The Abominal Earthman (1963) SSC Read online

  THE

  ABOMINABLE

  EARTHMAN

  FREDERIK

  POHL

  BALLANTINE ORIGINAL

  Contents

  THE ABOMINABLE EARTHMAN

  WE NEVER MENTION AUNT NORA

  A LIFE AND A HALF

  PUNCH

  THE MARTIAN STAR-GAZERS

  WHATEVER COUNTS

  THREE PORTRAITS AND A PRAYER

  Ballantine Books

  January 1963

  Cover by Richard Powers

  Printed in The US

  Ballantine Books are distributed in the U.S.A.

  By Affiliated Publishers, a division of Pocket Books Inc.,

  630 Fifth Avenue, New York 20, N.Y.

  BALLANTINE BOOKS INC.,

  101 Fifth Avenue New York 3. N.Y.

  Acknowledgements

  Grateful Acknowledgement for permission to reprint the stories in this volume is made to the following :

  The Abominable Earthman – Galaxy Magazine October 1961

  We Never Mention Aunt Nora – Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958

  A Life and a Half – If Magazine July 1959

  Punch – Playboy June 1961

  The Martian Star-Gazers – Galaxy Magazine February 1962

  Whatever Counts – Galaxy Magazine June 1959

  Three Portraits and a Prayer – Galaxy Magazine August 1962

  THE ABOMINABLE EARTHMAN

  The alien invaders, behind their impenetrable force fields, had the war going all their way—and then the biggest goldbrick in Earth’s forces surrendered to them.

  • • •

  I

  One night when I was C.Q. at the 549th, the Officer of the Day came in, swearing, with a tall, dark-skinned private wandering sullenly along behind him.

  We were up to our eyeballs in frantic work; Trenton had just been evacuated. “Get me the M.P. barracks,” yelled the O.D. “What do you think? This rat’s been selling rations to the civilians.” That was Lt. Lauchheimer, who was a pale young man with enormous integrity. He looked at the prisoner as if he wanted to kick him. I could understand that.

  The prisoner looked back at him calmly, without very much interest at all. He leaned back against the wall, put one elbow on the hammering teletype and sighed. Behind him was a poster of a great green bug being bayoneted by an American infantryman, captioned:

  SIRIANS, GO HOME!

  “Sit down,” snapped Lt. Lauchheimer, “—you. Whatever the hell you said your name was.”

  “He’s Private Postal, sir,” I said reluctantly. “Pinkman W. Postal.”

  The prisoner looked at me for the first time. The orderly room was full and bustling, so it wasn’t surprising he hadn’t noticed me. “Oh. Hello, Harry.”

  I dialed the M.P. barracks without answering him, but it was already too late. When I handed the phone to Lt. Lauchheimer he glared at me. I said, “We took basic together, Lieutenant. We, uh—we weren’t very close buddies.”

  “Sergeant, I didn’t ask you.”

  I listened while he was talking on the phone, although I was supposed to be checking casualty reports resulting from the morning’s assault on the Sirian bubble. It seemed that Pinky had been given a truckload of supplies for evacuees and told to deliver it to a relief center in Bound Brook. They’d picked him up in New Brunswick with the supplies gone and a pocketful of cash. It was about what I would have expected.

  The M.P. jeep was there in less than five minutes, and Lt. Lauchheimer escorted Pinky out without another word to me. But he didn’t forget. Two weeks later, when we were packing up for the move to Staten Island, he was in charge of my section and he put me on every rough detail he could think of. I guess I didn’t blame him. I would have done the same. He didn’t know me very well, but he knew I knew Pinky Postal.

  Lauchheimer didn’t get off my back until the Boston Retreat, when we were bombed-in together for twelve hours and had a chance to talk things over. After that we were pretty close. He asked me to come along when he volunteered for the Worcester booby-trapping mission that almost worked, which I did, so in a way you might say that Pinky Postal was responsible for my getting the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  I’m glad I got it. There were fifteen awarded that day, including mine and Lauchheimer’s. They lined us up alphabetically, and my name begins with “W”. So, although my medal looks like all the others, it’s pretty special. It was the last one issued. After that the Sirians englobed Washington.

  When Pinky Postal got his bright notion of selling GI canned milk in New Brunswick he was twenty-three years old. He had been drafted at nineteen, out of Cincinnati.

  He hated it—hated both. He hated being drafted; and he hated Cincinnati. He had never done a day’s work. He liked to drive around down in Kentucky and try to pick up girls, but he was a poor man’s son. The girls were not usually impressed by his wobbly old Ford. In basic training his unmade bed cost the whole platoon a weekend pass at Saturday inspection, so the platoon gave him a bit of a hazing. He wasn’t hurt. But the next day he went AWOL.

  He got as far as the railroad station. He spent the rest of the eight-week training cycle cleaning latrines after duty hours, and our platoon had the dirtiest latrines on the post.

  By the time the Sirians landed three years later, Postal should have been out of the Army, except that he never stopped trying. He fought the Army with everything he had. A warrant officer called him a Dutch mudheel—well, something like that—and Pinky hit him. That was three months in the guardhouse with forfeiture of pay. A mess sergeant somehow got in the way of a toppling vat of boiling dried limas after a few words with Pinky, who had been on KP. The court-martial called it deliberate assault with intent to maim. While he was awaiting trial for that he got out of the stockade and went AWOL again, and . . . add it up yourself; he had enough bad time to keep him in as long as they wanted him; and he was still trying to make it up when the Sirians blew their bubble around Wilmington.

  Pinky couldn’t have cared less.

  They weren’t shooting at him, were they? So what difference did it make to Pinky? What was there to choose between a hopelessly inimical government of human beings, whose rules were beyond him, and a hopelessly alien government of green-chitoned bugs, whose rules were never explained?

  The difference was too small for Pinky to bother with. Pinky was as much an alien as the Sirians, in his unattractive, angle-shooting way.

  But the Army still thought of him as a soldier, after all. In the massive redeployment that tried to put an armed perimeter around the bubble, Pinky found himself put to work. He hated that most of all.

  We were throwing everything we had at the Sirians. The troops in Delaware and Maryland lived in lead suits for a month because we tried to break in with hydrogen bombs. All we accomplished was to kill off every green thing and wild animal for forty miles south of Wilmington. The bubble didn’t even bend, and the troops got plenty of chance to become pretty foul inside those suits. I remember it very well; I was one of them.

  So was Pinky but, heavens knows how, he managed to get sent north. He was supposed to be driving a truck again in the evacuation of Philadelphia. The place he was evacuating was Bryn Mawr, and probably he mistook the girls’ panic for another kind of excitement. They screamed to the colonel. Pinky wound up in a punishment battalion once more, and there he met the missionary from inside the bubble, an exile from Eden.

  “Give it to me straight, Rocco. What’s it like in the bubble?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Come on, Rocco! Look, you don’t like working in the boiler room, do you? Maybe I know how we can cut out of here.”

  “Shut up, Postal. The serg
eant’s looking at us.”

  Vindictively, Pinky turned the steam valve a moment before Rocco was ready for it. The high-temperature jet barely missed boiling his fingers.

  “What the hell did you do that for? Get off my back, Postal!”

  “Come on. What’s it like?”

  “Shut up, you two! Drag tail!”

  Pinky sulked. The job of delousing refugee clothing took two men, one to lift the hundred-pound bundles in and out of the steam boiler, one to turn the valve. Pinky was twice the size of the little ex-prisoner of the Sirians, but it was Pinky who sat at ease with one gloved hand on the valve.

  “Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  “Look, Postal. They won’t take me back. Now leave me alone, will you?”

  “. . . Well, what’s it like? Do they feed you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Work you hard?”

  The little man said dreamily, “There’s a stud farm down in Delaware. Fifteen hundred women, they say. Only a couple dozen men. For breeding, see?”

  “Breeding? You mean—”

  “They’re growing slaves, I guess. Well, I was working on a farm and they closed that up. I got friendly with the overseer and he put me in for the breeding farm. Plenty of food. Nothing else to do. I—”

  “I’m warnin’ you two! For the last time.”

  But then, after the last smelly, flea-ridden bale had come out of the sterilizer, Pinky had a chance for one more word with the missionary. Why couldn’t he go back?

  “Postal, I don’t want to talk about it. They threw me out. I was all set, passed the overseers, right up to one of the bugs. He—he said I was too little. They don’t want anybody under six feet tall.”

  Back in the barracks, Pinky slipped out of his dirty GI shoes and painstakingly marked his height off on the wall. The tape measure showed that nothing had changed. He was exactly six feet, one and a quarter inches tall.

  II

  Altogether, there were six Sirian ships that landed on the Earth—two in Russia, one in the United States, one in Canada, one in India and, the first one of all, one in New South Wales. The first we heard of them was when the Russian radio satellite began a frantic emergency message in clear, and then went dead before it finished. Then all the other space stations went dead.

  Then the ship came down on Australia and, pop, up went the pale green bubble.

  The bubbles were like a wall, except more flexible and beautifully controlled. The rule was: what the Sirians wanted to pass could pass; everything else could not.

  Time passed; the other ships landed; there were more bubbles.

  Then the bubbles grew bubbles. They clustered in groups, expanding. Sometimes the new bubbles were big, sometimes small. Sometimes a couple of months would go by without much expansion, sometimes half a dozen little buds would pop up in a week.

  No metallic object could get through them at all after the first week. Evidently the Sirians had decided that was their simplest defense.

  We tried non-metallic attacks, of course. We drifted poison gas and bacteria through them easily enough. But nothing happened as far as we could see . . . as far as we could see was, after all, only the outermost skin of the bubble.

  A man could walk through—or most of the time he could—without feeling a thing, as long as he had taken off his wrist watch and laid down his gun. Not always. I was in Camden when the 5th Mountain Division sent in an attack with wooden spears and pottery grenades. Fifty men got through but the fifty-first bounced back, knocked unconscious, as though he’d hit a stone wall. I don’t know what happened to the fifty men who got through. The only thing I’m pretty sure of is that they didn’t much worry the bugs.

  Some people did come back. The Sirians threw them out, like Pinky’s missionary, Rocco. Probably the Sirians had chosen types who would have little of importance to tell, except how much they liked living under the Sirians. That’s what they told, every one of them.

  They were a problem to the Army. Most of them were soldiers, as it happened. The Army didn’t much like the idea of sending them back to their units, whose morale was already hanging low, so they put the missionaries in special battalions, along with the goof-offs and low-grade criminals, like Pinky Postal.

  Pinky heard the message of the missionaries loud and clear. He didn’t like the punishment battalion at all. He got his chance when he was handing out tetanus shots for a line of children and a jeep skidded in the slush, side-swiping the medics’ personnel carrier. The kids scattered like screaming geese. By the time the medic corporal got his detail rounded up again he had only five men instead of six.

  Pinky was in the back of a truck, heading south along the old Turnpike. Snow was driving down on him, but he was very happy. He had outsmarted the Army. They would look for him, but they would look North. It is always easy to desert in the direction of the enemy in wartime; the traffic is all the other way.

  He walked the last mile to the edge of the bubble, looming over him in the darkness like a green glass cliff. The snow was easing off and it was almost daylight as he stepped through.

  The Sirians never intended to destroy the Earth, only to own it. Pinky’s missionary was quite right. Almost at once they began breeding slaves.

  It was exactly the sort of job that Pinky would seek. He was not a bookish man, but he was immensely erudite on prurience. He knew very well what a breeding farm was like. There were the dozens of helpless, tamable does; and there was the big stud stallion, himself. What would be closer to the heart of any red-blooded boy? He made his way there, finally, very much elated. There were fifteen others in the shipment, all tall, heavy, muscular men, all extremely cheerful. They rode in the back of an old Ford pickup truck, in warm sunshine. They didn’t mind that it had a purplish tinge (green, Pinky would have thought, if he had thought about it at all; but the bubble reflected the green bands of the spectrum and what came through left the sun looking like a violet spotlight in the sky.) There were lavender clouds in a mauve sky, and all around them the bugs were busy with their reconstruction. Snow-white machines on wire-mesh treads were neatly paving over the rubble that had been a small Maryland town.

  “Bring on the girls,” bellowed Pinky, waving a bottle in one hand. It was only California sherry, but it was all he’d been able to find in the abandoned supermarket where they’d spent the night.

  “Man!” cried one of the other eager breeders.

  “Women!” Pinky dropped the bottle in his excitement, staring.

  They were women, all right. They were flat on their backs on a grassy meadow, their legs in the air, pumping invisible bicycle pedals under the direction of a husky blonde girl. “Vun, two. T’ree,four! Vun, two. T’ree, four! All right, ladies. Now some bending and stretching, hurry up, yoomp!” As the breeding stock clambered to its legs, Pinky observed that they had in fact already been bred, some months before. It was only mildly disappointing. Where these were, there were bound to be others.

  The truck slowed and stopped, and Pinky saw his first Sirian.

  The creature was twelve feet high but flimsily constructed. It had a green carapace like a June bug’s, jointed in the center. It was not paying any attention to the snorting volunteer stallions. It stood on four hind legs, holding in its front pair of legs an instrument like a theodolite. (It had two smaller pairs of legs clasped across its olive-colored belly plate.)

  “Out! Everybody out!” bawled a man in a green brassard, circling respectfully around the Sirian toward the truck. “Nip along, you!”

  Pinky was first off, and first to reach the man in the green brassard. He had at that time been in the bubble for less than thirty-six hours, but he knew who to butter up. Green brassards were overseers. They were the human straw-bosses for the Sirians. “Excuse me, sir. Say, I happened to get some good cigars last night, and I wondered if you . . . ?”

  The Sirians were not hard masters, but they were firm. They knew what they wanted in the way of a slave population—strength, size,
stupidity—and it was only a detail that they found it necessary to kill some of those who gave them trouble. The trouble did not have to arise from viciousness. As Pinky Postal was entrenching himself with the man in the green brassard, one of the other candidate breeders made the mistake of gawking too close to the Sirian, who moved, which startled the captive, who brushed against the horny edge of green chiton at the Sirian’s tail. It was like green fire. The man did not even make a sound. Washed in a green blaze of light, he froze, straightened and fell dead.

  At about that time the first dead Sirian fell into our hands—partly because of Lt. Lauchheimer and myself—and we had a chance to discover what the green fire was. Not that it helped us. It was a natural defense, like the shock of an electric eel; electromagnetic, at neural frequencies, it paralyzed life. Nothing else. It would not set off a match or stir a cobweb, but it would kill.

  Pinky did not know this, but he knew what he had already known, that the Sirians were deadly. Shaken, he waited for the physical examination.

  The overseer was not kind to Pinky because of the gift of cigars. He knew that kindness was not involved; it was a simple bribe. But as he shared Pinky’s code, he repaid the bribe. He did not volunteer information, but he answered questions. Would all of them be kept for breeding stock? “God, no. Six jobs want to be filled, the rest of you go back.” Was there any special trick to passing the examination? The overseer jerked his thumb at a door labeled: Dr. Lessard. “Up to the doc.” And was it really what they said, inside, all girls and fun? The overseer laughed and walked away. There had only been two cigars.