He nodded, forgetting to salute or “sir” me. We started off, none of us talking. I wasn’t worried about Johnny getting us back; he’d been all right until we’d hit the tent; he’d been following our course with his wrist-compass.
After we got to where the end of the street had been, it got easy because we could see our own footprints in the clay, and just had to follow them. We passed the rise where there had been the purple bush with the propeller birds, but the birds weren’t there now, nor was the purple bush.
But the Chitterling was still there, thank Heavens. We saw it from the last rise and it looked just as we had left it. It looked like home, and we started to walk faster.
I opened the door and stood aside for Ma and Ellen to go in first. Ma had just started in when we heard the voice. It said, “We bid you farewell.”
I said, “We bid you farewell, too. And the hell with you.”
I motioned Ma to go on into the ship. The sooner I was out of this place, the better I’d like it.
But the voice said, “Wait,” and there was something about it that made us wait. “We wish to explain to you so that you will not return.”
Nothing had been further from my mind, but I said, “Why not?”
“Your civilization is not compatible with ours. We have studied your minds to make sure. We projected images from the images we found in your minds, to study your reactions to them. Our first images, our first thought-projections, were confused. But we understood your minds by the time you reached the farthest point of your walk. We were able to project beings similar to yourselves.”
“Sam Heideman, yeah,” I said. “But how about the da—the woman? She couldn’t have been in the memory of any of us because none of us knew her.”
“She was a composite—what you would call an idealization. That, however, doesn’t matter. By studying you we learned that your civilization concerns itself with things, ours with thoughts. Neither of us has anything to offer the other. No good could come through interchange, whereas much harm might come. Our planet has no material resources that would interest your race.
I had to agree with that, looking out over that monotonous rolling clay that seemed to support only those few tumble-weedlike bushes, and not many of them. It didn’t look like it would support anything else. As for minerals, I hadn’t seen even a pebble.
“Right you are,” I called back. “Any planet that raises nothing but tumbleweeds and cockroaches can keep itself, as far as we’re concerned. So—” Then something dawned on me. “Hey, just a minute. There must be something else or who the devil am I talking to?”
“You are talking,” replied the voice, “to what you call cockroaches, which is another point of incompatibility between us. To be more precise, you are talking to a thought-projected voice, but we are projecting it. And let me assure you of one thing—that you are more repugnant physically to us than we are to you.”
I looked down then and saw them, three of them, ready to pop into holes if I made a move. Back inside the ship, I said, “Johnny, blast off. Destination, Earth.”
He saluted and said, “Yes, sir,” and went into the pilot’s compartment and shut the door. He didn’t come out until we were on an automatic course, with Sirius dwindling behind us.
Ellen had gone to her room. Ma and I were playing cribbage.
“May I go off duty, sir?” Johnny asked, and walked stiffly to his room when I answered, “Sure.”
After a while, Ma and I turned in. Awhile after that we heard noises. I got up to investigate, and investigated.
I came back grinning. “Everything’s okay, Ma,” I said. “It’s Johnny Lane and he’s as drunk as a hoot owl!” And I slapped Ma playfully on the fanny.
“Ouch, you old fool,” she sniffed. “I’m sore there from the curb disappearing from under me. And what’s wonderful about Johnny getting drunk? You aren’t, are you?”
“No,” I admitted, regretfully perhaps. “But, Ma, he told me to go to blazes. And without saluting. Me, the owner of the ship.”
Ma just looked at me. Sometimes women are smart, but sometimes they’re pretty dumb.
“Listen, he isn’t going to keep on getting drunk,” I said. “This is an occasion. Can’t you see what happened to his pride and dignity?”
“You mean because he—”
“Because he fell in love with the thought-projection of a cockroach,” I pointed out. “Or anyway he thought he did. He has to get drunk once to forget that, and from now on, after he sobers up, he’s going to be human. I’ll bet on it, any odds. And I’ll bet too that once he’s human, he’s going to see Ellen and realize how pretty she is. I’ll bet he’s head-over-heels before we get back to Earth. I’ll get a bottle and we’ll drink a toast on it. To Nothing Sirius!”
And for once I was right. Johnny and Ellen were engaged before we got near enough to Earth to start decelerating.
Pattern
Miss Macy sniffed. “Why is everyone worrying so? They’re not doing anything to us, are they?”
In the cities, elsewhere, there was blind panic. But not in Miss Macy’s garden. She looked up calmly at the monstrous mile-high figures of the invaders.
A week ago, they’d landed, in a spaceship a hundred miles long that had settled down gently in the Arizona desert. Almost a thousand of them had come out of that spaceship and were now walking around.
But, as Miss Macy pointed out, they hadn’t hurt anything or anybody. They weren’t quite substantial enough to affect people. When one stepped on you or stepped on a house you were in, there was sudden darkness and until he moved his foot and walked on you couldn’t see; that was all.
They had paid no attention to human beings and all attempts to communicate with them had failed, as had all attacks on them by the army and the air force. Shells fired at them exploded right inside them and didn’t hurt them. Not even the H-bomb dropped on one of them while he was crossing a desert area had bothered him in the slightest.
They had paid no attention to us at all.
“And that,” said Miss Macy to her sister who was also Miss Macy since neither of them was married, “is proof that they don’t mean us any harm, isn’t it?”
“I hope so, Amanda,” said Miss Macy’s sister. “But look what they’re doing now.”
It was a clear day, or it had been one. The sky had been bright blue and the almost humanoid heads and shoulders of the giants, a mile up there, had been quite clearly visible. But now it was getting misty, Miss Macy saw as she followed her sister’s gaze upward. Each of the two big figures in sight had a tanklike object in his hands and from these objects clouds of vaporous matter were emerging, settling slowly toward Earth.
Miss Macy sniffed again. “Making clouds. Maybe that’s how they have fun. Clouds can’t hurt us. Why do people worry so?”
She went back to her work.
“Is that a liquid fertilizer you’re spraying, Amanda?” her sister asked. “No,” said Miss Macy. “It’s insecticide.”
The Yehudi Principle
I am going crazy.
Charlie Swann is going crazy, too. Maybe more than I am, because it was his dingbat. I mean, he made it and he thought he knew what it was and how it worked.
You see, Charlie was just kidding me when he told me it worked on the Yehudi principle. Or he thought he was. “The Yehudi principle?” I said.
“The Yehudi principle,” he repeated. “The principle of the little man who wasn’t there. He does it.”
“Does what?” I wanted to know.
The dingbat, I might interrupt myself to explain, was a headband. It fitted neatly around Charlie’s noggin and there was a round black box not much bigger than a pillbox over his forehead. Also there was a round flat copper disk on each side of the band that fitted over each of Charlie’s temples, and a strand of wire that ran down behind his ear into the breast pocket of his coat, where there was a little dry cell battery.