Overconfident? No - any Earthman, of course, could have worked out a variation which would have made the weapon useful again in an hour’s leisurely thought. But Earthmen are flexible. And the Martians were not. Because the Martians were not-the Martians.
That is, they were not the Martians.
‘Successors,’ Solveig explained to all of us, back in Niobe. ‘Heirs, if you like. But not the inventors. Compared with whoever built those machines, the Martians we’ve been up against are nothing but animals - or children. Like children, they can pull a trigger or strike a match. But they can’t design a gun - or even build one by copying another.’
Keever shook his long, lean head. ‘And the original Martians?’
Solveig said, ‘That’s a separate question. Perhaps they’re hiding out somewhere we haven’t reached - underground or at the poles. But they’re master builders, whoever and wherever they are.’ He made a wry face. ‘There I was,’ he said, ‘hiding out in a cleft in the rock when the dawn wind came. I thought I’d dodged the Martians, but they knew I was there. As soon as the sun came up I saw them dragging that thing towards me.’ He jerked a thumb at the weapon, already being checked over by our maintenance crews. ‘I thought that was the end, especially when they pulled the trigger.’
‘And it didn’t go off,’ said Demaree.
‘It couldn’t go off! I wasn’t a machine. So I took it away from them - they aren’t any stronger than kittens - and I went back to look for you two. And there was that Martian waiting for you. I guess he didn’t have a real gun, so he was making one - like a kid’ll make a cowboy pistol out of two sticks and a nail. Of course, it won’t shoot. Neither did the Martians, as you will note.’
We all sat back and relaxed. ‘Well,’ said Keever, ‘that’s our task for this week. I guess you’ve shown us how to clean up what the Earthside papers call the Martian Menace, Doc. Provided, of course, that we don’t run across any of the grownup Martians; or the real Martians, or whatever it was that designed those things.’
Solveig grinned. ‘They’re either dead or hiding, Keever,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about them.’
And unfortunately, he didn’t worry about them, and neither did any of the rest of us.
Not for nearly five years...
THE DAY OF THE BOOMER DUKES
Just as medicine is not a science, but rather an art—a device, practised in a scientific manner, in its best manifestations—time-travel stories are not science fiction. Time-travel, however, has become acceptable to science fiction readers as a traditional device in stories than are otherwise admissible in the genre. Here, Frederik Pohl employs it to portray the amusingly catastrophic meeting of three societies.
Illustrated by EMSH
There was a silvery aura around the kid ... the cops’ guns hit him ... but he didn’t notice....
I
Foraminifera 9
Paptaste udderly, semped sempsemp dezhavoo, qued schmerz—Excuse me. I mean to say that it was like an endless diet of days, boring, tedious....
No, it loses too much in the translation. Explete my reasons, I say. Do my reasons matter? No, not to you, for you are troglodytes, knowing nothing of causes, understanding only acts. Acts and facts, I will give you acts and facts.
First you must know how I am called. My “name” is Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey’s Beam, and I am of adequate age and size. (If you doubt this, I am prepared to fight.) Once the—the tediety of life, as you might say, had made itself clear to me, there were, of course, only two alternatives. I do not like to die, so that possibility was out; and the remaining alternative was flight.
Naturally, the necessary machinery was available to me. I arrogated a small viewing machine, and scanned the centuries of the past in the hope that a sanctuary might reveal itself to my aching eyes. Kwel tediety that was! Back, back I went through the ages. Back to the Century of the Dog, back to the Age of the Crippled Men. I found no time better than my own. Back and back I peered, back as far as the Numbered Years. The Twenty-Eighth Century was boredom unendurable, the Twenty-Sixth a morass of dullness. Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Fourth—wherever I looked, tediety was what I found.
I snapped off the machine and considered. Put the problem thus: Was there in all of the pages of history no age in which a 9-Hart Bailey’s Beam might find adventure and excitement? There had to be! It was not possible, I told myself, despairing, that from the dawn of the dreaming primates until my own time there was no era at all in which I could be—happy? Yes, I suppose happiness is what I was looking for. But where was it? In my viewer, I had fifty centuries or more to look back upon. And that was, I decreed, the trouble; I could spend my life staring into the viewer, and yet never discover the time that was right for me. There were simply too many eras to choose from. It was like an enormous library in which there must, there had to be, contained the one fact I was looking for—that, lacking an index, I might wear my life away and never find.
“Index!”
I said the word aloud! For, to be sure, it was the answer. I had the freedom of the Learning Lodge, and the index in the reading room could easily find for me just what I wanted.
Splendid, splendid! I almost felt cheerful. I quickly returned the viewer I had been using to the keeper, and received my deposit back. I hurried to the Learning Lodge and fed my specifications into the index, as follows, that is to say: Find me a time in recent past where there is adventure and excitement, where there is a secret, colorful band of desperadoes with whom I can ally myself. I then added two specifications—second, that it should be before the time of the high radiation levels; and first, that it should be after the discovery of anesthesia, in case of accident—and retired to a desk in the reading room to await results.
It took only a few moments, which I occupied in making a list of the gear I wished to take with me. Then there was a hiss and a crackle, and in the receiver of the desk a book appeared. I unzipped the case, took it out, and opened it to the pages marked on the attached reading tape.
I had found my wonderland of adventure!
Ah, hours and days of exciting preparation! What a round of packing and buying; what a filling out of forms and a stamping of visas; what an orgy of injections and inoculations and preventive therapy! Merely getting ready for the trip made my pulse race faster and my adrenalin balance rise to the very point of paranoia; it was like being given a true blue new chance to live.
At last I was ready. I stepped into the transmission capsule; set the dials; unlocked the door, stepped out; collapsed the capsule and stored it away in my carry-all; and looked about at my new home.
Pyew! Kwel smell of staleness, of sourness, above all of coldness! It was a close matter then if I would be able to keep from a violent eructative stenosis, as you say. I closed my eyes and remembered warm violets for a moment, and then it was all right.