Assignment in Tomorrow Read online

  “No!” cried Willy. “Not another one!”

  “ ‘I do stipulate,’ ” read Lou, “ ‘that all of my property, of whatsoever kind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to be held in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share alike.’ ”

  “Issue?” said Emerald.

  Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. “It means we all own the whole damn shootin’ match.”

  All eyes turned instantly to the bed.

  “Share and share alike?” said Morty.

  “Actually,” said Willy, who was the oldest person present, “it’s just like the old system, where the oldest people head up things with their headquarters in here, and——”

  “I like that!” said Em. “Lou owns as much of it as you do, and I say it ought to be for the oldest one who’s still working. You can snooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, and poor Lou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and——”

  “How about letting somebody who’s never had any privacy get a little crack at it?” said Eddie hotly. “Hell, you old people had plenty of privacy back when you were kids. I was bom and raised in the middle of the goddamn barracks in the hall! How about—?”

  “Yeah?” said Morty. “Sure, you’ve all had it pretty tough, and my heart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick.”

  “Silence!” shouted Willy imperiously. “The next person who opens his mouth spends the next six months by the bathroom. Now clear out of my room. I want to think.”

  A vase shattered against the wall, inches above his head. In the next moment a free-for-all was under way, with each couple battling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tactical situation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall, where they organized others in the same situation, and stormed back into the room.

  After two hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, the cops broke in.

  For the next half hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Schwartzes, and then the apartment was still and spacious.

  An hour later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televised to 500,000,000 delighted viewers on the eastern seaboard.

  In the stillness of the three-room Schwartz apartment on the seventy-sixth floor of Building 257, the television set had been left on. Once more the air was filled with the cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, coming harmlessly now from the loudspeaker. The program drew to a close with a live scene of Lou and Em behind bars at the police station.

  They were in adjacent four-by-eight cells, and were stretched out peacefully on their cots.

  “Em,” called Lou through the partition, “you got a washbasin all your own too?”

  “Sure. Washbasin, bed, light—the works. Ha! And we thought Gramps’ room was something. How long’s this been going on?” She held out her hand. “For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven’t got the shakes.”

  “Cross your fingers,” said Lou; “the lawyer’s going to try to get us a year.”

  “Gee,” said Em dreamily, “I wonder what kind of wires you’d have to pull to get solitary?”

  “All right, pipe down,” said the turnkey, “or I’ll toss the whole kit and caboodle of you right out.”

  The prisoners fell silent; the television camera backed away for a long shot of the cell block filled with contented Schwartzes, and the scene on the television screen faded.

  The Schwartz living room darkened for a moment, and then the face of the announcer appeared, like the sun coming from behind a cloud. “And now, friends,” he said, “I have a special message from the makers of anti-gerasone, a message for all yon folks over 150. Are you hampered socially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or loss of hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone was developed? Well, if you are, you need no longer suffer, need no longer feel different and out of things.

  “After years of research, medical science has now developed super-anti-gerasone! In weeks—yes, weeks—you can look, feel, and act as young as your great-great-grandchildren! Wouldn’t you pay $5,000 to be indistinguishable from everybody else? Well, you, don’t have to. Sap, tested super-anti-gerasone costs you only dollars a day. The average cost of regaining all the sparkle and attractiveness of youth is less than fifty dollars.

  “Write novo for your free trial carton. Just put your name and address on a dollar postcard and mail it to ‘Super,’ Box 500,000, Schenectady, N.Y. Have you got that? I’ll repeat it. ‘Super,’ Box . . .”

  Underlining the announcer’s words was the scratching of Gramps’ fountain pen, the one Willy had given him the night before. He had come in a few minutes previous from the Idle Hour Tavern, which commanded a view of Building 257 across the square of asphalt known as the Alden Village Green. He had called a cleaning woman to come straighten the place up and had hired the best lawyer in town to get his family convicted—a genius whose clients were always jailed. Then he had moved the day bed before the television screen so that he could watch from a reclining position. It was something he’d dreamed of doing for years.

  “Schen-ec-ta-dy,” mouthed Gramps. “Got it.” His face had changed remarkably. His facial muscles seemed to have relaxed, revealing kindness and equanimity under what had been taut, bad-tempered lines. It was almost as though his trial package of super-anti-gerasone had already arrived. When something amused him on television, he smiled easily, rather than barely managing to lengthen the thin line of his mouth a millimeter.

  The telephone rang, and Gramps answered. “Yes?”

  An anxious man’s face appeared on the viewer. “Uh—are you the building custodian?”

  “No. But let’s say I was. What then?”

  “Well, I was just watching television,” said the caller, “and I kind of got the idea that maybe that apartment would be vacant, with everybody in jail and all.”

  “Sorry, sonny, but they didn’t get me, and I’m just getting to like the place.”

  “Oh—I see,” said the caller desolately. “I just thought, maybe . . .” His voice trailed off. “I’ve been living over at my great-grandparents’ place for the past fifty years, and my wife and I’d like to have a baby, but——”

  “That’s the trouble with the world,” said Gramps. “It isn’t the Russians, it’s people breeding like jackrabbits.”

  The caller blushed. “Yessir. Well—this’d be our first one, and we just celebrated our golden wedding anniversary.”

  “Well, if you did have one, the little nipper’d turn on you first chance it got,” said Gramps. “The number-two trouble with the world isn’t Russia, either. It’s juvenile delinquency. No sooner they get to be seventy or eighty and they start running hog-wild. Take it from a man who’s been around a little, boy: until we’ve got that licked, hold off, or you’ll play hell getting a minute’s peace.”

  “Yup,” said the caller listlessly.

  “Youngsters used to have a little respect for their elders when I was a kid,” said Gramps. “Only thing I can figure out that makes ’em so wild nowadays is something in the processed seaweed. Nobody ate seaweed when I was a kid,” said Gramps, and he hung up.

  The Big Trip up Yonder by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Copyright, 1953, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation; reprinted by permission of the author and his agents, Littauer & Wilkinson.

  JAMES H SCHMITZ

  Eight years ago Astounding Science-Fiction published a story called Agent of Vega by an almost-newcomer (one previous story) named James H. Schmitz. It was a story brilliant as a nova; but unlike most novae, it was followed by stories brighter still. For one, there was The Witches of Karres; for another——

  We Don’t Want Any Trouble

  “Well, that wasn’t a very long interview, was it?” asked the professor’s wife. She discovered the professor looking out of the living-room window when she’d come home from sho
pping just now. “I wasn’t counting on having dinner before nine,” she said, setting her bundles down on the couch. “I’ll get at it right away.”

  “No hurry about dinner,” the professor replied without turning his head. “I didn’t expect we’d be through there before eight myself.”

  He had clasped his hands on his back and was swaying slowly, backward and forward on his feet, staring out at the street. It was a favorite pose of his, and she never had discovered whether it indicated deep thought or just day-dreaming. At the moment, she suspected uncomfortably it was very deep thought, indeed. She took off her hat.

  “I suppose you could call it an interview,” she said uneasily. “I mean you actually talked with it, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, we talked with it,” he nodded. “Some of the others did, anyway.”

  “Imagine talking with something like that! It really is from another world, Clive?” She laughed uneasily, watching the back of his head with frightened eyes. “But, of course, you can’t violate the security rules, can you? You can’t tell me anything about it at all . . .”

  He shrugged, turning around.

  “There’ll be a newscast at six o’clock. In ten minutes. Wherever there’s a radio or television set on Earth, everybody will hear what we found out in that interview. Perhaps not quite everything, but almost everything.”

  “Oh?” she said in a surprised small voice. She looked at him in silence for a moment, her eyes growing more frightened. “Why would they do a thing like that?”

  “Well,” said the professor, “it seemed like the right thing to do. The best thing, at any rate. There may be some panic, of course.” He turned back to the window and gazed out on the street, as if something there were holding his attention. He looked thoughtful and abstracted, she decided. But then a better word came to her, and it was “resigned.”

  “Clive,” she said, almost desperately, “what happened?” He frowned absently at her and walked to the radio. It began to make faint, humming noises as the professor adjusted dials unhurriedly. The humming didn’t vary much.

  “They’ve cleared the networks, I imagine,” he remarked. The sentence went on repeating itself in his wife’s mind, with no particular significance at first. But then a meaning came into it and grew and swelled swiftly, until she felt her head would burst with it. They’ve cleared the networks. All over the world this evening, they’ve cleared the networks. Until the newscast comes on at six o’clock . . .

  “As to what happened,” she heard her husband’s voice saying, “that’s a little difficult to understand or explain. Even now. It was certainly amazing—” He interrupted himself. “Do you remember Milt Caldwell, dear?”

  “Milt Caldwell?” She searched her mind blankly. “No,” she said, shaking her head.

  “A rather well-known anthropologist,” the professor informed her, with an air of faint reproach. “Milt got himself lost in the approximate center of the Australian deserts some two years ago. Only we have been told he didn’t get lost. They picked him up——”

  “They?” she said. “You mean there’s more than one?”

  “Well, there would be more than one, wouldn’t there?” he asked reasonably. “That explains, at any rate, how they learned to speak English. It made it seem a little more reasonable, anyhow,” he added, “when it told us that. Seven minutes to six . . .”

  “What?” she said faintly.

  “Seven minutes to six,” the professor repeated. “Sit down, dear. I believe I can tell you, in seven minutes, approximately what occurred . . .”

  The Visitor from Outside sat in its cage, its large gray hands slackly clasping the bars. Its attitudes and motions, the professor had noted in the two minutes since he had entered the room with the other men, approximated those of a rather heavily built ape. Reporters had called it “the Toad from Mars,” on the basis of the first descriptions they’d had of it—the flabby shape and loose, warty skin made that a vaguely adequate identification. The round, horny head almost could have been that of a lizard.

  With a zoologist’s fascination in a completely new genus, the professor catalogued these contradicting physical details in his mind. Yet something somewhat like this might have been evolved on Earth, if Earth had chosen to let the big amphibians of its Carboniferous Period go on evolving.

  That this creature used human speech was the only almost-impossible feature.

  It had spoken as they came in. “What do you wish to know?” it asked. The horny, toothed jaws moved, and a broad yellow tongue became momentarily visible, forming the words. It was a throaty, deliberate “human” voice.

  For a period of several seconds, the human beings seemed to be shocked into silence by it, though they had known the creature had this ability. Hesitantly, then, the questioning began.

  The professor remained near the back of the room, watching. For a while, the questions and replies he heard seemed to carry no meaning to him. Abruptly he realized that his thoughts were fogged over with a heavy, cold, physical dread of this alien animal. He told himself that under such circumstances fear was not an entirely irrational emotion, and his understanding of it seemed to lighten its effects a little.

  But the scene remained unreal to him, like a badly lit stage on which the creature in its glittering steel cage stood out in sharp focus, while the humans were shadow-shapes stirring restlessly against a darkened background.

  “This won’t do!” he addressed himself, almost querulously, through the fear. “I’m here to observe, to conclude, to report—I was selected as a man they could trust to think and act rationally!”

  He turned his attention deliberately away from the cage and what it contained, and directed it on the other human beings, to most of whom he had been introduced only a few minutes before. A young, alert-looking Intelligence major who was in some way in charge of this investigation; a sleepy-eyed general; a very pretty Wac captain acting as stenographer, whom the major had introduced as his fiancée. The handful of other scientists looked for the most part like brisk business executives, while the two Important Personages representing the Government looked like elderly professors.

  He almost smiled. They were real enough. This was a human world. He returned his attention again to the solitary intruder in it.

  “Why shouldn’t I object?” the impossible voice was saying with a note of lazy good-humor. “You’ve caged me like—a wild animal! And you haven’t even informed me of the nature of the charges against me. Trespassing, perhaps—eh?”

  The wide mouth seemed to grin as the thing turned its head, looking them over one by one with bright black eyes. The grin was meaningless; it was the way the lipless jaws set when the mouth was closed. But it gave expression to the pleased malice the professor sensed in the voice and words.

  The voice simply did not go with that squat animal shape.

  Fear surged up in him again. He found himself shaking.

  If it looks at me now, he realized in sudden panic, I might start to scream!

  One of the men nearest the cage was saying something in low, even tones. The Wac captain flipped over a page of her shorthand pad and went on writing, her blonde head tilted to one side. She was a little pale, but intent on her work. He had a moment of bitter envy for their courage and self-control. But they’re insensitive, he tried to tell himself; they don’t know Nature and the laws of Nature. They can’t feel as I do how wrong all this is!

  Then the black eyes swung around and looked at him.

  Instantly, his mind stretched taut with blank, wordless terror. He did not move, but afterward he knew he did not faint only because he would have looked ridiculous before the others, and particularly in the presence of a young woman. He heard the young Intelligence officer speaking sharply; the eyes left him unhurriedly, and it was all over.

  “You indicate,” the creature’s voice was addressing the major, “that you can force me to reveal matters I do not choose to reveal at this time. However, you are mistaken. For one thing
, a body of this type does not react to any of your drugs.”

  “It will react to pain!” the major said, his voice thin and angry.

  Amazed by the words, the professor realized for the first time that he was not the only one in whom this being’s presence had aroused primitive, irrational fears. The other men had stirred restlessly at the major’s threat, but they made no protest.

  The thing remained silent for a moment, looking at the major.

  “This body will react to pain,” it said then, “only when I choose to let it feel pain. Some of you here know the effectiveness of hypnotic blocks against pain. My methods are not those of hypnosis, but they are considerably more effective. I repeat, then, that for me there is no pain, unless I choose to experience it.”

  “Do you choose to experience the destruction of your body’s tissues?” the major inquired, a little shrilly.

  The Wac captain looked up at him quickly from the chair where she sat, but the professor could not see her expression. Nobody else moved.

  The thing, still staring at the major, almost shrugged.

  “And do you choose to experience death?” the major cried, his face flushed with excitement.

  In a flash of insight, the professor understood why no one was interfering. Each in his own way, they had felt what he was feeling: that here was something so outrageously strange and new that no amount of experience, no rank, could guide a human being in determining how to deal with it. The major was dealing with it—in however awkward a fashion. With no other solution to offer, they were, for the moment, unable or unwilling to stop him.

  The thing then said slowly and flatly, “Death is an experience I shall never have at your hands. That is a warning. I shall respond to no more of your threats. I shall answer no more questions.

  “Instead, I shall tell you what will occur now. I shall inform my companions that you are as we judged you to be—foolish, limited, incapable of harming the least of us. Your world and civilization are of very moderate interest. But they are a novelty which many will wish to view for themselves. We shall come here and leave here, as we please. If you attempt to interfere again with any of us, it will be to your own regret.”