It was nearly noon when he awakened. He lay there for a moment before opening his eyes, thinking of the crazy dream he’d had about a world with space-travel and Bems and war with Arcturus. And mist-outs and—
He rolled over a little and his shoulder hurt so that he opened his eyes and saw an unfamiliar ceiling over his head. It was a shock, and it made him fully awake and he sat up in bed quickly. He looked at his wrist watch. Eleven forty-five! Rats, he was late for the office. Or was he?
He was horribly mixed up, unoriented. He got out of bed, and walked over to the window. Yes, he was on Forty-second Street, on the third floor, and there, across the street, was the Public Library. The street was filled with normal traffic and the sidewalks were crowded as ever, with ordinary-looking people wearing ordinary clothes. It was the New York he knew.
He stood there, puzzling, trying to fit his being here in New York into the scheme of things. The last thing he remembered that really made sense was his sitting in a chair in Mr. Borden’s garden. After that—
Could he have come back to New York other than in the way he seemed to remember it—and have supplied, somehow, a nightmare for his memories of the trip? If so he was overdue to see a psychiatrist. Was he crazy? He must be. Yet something had happened to him yesterday. He put his hand to his shoulder gently and it was plenty sore under the bandage.
Well, he’d get out of here, go home and—well, he couldn’t plan any further than that just yet. He’d go home first.
He turned around and walked to the chair where he had put his shirt and trousers. Something on the floor beside the bed caught his eye. It was a copy of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History.
His hands trembled a little as he picked it up and opened it to the contents page.
That would be the quickest. The third last chapter was Into Space, the second last The Interplanetary War and the last chapter Struggle Against Arcturus.
The book dropped out of his hand. He reached to pick it up and saw another one slid slightly under the bed. It was called, Is the Mist-out Worth It?
He sat down in the chair and didn’t do anything for a few minutes except to think, to adjust his mind to the fact that whatever had happened had really happened. The mist-out last night with its jungle savagery, the—
He reached back for his trouser pocket and got his wallet. There were credit bills in it and not dollars. A little over a thousand credits, which would be a little over a hundred dollars.
Slowly he dressed and walked back over to the window. It was still Forty-second Street and still ordinary but it didn’t fool him now. He remembered what it had been like at one o’clock last night and shuddered a little.
He caught a flash of purple in the crowd below and across the street and looked closer. It was a purple Bem, all right, walking into the library—and nobody was paying any more attention to it than they would have paid to a bank clerk or an insurance salesman.
He sighed deeply, put the H. G. Wells pocket book and the Paul Gallico one on Dopelle into his coat pockets and decided to leave the one about the mist-out. He knew, all he really had to know about the mist-out—stay indoors out of it.
He went downstairs and out through the lobby. A different clerk was on duty at the desk and didn’t even glance at him.
Now that he was fully awake he was hungry. Eating was the first order of business. He hadn’t eaten since noon yesterday.
A quiet little restaurant a few doors west looked inviting. Keith went in and sat at a little table along one side. He studied the menu. There was a choice of a dozen entrees, and nine of them were familiar. The other three were the most expensive items—Martian sot a la Marseille, roast krail with kapi sauce and gallina de luna.
That last, if Keith remembered his Spanish, would be moon chicken. Some day, he decided, he was going to eat moon chicken, Martian sot and roast krail but right now he was too hungry to experiment. He ordered goulash.
Goulash didn’t require concentration and, while he ate, he skimmed through the final two chapters of Wells. Wells was bitter about the so-called interplanetary war. He saw it purely as a war of conquest with Earth the aggressor.
The inhabitants of the Moon and of Venus had proved friendly and exploitable—and had been exploited. The intelligence of the lunans (yes, they were the purple Bems) was about that of an African savage of Earth but they were much more docile. They made excellent laborers and still better mechanics, once they had been introduced to the mysteries of machinery.
The Venusians, although almost as intelligent as Earthmen, were creatures of a quite different order. Interested solely in philosophy, the arts and abstract mathematics, they had welcomed the Earthmen, avid for exchange of cultures and ideas. They had no practical civilization, no cities (or even houses), no possessions, machines or weapons.
Few in number, they were nomads who—aside from the life of the mind—lived as primitively as animals. They offered no barrier and every assistance—aside from work—to man’s colonization and exploitation of Venus. Earth had established four colonies there, aggregating a little short of a million people.
But Mars had been different.
The Martians had the silly idea that they didn’t want to be colonized. They had, it turned out, a civilization at least equal to ours, except that they had not yet developed space travel (which, after all, had been an accidental discovery on Earth—if it hadn’t been for the Professor’s sewing machine the space warp principle might not have been discovered, mathematically, for a millennium).
The Martians had greeted the first arrivals from Earth gravely and courteously (the Martians did everything gravely; they had no sense of humor) and suggested they return home and-stay there. They’d shot the second arrivals and the third.
And, although they’d captured the space ships in which these parties had arrived, they’d not bothered to use or copy the machines. They had no desire to leave Mars, ever. In fact, Wells pointed out, no Martian had ever left Mars alive even during the interplanetary war.
A few, captured alive and put on Earthbound ships for demonstration and study here, had willed themselves to death as soon as the ships had left the thin atmosphere of Mars. The same was true of Martian plants and animals. They could not or would not live anywhere else. No single specimen of Martian flora or fauna graced botanical gardens or zoos of Earth.
The so-called interplanetary wars, therefore, were fought entirely on the surface of Mars, and had been a bitter struggle in which the Martian population had been several times decimated. They had, however, capitulated short of annihilation and permitted colonization of Mars by Earthmen.
Only Earth and its moon, Venus and Mars had turned out to be inhabited by intelligent beings in the Solar System. Saturn supported plant life of a strange sort and a few of the moons of Jupiter bore plant life and wild animals.
Man met his match—an aggressive, colonizing race of intelligent beings—only when he went beyond the Solar System. The Arcturians had had the space drive for centuries. It was only by chance—for the universe is wide indeed—that they had not yet visited the Sun’s planets. Having learned of us through an encounter near Proxima Centauri, they set about to remedy that omission.
The current war against Arcturus was, on Earth’s part, a defensive war—although it involved such offensive tactics as we could muster. And thus far it had been a stalemate. Defensive tactics on both sides being more than adequate against known offenses. By fortunate early capture of a few Arc ships Earth had quickly overcome the technical handicap of a few centuries under which it had started the war.