His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

The thing stumping across the terrain toward them was like and unlike the wave-train cretins. It had their conformation but was ma-terial rather than undulatory in nature—a puzzle that could wait. It appeared to have no contact with the wave-train life form. They soared and darted about it as it approached, but it ignored them. It passed once through a group of three who happened to be on the ground in its way.

Tentatively the three Visitors reached out into its mind. The thoughts were comparatively clear and steady.

When the figure had passed the Visitors chorused: Agreed, and headed back to their ship. There was nothing there for them. Among other things they had drawn from the figure's mind was the location of a ruined library; a feeble-minded working party of a million was dispatched to it.

Back at the ship they waited, unhappily ruminating the creature's foreground thoughts: "From Corey's Gin you get the charge to tote that bale and lift that barge. That's progress, God damn it. You know better than that, man. Liberty Unlimited for the Lonely Man, but it be nice to see that Mars ship land…"

Agreement: Despite all previous experience it seems that a sentient race is capable of destroying itself.

When the feeble-minded library detail returned and gratefully re-united itself with its parent "lives" they studied the magnetic tapes it had brought, reading them direct in the cans. They learned the name of the planet and the technical name for the wave-train entities which had inherited it and which would shortly be its sole proprietors. The solid life forms, it seemed, had not been totally unaware of them, though there was some confusion: Far the vaster section of the li-brary denied that they existed at all. But in the cellular minds of the Visitors there could be no doubt that the creatures described in a neglected few of the library's lesser works were the ones they had en-countered. Everything tallied. Their non-material quality; their curi-ous reaction to light. And, above all, their dominant personality trait, of remorse, repentance, furious regret. The technical term that the books gave to them was: ghosts.

The Visitors worked ship, knowing that the taste of this world and its colony would soon be out of what passed for their collective mouths, rinsed clean by new experiences and better-organized enti-ties.

But they had never left a solar system so gratefully or so fast.

Sir Mallory's Magnitude

[SF Quarterly -Winter 1941/1942 as by S. D. Gottesman]

1

After Armageddon

There was a lusty scream from the visitors' gallery. The lights of the hall flickered for a moment; guards drew and fired at shadows on the wall or at each other. Panic threatened; the restless roar of a great crowd rose to a jabbering sound like monkey-talk. In the great gallery and on the vast floor a few dimwits began to dash for exits.

"Rot them," growled Senator Beekman. He shoved the mike at Ballister.

"Shut them up," he snapped. "Use your precious psychology!"

Young Ballister took the mike, snapped on the button, dialed for heaviest amplification. "Atten-shun!" he barked into it, with the genuine parade-ground note of command.

The monkey-talk stopped for a priceless moment. Ballister jumped into it with both feet. Soothingly he said: "Now, folks, what's your hurry?

Stick around—these learned gentlemen put on a pretty good show for your benefit."

The learned gentlemen who were dashing for exits purpled; the visitors in the gallery laughed loud and long at the feeble little joke. They resumed their seats.

"Take it, Senator," snapped Ballister in an undertone. "I'll scamper for a gander at the fuss up there." He hopped nimbly from the platform into an elevator, which shot him up to the gallery. Displaying his Representative's badge, he broke through the cordon of International Police that was zealously guarding an ordinary seat, like any other of the five thousand in sight.

"What was it?" he demanded of a French provost. "Killing?"

The provost shrugged. "We do not know vat, m'sieu. On-lee we know that in that seat sat M'sieu the mayor of Bruxelles."

"Hi," snapped a crisp young voice at Ballister.

He removed his horn-rims to regard the young lady disapprovingly.

"Beat it, Kay," he ordered. "This isn't for the papers. Another unpleasant international incident. The Mayor of Brussels."

The young man looked down at the stage, very small and far away. From the speakers in the walls came the voice of Senator Beekman, hoarse and embarrassed:

"Our agenda will be incomplete today, gentlemen and ladies. I have been advised of the—the non-attendance of Monsieur Durtal, Mayor of Brussels and major sponsor of the bill entitled: 'An Act to Prevent Competitive Development of Instruments of Warfare.' We will proceed to—"