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.
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 animaclass="underline" 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.”