“Dr. Snyder, are you all right?” Margie’s voice. “Yes, Margie.” He looked up and tried to compose his face; he must have succeeded for apparently she saw nothing wrong. “My eyes were tired,” he explained. “I was just resting there for a moment.”
“Oh. Well, I mailed the manuscript. And it’s still only four o’clock. Are you sure there’s nothing you want me to do before I take off.”
“No. Wait, yes. You might look up George and tell him to change the lock on Luke’s door. Put on an ordinary one, I mean.”
“All right. Finish your paper?”
“Yes,” he said. “I finished my paper.”
“Good. I’ll find George.” She went away and he heard the click of her heels on the stairs leading down toward the janitor’s quarters in the basement.
He stood, almost without effort. He felt terribly tired, terribly discouraged, terribly futile. He needed a rest, a nap. If he slept, and overslept to miss dinner or the cell meeting, it wouldn’t matter. He needed sleep more than he needed food or pointless argument with fellow psychiatrists.
He trudged wearily up the carpeted stairs to the second floor, started along the corridor.
Paused outside Luke’s door and found himself glaring at it. The lucky bastard, he thought. In there thinking or reading. And, if there were Martians around, not even knowing it. Not able to see them or hear them.
Perfectly happy, perfectly adjusted. Who was crazy, Luke or everybody else?
And having Margie, too.
Damn him. He should throw him to the wolves, to the other psychiatrists, and let them experiment with him, probably make him as miserable as anybody else by curing him—or making him insane in some other and not so fortunate direction.
He should, but he wouldn’t.
He went on to his own room, the one he used here when he didn’t want to go home to Signal Hill, and shut the door. Picked up the telephone and called his wife.
“I don’t think I’ll be home tonight, dear,” he said. “Thought I’d better tell you before you started dinner.”
“Something wrong, Ellicott?”
“Just that I’m terribly tired. Going to take a nap and if I sleep through—well, I need the sleep.”
“You have a meeting tonight.”
I may miss that, too. If I do go to it, though, I’ll come home afterwards instead of back here.”
“Wery well, Ellicott. The Martians have been unusually bad here today. Do you know what two of them—”
“Please, dear. I don’t want to hear about Martians. Tell me some other time, please. Good-bye, dear.”
Putting down the phone, be found himself staring into a haunted face in the mirror, his own face. Yes, he needed sleep, badly. He picked up the phone again and called the receptionist, who also worked the switchboard and kept records. “Doris? I’m not to be disturbed under any circumstances. And if there are any callers, tell them I’m out.”
“All right, Doctor. For how long?”
“Until I call back. And if that isn’t before you go of duty and Estelle comes on, explain to her, will you? Thanks.”
He saw his face in the mirror again. Saw that his eyes looked hollow and that there was at least twice as much gray in his hair as had been there four months ago.
So Martians can’t lie, huh? he asked himself silently.
And there let him carry the thought to its horrible conclusion. If Martians could lie—and they could—then the fact that they did not claim they were staying here permanently wasn’t proof that they weren’t.
Perhaps they got more sadistic pleasure out of letting us hope so they could keep on enjoying our sufferings than by ending humanity by denying it hope. If everyone committed suicide or went insane, there’d be no sport for them; there’d be no one left to torment.
And the logic of that paper had been so simply beautiful and so beautifully simple…
His mind felt fogged now and for a moment he couldn’t remember where the flaw in it had been. Oh, yes. If someone says he can lie, he can; otherwise he’d be lying in saying be could lie, and if he is already lying—
He pulled his mind out of the circle before it made him dizzier. He took off his coat and tie and hung them over the back of a chair, sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes.
Lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.
Suddenly, a moment later, jumped almost three feet off the bed as two raucous and almost unbelievably loud Bronx cheers went off simultaneously, one in each ear. He’d forgotten his ear stopples.
He got up and put them in, lay down again. This time he slept.
And dreamed.
About Martians.
16.
The scientific front against the Martians wasn’t organized as was the psychological front, but it was even more active. Unlike the psych boys, who had their hands full with patients and could spare only stolen time for research and experimentation, the physical scientists were putting in full time and overtime studying the Martians. Research in every other direction was at a standstill. The active front was every big laboratory in the world.
Brookhaven, Los Alamos, Harwich, Braunschweig, Sumigrad, Troitsk and Tokuyama, to mention only a few.
Not to mention the attic, cellar or garage of every citizen who had a smattering of knowledge in any field of science or pseudoscience. Electricity, electronics; chemistry, white and black magic, alchemy, dowsing, biotics, optics, sonics and supersonics, typology, toxicology and topology were used as means of study or means of attach.
The Martians had to have a weakness somewhere. There just had to be something that could make a Martian say “Ouch.”
They were bombarded with alpha rays, with beta, gamma, delta, zeta, eta, theta and omega rays.
They were, when opportunity offered (and they neither avoided nor sought being experimentend on), caught in multi-million-volt flashes of electricity, subjected to strong and weak magnetic fields and to microwaves and macrowaves.
They were subjected to cold near absolute zero and to heat as hot as we could get it, which is the heat of nuclear fission. No, the latter was not achieved in a laboratory.
An H-bomb test that had been scheduled for April was, after some deliberation by authorities, ordered to proceed as planned despite the Martians. They knew all our secrets by then anyway so there was nothing to lose, And it was hoped that a Martian might be inspecting the H-bomb at close range when it was fired. One of them was sitting on it. After the explosion he kwimmed to the bridge of the admiral’s flagship, looking disgusted. “Is that the best you can do for firecrackers, Mack?” he demanded.
They were photographed, for study, with every kind of light anybody could think of: infrared, ultraviolet, fluorescent, sodium, carbon arc, candlelight, phosphorescence, sunlight, moonlight and starlight.
They were sprayed with every known liquid, including prussic acid, heavy water, holy water and Flit.
Sounds they made, vocal or otherwise, were recorded by every known type of recording device. They were studied with microscopes, telescopes, spectroscopes and iconoscopes.
Practical results, zero; nothing any scientist did to any Martian made him even momentarily uncomfortable. Theoretical results, negligible. Very little was learned about them that hadn’t been known within a day or two of their arrival.
They reflected light rays only of wave lengths within the visible spectrum (.0004 mm. to .00076 mm.). Any radiation above or below this band passed through them without being affected or deflected. They could not be detected by X-rays, radio waves or radar.