We shall kill them and then we shall go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will die too.
If more Earthmen ever come to punish us, we can live and hide in the hills where they’ll never find us. And if they try to build more domes here we’ll smash them. We want no more to do with Earth.
This is our planet and we want no aliens. Keep off!
FIRST TIME MACHINE
Dr. Grainger said solemnly, «Gentlemen, the first time machine.»
His three friends stared at it.
It was a box about six inches square, with dials and a switch.
«You need only to hold it in your hand,» said Dr. Grainger, «set the dials for the date you want, press the button—and you are there.»
Smedley, one of the doctor’s three friends, reached for the box, held it and studied it. «Does it really work?»
«I tested it briefly,» said the doctor. «I set it one day back and pushed the button. Saw myself—my own back—just walking out of the room. Gave me a bit of a turn.»
«What would have happened if you’d rushed to the door and kicked yourself in the seat of the pants?»
Dr. Grainger laughed. «Maybe I couldn’t have—because it would have changed the past. That’s the old paradox of time travel, you know. What would happen if one went back in time and killed one’s own grandfather before he met one’s grandmother?»
Smedley, the box still in his hand, suddenly was backing away from the three other men. He grinned at them. «That,» he said, «is just what I’m going to do. I’ve been setting the date dials sixty years back while you’ve been talking.»
«Smedley! Don’t!» Dr. Grainger started forward.
«Stop, Doc. Or I’ll press the button now. Otherwise I’ll explain to you.» Grainger stopped. «I’ve heard of that paradox too. And it’s always interested me because I knew I would kill my grandfather if I ever had a chance to. I hated him. He was a cruel bully, made life a hell for my grandmother and my parents. So this is a chance I’ve been waiting for.»
Smedley’s hand reached for the button and pressed it.
There was a sudden blur … Smedley was standing in a field. It took him only a moment to orient himself. If this spot was where Dr. Grainger’s house would some day be built, then his great-grandfather’s farm would be only a mile south. He started walking. En route he found a piece of wood that made a fine club.
Near the farm, he saw a red-headed young man beating a dog with a whip.
«Stop that!» Smedley yelled, rushing up.
«Mind your own damn business,» said the young man as he lashed with the whip again.
Smedley swung the club.
Sixty years later, Dr. Grainger said solemnly, «Gentlemen, the first time machine.»
His two friends stared at it.
AND THE GODS LAUGHED
You know how it is when you’re with a work crew on one of the asteroids. You’re there, stuck for the month you signed up for, with four other guys and nothing to do but talk. Space on the little tugs that you go in and return in, and live in while you’re there, is at such a premium that there isn’t room for a book or a magazine nor equipment for games. And you’re out of radio range except for the usual once-a-terrestrial-day, system-wide newscasts.
So talking is the only indoor sport you can go in for. Talking and listening. You’ve plenty of time for both because a work-day, in space-suits, is only four hours and that with four fifteen-minute back-to-the-ship rests.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that talk is cheap on one of those work crews. With most of the day to do nothing else, you listen to some real whoppers, stories that would make the old-time Liars Club back on Earth seem like Sunday-school meetings. And if your mind runs that way, you’ve got plenty of time to think up some yourself.
Charlie Dean was on our crew, and Charlie could tell some dillies. He’d been on Mars back in the old days when there was still trouble with the bolies, and when living on Mars was a lot like living on Earth back in the days of Indian fighting. The bolies thought and fought a lot like Amerinds, even though they were quadrupeds that looked like alligators on stilts—if you can picture an alligator on stilts—and used blow-guns instead of bows and arrows. Or was it crossbows that the Amerinds used against the colonists?
Anyway, Charlie’s just finished a whopper that was really too good for the first tryout of the trip. We’d just landed, you see, and were resting up from doing nothing en route, and usually the yarns start off easy and believable and don’t work up to real depth-of-space lying until along about the fourth week when everybody’s bored stiff.
«So we took this head bolie,» Charlie was ending up, «and you know what kind of flappy little ears they’ve got, and we put a couple of zircon-studded earrings in its ears and let it go, and back it went to the others, and then darned if—» Well, I won’t go on with Charlie’s yarn, because it hasn’t got anything to do with his story except that it brought earrings into the conversation.
Blake shook his head gloomily and then turned to me. He said, «Hank, what went on on Ganymede? You were on that ship that went out there a few months ago, weren’t you—the first one that got through? I’ve never read or heard much about that trip.»
«Me either,» Charlie said. «Except that the Ganymedeans turned out to be humanoid beings about four feet tall and didn’t wear a thing except earrings. Kind of immodest, wasn’t it?»
I grinned. «You wouldn’t have thought so if you’d seen the Ganymedeans. With them it didn’t matter. Anyway, they didn’t wear earrings.»
«You’re crazy,» Charlie said. «Sure, I know you were on that expedition and I wasn’t, but you’re still crazy, because I had a quick look at some of the pictures they brought back. The natives wore earrings.»
«No,» I said. «Earrings wore them.»
Blake sighed deeply. «I knew it, I knew it,» he said. «There was something wrong with this trip from the start. Charlie pops off the first day with a yarn that should have been worked up to gradually. And now you say—Or is there something wrong with my sense of earring?»
I chuckled. «Not a thing, Skipper.»
Charlie said, «I’ve heard of men biting dogs, but earrings wearing people is a new one. Hank, I hate to say it—but just consider it said.»
Anyway, I had their attention. And now was as good a time as any.
I said, «If you read about the trip, you know we left Earth about eight months ago, for a six-months’ round trip. There were six of us in the M-94; me and two others made up the crew and there were three specialists to do the studying and exploring. Not the really top-flight specialists, though, because the trip was too risky to send them. That was the third ship to try for Ganymede and the other two had cracked up on outer Jovian satellites that the observatories hadn’t spotted from Earth because they are too small to show up in the scopes at that distance.
«When you get there you find there’s practically an asteroid belt around Jupiter, most of them so black they don’t reflect light to speak of and you can’t see them till they hit you or you hit them. But most of them—»
«Skip the satellites,» Blake interrupted, «unless they wore earrings.»
«Or unless earrings wore them,» said Charlie.
«Neither,» I admitted. «All right, so we were lucky and got through the belt. And landed. Like I said, there were six of us. Lecky, the biologist. Haynes geologist and mineralogist. And Hilda Race, who loved little flowers and was a botanist, egad! You’d have loved Hilda—at a distance. Somebody must have wanted to get rid of her, and sent her on that trip. She gushed; you know the type.