A machine, he thought. Believing in the Evil Spirit entrenched solidly on Earth. A mass of solid-state circuitry diving deep into age-old theology, with divine creation and miracles on one side and the diabolic on the other. Plunged back into the Dark Ages, and by a man-made electronic construct, not by one of us humans.
And they say humans are prone to error.
When he returned home that night—after participating in the dismantling of every Genux-B-style computer on Earth—seven colored spheres of candy-coated gum lay in a group of the vanity table, waiting for him.
It would create quite a gum empire, he decided as he scrutinized the seven bright balls, all the same color. Not much overhead, to say the least. And no dispenser would ever become empty—not at this rate.
Going to the vidphone, he picked up the receiver and began to dial the emergency number which the FBI men had given him. And then reluctantly hung up.
It was beginning to look as if the computer had been right, hard as that was to admit. And it had been his decision to go ahead and dismantle it.
But the other part was worse. How could he report to the FBI that he had in his possession seven candy-coated balls of gum? Even if they did divide. That in itself would be even harder to report. Even if he could establish that they consisted of illegal—and rare—nonterrestrial primitive life forms smuggled to Terra from God knew what bleak planet.
Better to live and let live. Perhaps their reproduction cycle would settle down; perhaps after a period of swift binary fission they would adapt to a terran environment and stabilize. After that he could forget about it. And he could flush them down the incinerator chute of his conapt. He did so.
But evidently he missed one. Probably, being round, it had rolled off the vanity table. He found it two days later, under the bed, with fifteen like it. So once more he tried to get rid of them all—and again he missed one; again he found a new nest the following day, and this time he counted forty of them.
Naturally, he began to chew up as many as possible—and as fast. And he tried boiling them—at least the ones he could find—in hot water. He even tried spraying them with an indoor insect bomb.
At the end of a week, he had 15,832 of them filling the bedroom of his conapt. By this time chewing them out of existence, spraying them out of existence, boiling them out of existence—all had become impractical.
At the end of the month, despite having a scavenger truck haul away as much as it could take, he computed that he owned two million.
Ten days later—from a pay phone down at the corner—he fatalistically called the FBI. But by then they were no longer able to answer the vidphone.
A Game of Unchance
While rolling a fifty-gallon drum of water from the canal to his potato garden, Bob Turk heard the roar, glanced up into the haze of the midafternoon Martian sky and saw the great blue interplan ship.
In the excitement he waved. And then he read the words painted on the side of the ship and his joy became alloyed with care. Because this great pitted hull, now lowering itself to a rear-end landing, was a carny ship, come to this region of the fourth planet to transact business.
The painting spelled out:
Falling Star Entertainment Enterprises
presents
Freaks, Magic, Terrifying Stunts, and Women!
The final word had been painted largest of all.
I better go tell the settlement council, Turk realized. He left his water drum and trotted toward the shop-area, panting as his lungs struggled to take in the thin, weak air of this unnatural, colonized world. Last time a carnival had come to their area they had been robbed of most of their crops—accepted by the pitchmen in barter—and had wound up with nothing more than an armload of useless plaster figurines. It would not happen again. And yet—
He felt the craving within him, the need to be entertained. And they all felt this way; the settlement yearned for the bizarre. Of course the pitchmen knew this, preyed off this. Turk thought, If only we could keep our heads. Barter excess food and cloth-fibers, not what we need… not become like a lot of kids. But life in the colony world was monotonous. Carting water, fighting bugs, repairing fences, ceaselessly tinkering with the semi-autonomous robot farm machinery which sustained them… it wasn’t enough; it had no—culture. No solemnity.
“Hey,” Turk called as he reached Vince Guest’s land; Vince sat aboard his one-cylinder plow, wrench in hand. “Hear the noise? Company! More sideshows, like last year—remember?”
“I remember,” Vince said, not looking up. “They got all my squash. The hell with traveling shows.” His face became dark.
“This is a different outfit,” Turk explained, halting. “I never saw them before; they’ve got a blue ship and it looks like it’s been everywhere. You know what we’re going to do? Remember our plan?”
“Some plan,” Vince said, closing the jaw of the wrench.
“Talent is talent,” Turk babbled, trying to convince—not merely Vince—but himself as well; he talked against his own alarm. “All right, so Fred’s sort of half-witted; his talent’s genuine, I mean, we’ve tried it out a million times, and why we didn’t use it against that carny last year I’ll never know. But now we’re organized. Prepared.”
Raising his head Vince said, “You know what that dumb kid will do? He’ll join the carny; he’ll leave with it and he’ll use his talent on their side—we can’t trust him.”
“I trust him,” Turk said, and hurried on toward the buildings of the settlement, the dusty, eroded gray structures directly ahead. Already he could see their council chairman, Hoagland Rae, busy at his store; Hoagland rented tired pieces of equipment to settlement members and they all depended on him. Without Hoagland’s contraptions no sheep would get sheared, no lambs would be distailed. It was no wonder that Hoagland had become their political—as well as economic—leader.
Stepping out onto the hard-packed sand, Hoagland shaded his eyes, wiped his wet forehead with a folded handkerchief and greeted Bob Turk. “Different outfit this time?” His voice was low.
“Right,” Turk said, his heart pounding. “And we can take them, Hoag! If we play it right; I mean, once Fred—”
“They’ll be suspicious,” Hoagland said thoughtfully. “No doubt other settlements have tried to use Psi to win. They may have one of those—what do you call them?—those anti-Psi folks with them. Fred’s a p-k and if they have an anti-p-k—” He gestured, showing his resignation.
“I’ll go tell Fred’s parents to get him from school,” Bob Turk panted. “It’d be natural for kids to show up right away; let’s close the school for this afternoon so Fred’s lost in the crowd, you know what I mean? He doesn’t look funny, not to me, anyhow.” He sniggered.
“True,” Hoagland agreed, with dignity. “The Costner boy appears quite normal. Yes, we’ll try; that’s what we voted to do anyhow, we’re committed. Go sound the surplus-gathering bell so these carny boys can see we’ve got good produce to offer—I want to see all those apples and walnuts and cabbages and squash and pumpkins piled up—” He pointed to the spot. “And an accurate inventory sheet, with three carbons, in my hands, within one hour.” Hoagland got out a cigar, lit up with his lighter. “Get going.” Bob Turk went.
As they walked through their south pasture, among the black-face sheep who chewed the hard, dry grass, Tony Costner said to his son, “You think you can manage it, Fred? If not, say so. You don’t have to.”
Straining, Fred Costner thought he could dimly see the carnival, far off, arranged before the upended interplan ship. Booths, shimmering big banners and metal streamers that danced in the wind … and the recorded music, or was it an authentic calliope? “Sure,” he muttered. “I can handle them; I’ve been practicing every day since Mr. Rae told me.” To prove it he caused a rock lying ahead of them to skim up, pass in an arc, start toward them at high speed and then drop abruptly back to the brown, dry grass. A sheep regarded it dully and Fred laughed.
A small crowd fro
m the settlement, including children, had already manifested itself among the booths now being set up; he saw the cotton candy machine hard at work, smelled the frying popcorn, saw with delight a vast cluster of helium-filled balloons carried by a gaudily-painted dwarf wearing a hobo costume.
His father said quietly, “What you must look for, Fred, is the game which offers the really valuable prizes.”
“I know,” he said, and began to scan the booths. We don’t have a need for hula-hula dolls, he said to himself. Or boxes of salt water taffy.
Somewhere in the carnival lay the real spoils. It might be in the money-pitching board or the spinning wheel or the bingo table; anyhow it was there. He scented it, sniffed it. And hurried.
In a weak, strained voice his father said, “Um, maybe I’ll leave you, Freddy.” Tony had seen one of the girl platforms and had turned toward it, unable to take his eyes from the scene. One of the girls was already—but then the rumble of a truck made Fred Costner turn, and he forgot about the high-breasted, unclad girl on the platform. The truck was bringing the produce of the settlement, to be bartered in exchange for tickets.
The boy started toward the truck, wondering how much Hoagland Rae had decided to put up this time after the awful licking they had taken before. It looked like a great deal and Fred felt pride; the settlement obviously had full confidence in his abilities.
He caught then the unmistakable stench of Psi.
It emanated from a booth to his right and he turned at once in that direction. This was what the carny people were protecting, this one game which they did not feel they could afford to lose. It was, he saw, a booth in which one of the freaks acted as the target; the freak was a no-head, the first Fred had ever seen, and he stopped, transfixed.
The no-head had no head at all and his sense organs, his eyes and nose and ears, had migrated to other parts of his body beginning in the period before birth. For instance, his mouth gaped from the center of his chest, and from each shoulder an eye gleamed; the no-head was deformed but not deprived, and Fred felt respect for him. The no-head could see, smell and hear as good as anyone. But what exactly did he do in the game?
In the booth the no-head sat within a basket suspended above a tub of water. Behind the no-head Fred Costner saw a target and then he saw the heap of baseballs near at hand and he realized how the games worked; if the target were hit by a ball the no-head would plunge into the tub of water. And it was to prevent this that the carny had directed its Psi powers; the stench here was overpowering. He could not, however, tell from whom the stench came, the no-head or the operator of the booth or from a third person as yet unseen. The operator, a thin young woman wearing slacks and a sweater and tennis shoes, held a baseball toward Fred. “Ready to play, captain?” she demanded and smiled at him insinuatingly, as if it was utterly in the realm of the impossible that he might play and win.
“I’m thinking,” Fred said. He was scrutinizing the prizes. The no-head giggled and the mouth located in the chest said, “He’s thinking—I doubt that!” It giggled again and Fred flushed.
His father came up beside him. “Is this what you want to play?” he said. Now Hoagland Rae appeared; the two men flanked the boy, all three of them studying the prizes. What were they? Dolls, Fred thought. At least that was their appearance; the vaguely male, small shapes lay in rows on the shelves to the left of the booth’s operator. He could not for the life of him fathom the carny’s reasons for protecting these; surely they were worthless. He moved closer, straining to see…
Leading him off to one side Hoagland Rae said worriedly, “But even if we win, Fred, what do we get? Nothing we can use, just those plastic figurines. We can’t barter those with other settlements, even.” He looked disappointed; the corners of his mouth turned down dismally.
“I don’t think they’re what they seem,” Fred said. “But I don’t actually know what they are. Anyhow let me try, Mr. Rae; I know this is the one.” And the carny people certainly believed so.
“I’ll leave it up to you,” Hoagland Rae said, with pessimism; he exchanged glances with Fred’s father, than slapped the boy encouragingly on the back. “Let’s go,” he announced. “Do your best, kid.” The group of them—joined now by Bob Turk—made their way back to the booth in which the no-head sat with shoulder eyes gleaming.
“Made up your mind, people?” the thin stony-faced girl who operated the booth asked, tossing a baseball and recatching it.
“Here.” Hoagland handed Fred an envelope; it was the proceeds from the settlement’s produce, in the form of carny tickets—this was what they had obtained in exchange. This was all there was, now.
“I’ll try,” Fred said to the thin girl, and handed her a ticket.
The thin girl smiled, showing sharp, small teeth.
“Put me in the drink!” the no-head babbled. “Dunk me and win a valuable prize!” It giggled again, in delight.
That night, in the workshop behind his store, Hoagland Rae sat with a jeweler’s loupe in his right eye, examining one of the figurines which Tony Costner’s boy had won at the Falling Star Entertainment Enterprises carnival earlier in the day.
Fifteen of the figurines lay in a row against the far wall of Hoagland’s workshop.
With a tiny pair of pliers Hoagland pried open the back of the doll-like structure and saw, within, intricate wiring. “The boy was right,” he said to Bob Turk, who stood behind him smoking a synthetic tobacco cigarette in jerky agitation. “It’s not a doll; it’s fully rigged. Might be UN property they stole; might even be a microrob. You know, one of those special automatic mechanisms the government uses for a million tasks from spying to reconstruct surgery for war vets.” Now, gingerly, he opened the front of the figurine.
More wiring, and the miniature parts which even under the loupe were exceedingly difficult to make out. He gave up; after all, his ability was limited to repairing power harvesting equipment and the like. This was just too much. Again he wondered exactly how the settlement could make use of these microrobs. Sell them back to the UN? And meanwhile, the carnival had packed up and gone. No way to find out from them what these were. “Maybe it walks and talks,” Turk suggested.
Hoagland searched for a switch on the figurine, found none. Verbal order? he wondered. “Walk,” he ordered it. The figurine remained inert. “I think we’ve got something here,” he said to Turk. “But—” He gestured. “It’ll take time; we’ve got to be patient.” Maybe if they took one of the figurines to M City, where the truly professional engineers, electronics experts and repairmen of all kinds could be found… but he wanted to do this himself; he distrusted the inhabitants of the one great urban area on the colony planet.
“Those carny people sure were upset when we won again and again,” Bob Turk chuckled. “Fred, he said that they were exerting their own Psi all the time and it completely surprised them that—”
“Be quiet,” Hoagland said. He had found the figurine’s power supply; now he needed only to trace the circuit until he came to a break. By closing the break he could start the mechanism into activity; it was—or rather it seemed—as simple as that.
Shortly, he found the interruption in the circuit. A microscopic switch, disguised as the belt buckle, of the figurine… exulting, Hoagland closed the switch with his needle-nose pliers, set the figurine down on his workbench and waited.
The figurine stirred. It reached into a pouch-like construct hanging at it side, a sort of purse; from the pouch it brought a tiny tube, which it pointed at Hoagland.
“Wait,” Hoagland said feebly. Behind him Turk bleated and scuttled for cover. Something boomed in his face, a light that thrust him back; he shut his eyes and cried out in fright. We’re being attacked! he shouted, but his voice did not sound; he heard nothing. He was crying uselessly in a darkness which had no end. Groping, he reached out imploringly…
The settlement’s registered nurse was bending over him, holding a bottle of ammonia at his nostrils. Grunting, he managed to lift his head, open hi
s eyes. He lay in his workshop; around him stood a ring of settlement adults, Bob Turk foremost, all with expressions of gray alarm.
“These dolls or whatever,” Hoagland managed to whisper. “Attacked us; be careful.” He twisted, trying to see the line of dolls which he had so carefully placed against the far wall. “I set one off prematurely,” he mumbled. “By completing the circuit; I tripped it so now we know.” And then he blinked.
The dolls were gone.
“I went for Miss Beason,” Bob Turk explained, “and when I got back they had disappeared. Sorry.” He looked apologetic, as if it were his personal fault. “But you were hurt; I was worried you were maybe dead.”
“Okay,” Hoagland said, pulling himself up; his head ached and he felt nauseated. “You did right. Better get that Costner kid in here, get his opinion.” He added, “Well, we’ve been taken. For the second year in a row. Only this time is worse.” This time, he thought, we won. We were better off last year when we merely lost.
He had an intimation of true foreboding.
Four days later, as Tony Costner hoed weeds in his squash garden, a stirring of the ground made him pause; he reached silently for the pitchfork, thinking, It’s an m-gopher, down under, eating the roots. I’ll get it. He lifted the pitchfork, and, as the ground stirred once more, brought the tines of the fork savagely down to penetrate the loose, sandy soil.
Something beneath the surface squeaked in pain and fright. Tony Costner grabbed a shovel, dug the dirt away. A tunnel lay exposed and in it, dying in a heap of quivering, pulsating fur, lay—as he had from long experience anticipated—a Martian gopher, its eyes glazed in agony, elongated fangs exposed.