Short Fiction · Little Men of Space (2/3)

“Would it not be safer to kill them at once?”

“Unnecessary killing is always unpleasant,” Tall-Thin said.

“We should be emotionally prepared for it,” Rujit countered. “We would not have survived and become great as a race if we had not conquered all such squeamishness in ourselves. We must be prepared to nullify all opposition by instant drastic action⁠—the most drastic action available to us at any given time.”

Rujit paused for an instant to transfix Tall-Thin with an accusing stare. Then he went on quickly, “In an emergency it is often very difficult to decide instantly how necessary an action may be. To take pleasure in killing unnecessarily is therefore a survival attribute of a very high order.”

“I would as soon kill the Earth-children as not.” Tall-Thin said. “But the slightest emotional unpleasantness militates against survival. Every act we perform must be dictated by reason. Our moral grandeur as a race is based on absolute logic⁠—not on blind instinct. Even in an emergency we are wise enough to determine how necessary an action may be. So your argument falls to pieces.”

Tall-Thin straightened, his parchment-dry face crinkling with rage. “This isn’t the first time you’ve questioned my wisdom and authority, Rujit!” he said and his voice was like the hiss of a snake uncoiling in the long grass of a jungle clearing.

Rujit stiffened as if invisible fangs had buried themselves in his flesh. His cheeks could hardly have been called ruddy to begin with but their pallor suddenly became extreme. He took a quick step backward, a look of horror coming into his eyes.

“You wouldn’t! No, no, Hilili!”

“The choice is no longer mine alone.”

“But I was just thinking out loud!”

Tall-Thin clicked off the beam, leaving Melvin still standing large-eyed and motionless against the wall. He raised the tube which had projected the beam until it was pointing directly at Rujit.

“I’m going to step up the beam,” he said.

“But why? Why, Hilili? For the love you bear me⁠—”

“I bear you no love.”

“But you are my biogenetic twin, Hilili. We have been closer than ordinary brothers from birth.”

“It does not matter. It does not concern me. Family relationships militate against survival when reason falters in a single member of a family group.”

Tall-Thin’s voice hardened. “We came to this planet for one purpose⁠—to colonize it for the good of all. We numbered thousands and now we are reduced to a pitiful remnant⁠—just ourselves. Thanks to the stupidity of a few.”

“I was never one of the stupid ones!” Rujit protested. “I advised our immediate return. The unknown and hideous diseases which decimated us like migs, the atmospheric gases which rotted our ships so insidiously that we were not aware of the damage until they exploded in flight⁠—remember, I kept insisting that we could not survive such hazards for long!”

“Your sound judgment in that respect was more than offset by your wilful insistence we explore the entire planet,” Tall-Thin countered. “Our ships were so numerous that they were observed in flight and we might have been destroyed completely when death and disaster struck.

“As might have been expected the very shape of our ships made them conspicuous. Fiery disks they must have seemed to the Earth dwellers, so terrifying that they would have eventually found a way to fathom the mystery, and strike back. A perishing remnant of an advanced race has never yet succeeded in killing two billion primitives armed with Class C-type weapons.”

“But how could I have known it then?”

“Ignorance is never an excuse!” Tall-Thin’s voice was a merciless rasp. “A well-organized logical mind does not make such mistakes. Now we are facing utter disaster unless we can get back to our home planet and warn The Twenty that it would be sheer madness to attempt to colonize this planet again without better disease-preventing safeguards and atmosphere-resisting metals. Such safeguards can and must be worked out.”

Tall-Thin paused, watching Melvin as if apprehensive that the praise he was about to bestow would be held against him to the detriment of his vanity.

“Unfortunately only two of us can go in this rocket, which has miraculously come into our possession. The primitive who constructed it, this Earth-child’s progenitor, must have an almost Class B-type mind. Only two of us, understand?”

“But⁠—”

“The survival of the wisest. I’m afraid I shall have to extinguish you, Rujit.”

The tube lit up again, so brightly that Tall-Thin’s hand was blotted out by the glare. Equally blotted out was Rujit’s face but the rest of him did not vanish immediately. One arm disappeared but not the other⁠—and there was a yawning dark gap between his knees and his waist.

It might not have seemed so horrible if Rujit had not shrieked first. The shriek had an outward-inward quality, echoing both inside the heads of the children and in the room as actual sound.

Even Tall-Thin seemed shaken by it, as if in a race that had outgrown the need for physical speech there could be nothing more unnerving than anguish so expressed.

Yet both the shriek and the almost instant blotting out of Rujit’s face were eclipsed in point of horror by the fading of the little man’s legs. They faded, kicking and protesting and spasmodically convulsed, faded in a ruby red glow that lingered for an instant in the still air like a slowly dissolving blood clot, then as slowly vanished.

It was at that moment Mary Anne ceased to think as a child. She dug her knuckles into her mouth to keep from screaming but the undaunted way in which her mind worked was a tribute to her forgetfulness of self. If he should do that to Melvin!

Tall-Thin must have sensed the loathing in her mind, for he turned with a grimace of rage and trained the beam full upon her, taking care however to alter the tube’s destructive potential with a quick twist of his thumb.

“A primitive would have been sorely tempted to kill you, Earth-child,” he said. “Fortunately for you we have a high and undeviating code of ethics.”

Back and forth over the children Tall-Thin played the beam, as if to make sure there would be no further unpleasantness from that source.

Then he clicked off the tube again, and turned to his remaining companion⁠—a little man who apparently believed that silence and good order were the foundation of all things.

In a more primitive society he would have been considered a stooge but there appeared to be no such cultural concept in Tall-Thin’s scale of values. He spoke with the utmost respect, as if anyone who agreed with him automatically became as exalted as himself.

“The primitive who constructed this rocket had a remarkable mind,” he said. “We could not have constructed it for every culture, no matter how primitive, has resources peculiar to itself.”

“That is very true, Hilili!”

Mary Anne tried to turn her head to look at Melvin but her neck felt as stiff as when she’d had the mumps and everyone had felt sorry for her. She was sure that the little men did not feel in the least sorry and all she could do was stare in helpless anger as they turned and scrambled into the rocket.

Finally she did manage to turn her head, just far enough to see what Melvin was doing.

Melvin wasn’t moving at all. His head was lowered and he was thinking. She knew that he was thinking by the look in his eyes. Melvin was silently thinking and as she stared she ceased to be afraid.

She sat very still, waiting for Melvin to speak to her. Suddenly he did, deep inside her head.

The little men had come from far, far away. They had come from a big cloud of stars in the sky called the Great Nebula in Andromeda. Nearly everything in the universe curved and they had come spinning along the biggest curve of all in hundreds and hundreds of punched-out disks that glowed in the dark like Roman candles.

The cow pasture Melvin and she played in was⁠—she knew what it was but she waited for Melvin to say it⁠—rocket proving-ground. It was their own secret playing place but daddy called it a rocket proving-ground.

Daddy wouldn’t send the rocket to the moon from his laboratory in the cellar. He’d take it out to the proving-ground and ask even the President of the United States to watch it start out for the Moon.

The President would come because her daddy was a very important and wonderful man. He didn’t have much money but he’d be rich and famous if the rocket reached the moon.

Most men as wonderful as her daddy were poor until they did something to make people stand up and shout. The little men didn’t want her daddy to become rich so that he could send Melvin through college and she could go to college too. The little men didn’t want her to learn domestic housekeeping and make the handsomest man in all the world happy.

The little men wouldn’t⁠—couldn’t⁠—take the rocket out to the proving-ground. It would start off blazing and go straight up through the roof into the sky. It would blow the cellar apart and the cottage would come tumbling down in ruins. Melvin would be killed and her daddy.⁠ ⁠…

She had never been so terrified in all her life and if Melvin hadn’t started thinking she would have burst out crying.

Melvin was thinking something now about the cottage. Water came in from the sea. It did too⁠—she remembered daddy complaining about it when he went down to stoke the furnace. Water in the cellar and the ground underneath all soft and soggy.

Salt-marsh seepage. Why, it was like quicksand down below the solid strata. The words came quick and clear from Melvin thinking. Solid strata. Even the solid strata wasn’t all solid. There were porosities in it⁠—like a sponge. If something very heavy went down through the cellar floor it would go right on sinking.

Auxiliary fuels, came from Melvin thinking. They’re in the auxiliary fuel-chamber now. Hot steam in the turbines, pushed right through the heat exchanger. The atomic charge won’t go of at all if the heat exchanger works fast enough.

They don’t know as much about the rocket as Pop does, came from Melvin. The atomic part is the big important part. They came at night and studied that. But the heat exchanger⁠—they didn’t take the trouble to study it. Now they’re worried about it. Why should an atomic rocket have auxiliary fuels?

Daddy could have told them. You had to have auxiliary fuels in a rocket if you were going to send it to the moon. The rocket’s trajectory would have to be modified by small readjustments that could only be made by auxiliary fuels.

Melvin, think hard! Think hard and fast, and in the right way!

They’re stopping now to puzzle it out, came from Melvin. Their minds work differently from ours. They fasten on the big important things first. The small things they sometimes overlook. They can’t help it. Their minds are constructed that way.

Mustn’t let trivialities distract us. That’s what they were thinking. That’s what they were thinking, and they were going to make a mistake.

They’re going to move the wrong dial. I’m going to help them move the wrong dial. I want them to move the wrong dial. They must move the wrong dial.⁠ ⁠…

It began with a faint humming sound⁠—nothing more. But something that couldn’t have come from Melvin at all showered Mary Anne’s mind with thoughts and emotions that were like a screaming inside her head.

A continuous terrified screaming that made her want to slap her hands to her ears to shut out the sound.

The screaming stopped the instant the rocket began to vibrate. It stopped as abruptly as a jet of steam issuing from a suddenly clogged pipe.

The humming changed to a droning and the rocket vibrated so furiously that Mary Anne grew dizzy just watching it. With the dizziness came a terrible fear that the rocket would explode. It was like being bound to a chair, helpless, and knowing you couldn’t possibly escape. She saw herself being blown up with the cottage, with Melvin screaming for her to save him.

But nothing like that happened. The cottage shook a little. She was hurled forward, then to her knees. But the blast of heat which fanned her face was no worse than the blast from a furnace door swinging quickly open and shut.

Straight down through the floor the rocket sank with its base glowing white hot. There were a sizzling and a hissing and she could see flames dancing through the steam which kept rising in clouds until water gushed up in torrents and put the fire out.

She shut her eyes then and clenched her hands tight.

She sat very still, waiting for Melvin to come to her. She felt a great and overwhelming need to lean on someone, to be consoled by a firm masculine voice speaking out bold and clear.

The bursting strangeness was gone from inside her head. She could move again. She refused to try but she knew that she could whenever she wanted to. Her thoughts were her own now⁠—not Melvin’s or Tall-Thin’s.

She started to cry, very softly, and she was still crying when Melvin reached her side, helped her to her feet.

“Mary Anne, I could see them moving around inside the rocket. I could even make them do what I wanted them to do. It happened as soon as they turned that ray on me. I couldn’t move but I knew what they were thinking.”

“So did I, Melvin,” Mary Anne sobbed. “I knew what you were thinking too.”

“Yeah. We seemed to be talking together there for a minute. But not the way we’re talking now.”

Mary Anne nodded. “I knew what you were thinking and they knew what we.⁠ ⁠…” Mary Anne stopped. “Melvin! You fooled them! Inside the ship they didn’t hear us talking together. If they had heard us they would not have made a mistake and turned the wrong dial.”

“Yeah, I know. I tried to throw up a mental block when we talked about the auxiliary fuel-chamber and what would happen if the heat exchanger worked fast enough. I guess it worked. The mental block, I mean.⁠ ⁠…”

“You bet it worked, Melvin. You’re wonderful, Melvin.”

“You didn’t think so when you told Pop about the sandwiches.”

“I didn’t mean to be a nasty, Melvin.”

“All right⁠—skip it. Funny thing⁠—I could never read anybody’s thoughts before. It only lasted for a few minutes. I couldn’t do it now.”

“They must have done something to us, Melvin.”

“I’ll say they did. What’s Pop going to think when he comes down here tomorrow and sees the rocket gone?”

“I’m afraid he’s going to be awfully mad, Melvin.”

There is perhaps no more striking illustration of the prophetic faculty at work in the world than when it appears full-blown in the occasional understatements of children.

The next morning, Elwood didn’t merely hurl the magazine at his son. He pointed first to the article, tapping furiously with his forefinger at Melvin’s photograph while his breakfast grew cold at his elbow.

“Melvin, I warned you to keep your hands off that rocket. I warned you not to touch it or jar it in any way. But you had to putter around until you did something to the heat exchanger dial. It’s conduct like that which makes me realize how mistaken these journalist monkeys can be. A genius! You’re no more of a genius⁠—”

“Pop, you’ve got to believe me!” Melvin protested. “The little men are⁠—”

“Little men! My son is not only a genius”⁠—Elwood stressed the word with a biting sarcasm which was not lost on Melvin⁠—“but a first-class liar! Here, read this article again. It was published two months ago⁠—but I guess you didn’t read it over often enough. It may shame you into going into a corner and giving yourself a thorough mental overhauling.”

Elwood tossed the magazine then⁠—straight across the table at the disturbed Melvin.

“If he’s a liar so am I!” Mary Anne gasped in angry protest.

“For a dozen years now flying saucer rumors have been all over the place,” Elwood said, glaring at both of his children. “I suppose it’s only natural you should chatter occasionally about little men. All children do. But to use such imaginary companions as an excuse for an act of wanton destructiveness.⁠ ⁠…”