Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (49 page)

Willy smiled at the railroad. "You know what I'm going to do to you?" he
asked loudly. "I'm going to convert you to cash. How do you like that?"

He turned out the light and left the attic.

No current at all is coming through, and our town is black.

How did you like that, Clyde? All that work on the transformer and what do
we get? One stinking spark. Like sticking your finger on a lightning bug.
Deadly as a water pistol.

I'm not too surprised, to tell you the truth. Patrick the cop warned us;
he was in another town before Willy bought him, and they tried the same
thing there. Not enough volts for anything but a little shock. Maybe
you've been shocked by a model railroad yourself, Clyde. You think about
it a little.

Sure, we knew it wouldn't work. So what? You've got to believe in
something, Clyde, even when you know you're kidding yourself. What else is
there to do? And maybe we could hope that by some chance, just this once
…

But it's over now, been over for a week. This is the first I've felt like
talking. You know. There wasn't much left of Patrick when the transformer
hit him. I guess Lefty got his inside—nobody's had enough energy to
dig in and see.

Poor old Humphery is hardly himself anymore; he got shaken up pretty badly
when Willy socked the switchman's shack. I guess the worst part is mental,
though. It's hard to see how things can get much worse in ELM POINT.

Do you know a good psychiatrist, Clyde?

I guess I sound like one of those old bats who spend their waking hours
giving recitals of their aches and pains and their sleeping hours dreaming
about men under their beds. I'm getting to be crummy company. But it
is
hard to talk now. It used to be that when the transformer was turned off,
a little current would seep through anyhow, but not anymore. We don't even
have a wire into the wall plug. The joint is like a morgue in a coal mine.

I hear footsteps on the stairs.

The door is opening—the light hurts my eyes.

Here they come, Clyde.

A whole
herd
of them.

Willy Roberts rubbed his hands together expectantly. Just about every kid
in the neighborhood had showed up, and some of them were fairly well
loaded.

"Take it easy, Mac," he said. "One at a time. Let's not mess up the table,
guy—this is a valuable set."

Not bad, he told himself. Pretty good in fact. No doubt about it—he
had a genius for business.

"Whatcha want for the gas station, Willy?" asked Bruce Golder from down
the street.

"What'll you give me?"

"Fifty cents."

"Fifty
cents?
"

"Fifty cents."

"Sold."

Willy pocketed the money. It felt good.

"How about the switchman, Willy?" said Eddie Upman, the rich kid from up
the hill.

Willy hesitated, just for a second. He and Humphery had been together for
a long time. But what the devil. He wasn't a kid anymore. Humphery had
cost five dollars new, and prices had gone up since then.

"Two bucks four bits," Willy announced, crossing his fingers.

"Make it two bucks even," said Eddie Upman, taking out his billfold.

Willy looked around, but no one topped the bid. "Sold," he said, and Eddie
Upman took Humphery and put him in a sack.

"Let's get rid of the houses before we start on the track and stuff,"
Willy said. "Who wants 'em?"

Nobody said anything.

"They're
good
houses," Willy insisted. "People inside and
everything. See?"

Silence.

"Aw, come on. A buck for the lot."

No takers.

"Fifty cents. This is the last chance on these, you guys. I'll burn 'em
before I'll give 'em away."

Mark Borden slowly fumbled in his pockets and came up with a quarter, four
nickels, and five pennies. "I'll take them," he said. "I guess I can use
them."

"Sold!" said Willy, pocketing the money. "Now, what am I offered for the
good mountain? I'll make it easy on you. Let see, about a buck ought to be
right …"

Willy Roberts felt good. The table was being cleaned quicker than he had
hoped, and the table itself ought to bring in some real dough. He smiled
broadly when Bruce Golder bought the mountain.

Willy knew that he was a real man now.

I'm back, Clyde.

I guess you saw how they fought over me. Willy almost had to throw me into
the fire. I'm a real queen, I am. I drive men mad.

I wish he'd burn me, Clyde. I really do.

I'm determined not to get all morbid and gloomy, so you won't be hearing
from me again. I can't hold out much longer, and if I have to make with
the blues I'll do it alone.

Maybe you'll be wondering about me—where I am, what I'm doing.
Probably you don't give a damn. You're just like all the rest of them,
aren't you? But just in case—

Let me tell you about our new town, Clyde. It'll kill you.

You see, I'm it. Or just about.

That's right. ELM POINT looks like Utopia from where I'm sitting. Mark
Borden, the one that bought me, can't afford a real model railroad set-up,
and his house doesn't even
have
an attic. So about once a week he
takes us all out of his dirty closet, sets up his lousy circle of track,
and starts up his wheezing four-car freight train. It isn't even a scale
model. Big deal.

He's got four houses that he spaces alongside the track when he's running
the train; he doesn't much like the other three that he got from Willy, so
he leaves them in the closet
all
the time. That's all there is,
Clyde. Just me and the train. The other houses aren't even occupied, and
the engineer on the freight is so embittered by now that he won't even
wave.

I just sit in my stinking rocking chair and look out the window. Oh, it's
delightful. I can see an old blue rug, a dresser with initials cut in it,
a pile of dirty clothes in the corner, and a bed that's never made.

Once in a while Mark, the little angel, gets out his lead men and plays
soldier. The first thing he does, see, is to build him a Lincoln Log fort,
about a foot from my house. Then he sticks all these lantern-jawed jokers
with broken rifles along the walls, and then he backs off about nine feet
and sets up his Coast Defense Gun. You'd love that, Clyde. The Coast
Defense Gun is a huge blue job that works on a big spring. Mark puts
marbles in the barrel, cocks the spring, and then hollers "Fire!" like a
maniac. The whole lousy gun jerks up on two folding stilts and hurls all
the marbles at the log fort by my house.

Chaos results, Clyde.

Logs fly all over the place. Marbles swish through the air and roll under
the bed like thunder. My house has two big holes in it, and all I can do
is sit in this quaint old rocker and pray. I don't know whether to pray
for a hit or a miss. Periodically, one of the marbles hits a soldier
square in the face and knocks his head off.

Charming.

And there's one other minor detail. Ants. We have ants. I don't think I'll
tell you about them, though. You just think about it awhile.

That's about all. You see how it is, Clyde. I've enjoyed talking to you,
but now there doesn't seem to be much to say. I won't bother you anymore.

There's only one thing, Clyde. I wouldn't even ask, but I
am
getting old and corny. It's about Humphery. The one named Eddie Upman
bought him, and he's got a lot of money. I heard Willy say so. That
probably means a big table and another town and maybe some trees and
rivers.

I wouldn't want you to go to any trouble, Clyde. But if you should ever be
in Eddie Upman's house, maybe you could go up to the attic for a minute.
Maybe you could see Humphery. You wouldn't have to do anything drooley or
sentimental; I know you couldn't stand that. But maybe you could sort of
accidentally leave the current on low when you leave, without running the
trains.

Old Humphery would like that.

Would you do that, Clyde—for me?

The End

© 1954 Fantasy House, Inc. First published in
The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction
, November 1954.  Copyright renewed by Chad
Oliver in 1982.  Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Chad Oliver.

Fredric Brown

Bill Wheeler was, as it happened, looking out of the window of his
bachelor apartment on the fifth floor on the corner of 83
^rd
Street and Central Park West when the spaceship from Somewhere landed.

It floated gently down out of the sky and came to rest in Central Park on
the open grass between the Simon Bolivar Monument and the walk, barely a
hundred yards from Bill Wheeler's window.

Bill Wheeler's hand paused in stroking the soft fur of the Siamese cat
lying on the windowsill, and he said wonderingly, "What's that,
Beautiful?" but the Siamese cat didn't answer. She stopped purring,
though, when Bill stopped stroking her. She must have felt something
different in Bill—possibly from the sudden rigidness in his fingers
or possibly because cats are prescient and feel changes of mood. Anyway
she rolled over on her back and said "Miaouw" quite plaintively. But Bill,
for once, didn't answer her. He was too engrossed in the incredible thing
across the street in the park.

It was cigar-shaped, about seven feet long and two feet in diameter at the
thickest point. As far as size was concerned, it might have been a large
toy model dirigible, but it never occurred to Bill—even at his first
glimpse of it when it was about fifty feet in the air, just opposite his
window-that it might be a toy or a model.

There was something about it, even at the most casual look, that said
alien.
You couldn't put your finger on what it was. Anyway, alien or terrestrial,
it had no visible means of support. No wings, propellers, rocket tubes, or
anything else—and it was made of metal and obviously heavier than
air.

But it floated down like a feather to a point just about a foot above the
grass. It stopped there, and suddenly, out of one end of it (both ends
were so nearly alike that you couldn't say it was the front or back) came
a flash of fire that was almost blinding. There was a hissing sound with
the flash, and the cat under Bill Wheeler's hand turned over and was on
her feet in a single lithe movement, looking out of the window. She spat
once, softly, and the hairs on her back and the back of her neck stood
straight up, as did her tail, which was now a full two inches thick.

Bill didn't touch her; if you know cats, you don't when they're like that.
But he said, "Quiet, Beautiful. It's all right. It's only a spaceship from
Mars, to conquer Earth. It isn't a mouse."

He was right on the first count, in a way. He was wrong on the second, in
a way. But let's not get ahead of ourselves like that.

After the single blast from its exhaust tube or whatever it was, the
spaceship dropped the last twelve inches and lay inert on the grass. It
didn't move. There was now a fan-shaped area of blackened earth radiating
from one end of it for a distance of about thirty feet.

And then nothing happened except that people came running from several
directions. Cops came running, too, three of them, and kept people from
going too close to the alien object. Too close, according to the cops'
idea, seemed to be closer than about ten feet. Which, Bill Wheeler
thought, was silly. If the thing was going to explode or anything, it
would probably kill everyone for blocks around.

But it didn't explode. It just lay there, and nothing happened. Nothing
except that flash that had startled both Bill and the cat. And the cat
looked bored now, and lay back down on the windowsill, her hackles down.

Bill stroked her sleek, fawn-colored fur again, absentmindedly. He said,
"This is a day, Beautiful. That thing out there is from
outside,
or
I'm a spider's nephew. I'm going down and take a look at it."

He took the elevator down. He got as far as the front door, tried to open
it, and couldn't. All he could see through the glass was the backs of
people, jammed tight against the door. Standing on tiptoes and stretching
his neck to see over the nearest ones, he could see a solid phalanx of
heads stretching from here to there.

He got back in the elevator. The operator said, "Sounds like excitement
out front. Parade going by or something?"

"Something," Bill said. "Spaceship just landed in Central Park, from Mars
or somewhere. You hear the welcoming committee out there."

"The hell," said the operator. "What's it doing?"

"Nothing."

The operator grinned. "You're a great kidder, Mr. Wheeler. How's that cat
you got?"

"Fine," said Bill. "How's yours?"

"Getting crankier. Threw a book at me when I got home last night with a
few under my belt and lectured me half the night because I'd spent three
and a half bucks. You got the best kind."

"I think so," Bill said.

By the time he got back to the window, there was really a crowd down
there. Central Park West was solid with people for half a block each way,
and the park was solid with them for a long way back. The only open area
was a circle around the spaceship, now expanded to about twenty feet in
radius and with a lot of cops keeping it open instead of only three.

Bill Wheeler gently moved the Siamese over to one side of the windowsill
and sat down. He said, "We got a box seat, Beautiful. I should have had
more sense than to go down there."

The cops below were having a tough time. But reinforcements were coming,
truckloads of them. They fought their way into the circle and then helped
enlarge it. Somebody had obviously decided that the larger that circle
was, the fewer people were going to be killed. A few khaki uniforms had
infiltrated the circle, too.

"Brass," Bill told the cat. "High brass. I can't make out insignia from
here, but that one boy's at least a three-star, you can tell by the way he
walks."