But the Chitterling was there, thank heaven. We saw it from the last rise, and it was just as we’d left it. It looked like home, and we started to walk faster.
I opened the door and stood aside for Ma and Ellen to go in first. Ma had just got her foot on the first rung when we heard the voice. It said, «We bid you farewell.»
I looked around — all of us looked around — but there wasn’t anybody or anything doing the talking. Well, there hadn’t been any street either. Or one-sided restaurant or propeller-birds.
«We bid you farewell, too. And the hell with you,» I answered, letting ’em know I meant it.
I motioned to Ma to go on into the ship. The sooner I was out of this place, the better I’d like it.
But the voice said: «Wait,» and there was something about it that made us wait. «We wish to explain, so you will not return.»
Nothing had been further from my mind, but I said, «Why not?»
«Your civilization is not compatible with ours. We have studied your minds to make sure. We projected images from images we found in your minds, to study your reactions to them. Our first images, our thought projections, were confused. But we understood your minds well by the time you reached the farthest point of your walk. We were able to project beings similar to yourselves.»
«Sam Heideman, yeah,» I said. «But how about the da — the woman? She couldn’t have been in the memory of any of us because we didn’t know her.»
«She was a composite — what you would call an idealization. That, however, does not matter. By studying you, we learned that your civilization concerns itself with things, ours with thoughts. Neither of us has anything to offer the other. No good could come through interchange whereas much harm might. Our planet has no material resources that would interest your race.»
I had to agree to that, looking out over that monotonous rolling green clay. It supported those tumbleweedlike bushes, a few of them, but didn’t look as though it would raise anything else. As for minerals, I hadn’t even seen a pebble.
«Right you are,» I shouted back. «Any planet that raises nothing but tumbleweeds and cockroaches can keep itself, as far as we are concerned. So —» Then something dawned on me. «Hey, just a minute. There must be something else besides weeds and roaches, or who the hell am I talking to?»
«You are talking,» replied the voice, «to what you call cockroaches, which is another point of incompatibility between us. To be more precise, you are talking to a thought-projected voice, but we are projecting it. And let me assure you of one thing — that you are as physically repugnant to us as we are to you.»
I looked down then and saw them, three of them, ready to pop in holes if I made a move. Back inside the ship, I said, «Johnny, blast off.»
He saluted and said, «Yes, sir,» and went into the pilot’s compartment and shut the door. His face had been studiously blank. He didn’t come out until we were on automatic course with Sirius just a dwindling star behind us. Ellen had gone to her room. Ma and I were playing cribbage.
«May I go off duty, sir?» Johnny asked and walked stiffly to his room when I answered, «Sure.»
After a while Ma and I turned in. A while after that we heard the noises. I got up and went to investigate.
I came back grinning, «Everything’s okay, Ma,» I said. «It’s Johnny Lane. He’s as drunk as a hoot owl.» And I pinched Ma playfully.
«Ouch, you old fool,» she sniffed. «I’m sore there from the curb disappearing from under me. And what’s wonderful about Johnny getting drunk? Are you?»
«No,» I admitted, regretfully maybe, «But Ma — he told me to go to blazes. And without saluting. Me, the owner of the ship.»
Ma just looked at me. Sometimes women are smart, but sometimes they’re pretty dumb.
«Listen, he isn’t going to keep on getting drunk. This is just an occasion. Can’t you see what happened to his pride and his dignity?»
«You mean because he —»
«Because he fell in love with the thought projection of a cockroach,» I pointed out. «Or thought he did. He has to get drunk once to forget that, and from now on, after he sobers up, he’s going to be human. I’ll bet on it. And I’ll bet, too, that once he’s human he’s going to see Ellen and realize how pretty she is. I’ll even bet he’s head-over-heels before we get back to Earth.»
«If you’re right —»
«I am right,» I told her gleefully. «I’ll get a bottle and we’ll drink a toast to it. To Nothing Sirius.»
And, for once, I was right. Johnny and Ellen were engaged before we got near enough to the Solar System to start decelerating.
STAR MOUSE
MITKEY, the mouse, wasn’t Mitkey then.
He was just another mouse, who lived behind the floorboards and plaster of the house of the great Herr Professor Oberburger, formerly of Vienna and Heidelberg; then a refugee from the excessive admiration of his more powerful fellow-countrymen. The excessive admiration had concerned not Herr Oberburger himself, but a certain gas which had been a by-product of an unsuccessful rocket fuel — which might have been a highly-successful something else.
If, of course, the Professor had given them the correct formula. Which he — Well, anyway, the Professor had made good his escape and now lived in a house in Connecticut. And so did Mitkey.
A small gray mouse, and a small gray man. Nothing unusual about either of them. Particularly there was nothing unusual about Mitkey; he had a family and he liked cheese and if there were Rotarians among mice, he would have been a Rotarian.
The Herr Professor, of course, had his mild eccentricities. A confirmed bachelor, he had no one to talk to except himself, but he considered himself an excellent conversationalist and held constant verbal communication with himself while he worked. That fact it turned out later, was important, because Mitkey had excellent ears and heard those night-long soliloquies. He didn’t understand them, of course. If he thought about them at all, he merely thought of the Professor as a large and noisy super-mouse who squeaked over-much.
«Und now,» he would say to himself, «ve vill see vether this eggshaust tube vas broperly machined. It should fidt vithin vun vun-hundredth thousandth uf an indtch. Ahhh, it iss berfect. Und now —»
Night after night, day after day, month after month. The gleaming thing grew, and the gleam in Herr Oberburger’s eyes grew apace.
It was about three and a half feet long, with weirdly shaped vanes, and it rested on a temporary framework on a table in the center of the room that served the Herr Professor for all purposes. The house in which he and Mitkey lived was a four room structure, but the Professor hadn’t yet found it out, seemingly. Originally, he had planned to use the big room as a laboratory only, but he found it more convenient to sleep on a cot in one corner of it, when he slept at all, and to do the little cooking he did over the same gas burner over which he melted down golden grains of TNT into a dangerous soup which he salted and peppered with strange condiments, but did not eat.
«Und now I shall bour it into tubes, und see vether vun tube adjacendt to another eggsplodes de secondt tube vhen der virst tube iss —»
That was the night Mitkey almost decided to move himself and his family to a more stable abode, one that did not rock and sway and try to turn handsprings on its foundations. But Mitkey didn’t move after all, because there were compensations. New mouse-holes all over, and — joy of joy! — a big crack in the back of the refrigerator where the Professor kept, among other things, food.
Of course the tubes had been not larger than capillary size, or the house would not have remained around the mouse-holes. And of course Mitkey could not guess what was coming or understand the Herr Professor’s brand of English (or any other brand of English, for that matter) or he would not have let even a crack in the refrigerator tempt him.