His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

At World Wireless, we sent out a memo to all stringers: "File no more enterpriser dispatches on black pit story. Mail queries should be sent to regional desk if a new angle breaks in your territory." We got about ten mail queries, mostly from journalism students acting as string men, and we turned them all down. All the older hands got the pitch, and didn't bother to file it to us when the town drunk or the village old maid loudly reported that she saw a pit open up on High Street across from the drug store. They knew it was probably untrue, and that furthermore nobody cared.

I wrote Benson about all this, and humbly asked him what his pre-diction for next summer was. He replied, obviously having the time of his life, that there would be at least one more summer phenome-non like the last three, and possibly two more—but none after that.

It's so easy now to reconstruct, with our bitterly earned knowl-edge!

Any youngster could whisper now of Benson: "Why, the damned fool!

Couldn't anybody with the brains of a louse see that they wouldn't keep it up for two years?" One did whisper that to me the other day, when I told this story to him. And I whispered back that, far from being a damned fool, Benson was the one person on the face of the earth, as far as I know, who had bridged with logic the widely separated phenomena with which this reminiscence deals.

Another year passed. I gained three pounds, drank too much, rowed incessantly with my staff, and got a tidy raise. A telegrapher took a swing at me midway through the office Christmas party, and I fired him. My wife and the kids didn't arrive in April when I ex-pected them.

I phoned Florida, and she gave me some excuse or other about missing the plane. After a few more missed planes and a few more phone calls, she got around to telling me that she didn't want to come back. That was okay with me. In my own intuitive way, I knew that the upcoming silly season was more important than who stayed married to whom.

In July, a dispatch arrived by wire while a new man was working the night desk. It was from Hood River, Oregon. Our stringer there reported that more than one hundred "green capsules" about fifty yards long had appeared in and around an apple orchard. The new desk man was not so new that he did not recall the downhold policy on silly-season items.

He killed it, but left it on the spike for my amused inspection in the morning. I suppose exactly the same thing happened in every wire service newsroom in the region. I rolled in at 10:30 and riffled through the stuff on the spike. When I saw the "green capsules" dispatch I tried to phone Portland, but couldn't get a connection. Then the phone buzzed and a correspondent of ours in Seattle began to yell at me, but the line went dead.

I shrugged and phoned Benson, in Fort Hicks. He was at the police station, and asked me: "Is this it?"

"It is," I told him. I read him the telegram from Hood River and told him about the line trouble to Seattle.

"So," he said wonderingly, "I called the turn, didn't I?"

"Called what turn?"

"On the invaders. I don't know who they are—but it's the story of the boy who cried wolf. Only this time, the wolves realized—" Then the phone went dead.

But he was right.

The people of the world were the sheep.

We newsmen—radio, TV, press, and wire services—were the boy, who should have been ready to sound the alarm.

But the cunning wolves had tricked us into sounding the alarm so many times that the villagers were weary, and would not come when there was real peril.

The wolves who then were burning their way through the Ozarks, utterly without opposition, the wolves were the Martians under whose yoke and lash we now endure our miserable existences.

Fire-Power

[Cosmic Stories - July 1941 as by S. D. Gottesman]

1

Tiny, trim Babe MacNeice descended the very secret staircase that led into the very private office of Intelligence Wing Commander Bartok.

"Hello!" he gasped as the wall panel slid aside. "You're on Magdeburg's 83— or aren't you?"

"There was very little doing there," she smiled, seating herself. "Except a bustle and roiling about as I left. It seems that someone had kidnapped their HQ secretary and sweated him for some information relative to their new interceptors."

"Have they any idea," asked Bartok anxiously, "who that someone was?"

Babe laughed. "They have the finger on him. From some confidential instructions he dropped while making a getaway, they learned that he was a secret agent for some Venusian colony or other. He was described as a thin old man of effeminate carriage and manner."

Bartok smiled, relieved. "Your number twelve. Report, please." He started a phonograph turning and pointed the mike at Babe.

The girl said chattily: "MacNeice went per orders to Magdeburg's 83 for confirmation or denial of rumors concerning a planned uprising against Terrestrial authority. There she found widespread reports of similar character; the entire planet was flooded with propaganda.