other half as grade-A poison ivy?”
“I remember it,” Oliver said sadly.
Max Weber, our biologist, walked over to the critter, reached out a cautious foot and prodded it.
“Trouble is,” he said, “that Hamal tomato was Julian’s baby and this one here is mine.”
“I wouldn’t say entirely yours,” Oliver retorted. “What do you call that underbrush growing out of it?”
I came in fast to head off an argument. I had listened to those two quarreling for the past twelve years, across several hundred light-years and on a couple dozen planets. I couldn’t stop it here, I knew, but at least I could postpone it until they had something vital to quarrel about.
“Cut it out,” I said. “It’s only a couple of hours till nightfall and we have to get the camp set up.”
“But this critter,” Weber said. “We can’t just leave it here.”
“Why not? There are millions more of them. This one will stay right here and even if it doesn’t—”
“But it dropped dead!”
“So it was old and feeble.”
“It wasn’t. It was right in the prime of life.”
“We can talk about it later,” said Alfred Kemper, our bacteriologist. “I’m as interested as you two, but what Bob says is right. We have to get the camp set up.”
“Another thing,” I added, looking hard at all of them. “No matter how innocent this place may look, we observe planet rules. No eating anything. No drinking any water. No wandering off alone. No carelessness of any kind.”
“There’s nothing here,” said Weber. “Just the herds of critters. Just the endless plains. No trees, no hills, no nothing.”
He really didn’t mean it. He knew as well as I did the reason for observing planet rules. He only wanted to argue.
“All right,” I said, “which is it? Do we set up camp or do we spend the night up in the ship?”
That did it.
We had the camp set up before the sun went down and by dusk we were all settled in. Carl Parsons, our ecologist, had the stove together and the supper started before the last tent peg was driven.
I dug out my diet kit and mixed up my formula and all of them kidded me about it, the way they always did.