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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Astounding Science Fiction, Februar 1939, with "Palooka from Jupiter"
Our green, sun-warmed Earth—menaced by a single man of Jupiter—
IT was 5:45 p. m. on the northbound Lenox Avenue express, the very peak of the rush hour. Wearied stenographers clung to their straps, glaring with indignant intensity at equally wearied male bookkeepers who had preempted all the seats in the initial Wall Street sector and were now burying their noses in the sporting and comic sections of their newspapers, pretending not to see the aforesaid glares.
The train flung from side to side with the intensity of its homeward flight; the packed cattle within its stuffy confines flung obediently to the opposite side, in conformity with Newton's well-known First Law of Motion. It was hot; it was smelly; and tempers, already frayed by the day's work, hung on triggers.
A woman of rather definite obesity and the air of one who brooks no contradiction had managed to squeeze her bulk into a space where a knife blade might barely have been inserted. The meek little man on the right disappeared out of sight, completely overwhelmed by her bulging girth; the sweet young thing on the left essayed dulcet remonstrance.
"Some people," she said acidly, "have a noive. For the nickel they drop in the slot they think the whole subway belongs to them. If I was a fat old slob like some people—"
The intruder twisted her elephantine form. A faint smothering sound came from the submerged little man on her right. "Listen, you skinny little guttersnipe," she commenced venomously, "if I wasn't no lady, I'd—"
The train gave an extra-special lurch. The professorial-looking man with the thick-lensed glasses had chosen that particularly unpropitious moment to let go his strap in order to emphasize a point with a crooked forefinger to the young man who swayed on a companion strap at his side.
He lost his balance, fell with a plop into the lap of the irate woman. She suspended her academic discussion of what she would do if she were not unfortunately a lady, to devote her entire time and attention to this new disturber of her placid peace.
"Say-y-y!" she shrilled. "Where d'ya get that stuff? I ain't no couch for old billygoats who think just because this is a subway and I'm a lone, defenseless woman—"
Sampson T. Schley, internationally known scientist and heralded as the next winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, scrambled most undignifiedly to his feet, clutched at his strap again with a death-like grip. His ears burned and his face suffused with blushes. Already necks were craning his way and snickers rose above the insistent grind of the wheels. Nor did it make matters better that Floyd Garrett, to whom he had been expounding at the very moment of the tragedy, the complex problem of the interstitial relations of two or more bodies coexistent in a simultaneous area, had a broad grin on his lean, sunburned young face.
"I... I'm extremely sorry, madam," he gasped hastily. "But the train rounded a curve, and my inertia, you know, in strict accordance with Newton's First Law of Motion, compelled me to—"
"Listen to him!" exclaimed the madam to the whole universe. "It ain't enough he makes a play for me, he gotta add insults. Inoisha, hey?
Where's a cop?"
"But, madam!" Schley started helplessly, and stopped short with a smothered gulp. Floyd Garrett broke off an amused chuckle, blinked furiously. Was he seeing things?
The outraged face of the lady had disappeared from view. Her paunch, heaving with a just wrath, was semi-obliterated. A man was sitting in her lap, grinning up at them with the benign, peaceful expression of one who was wholly unaware that he was perched on the very rim of a volcano.
FLOYD swore under his breath. He had not taken his eyes off the sputtering woman for even an instant. Schley had arched his body back as far as possible. There was a clear space in front of her. The train had not lurched, nor had the lights flickered from their steady glow.
Yet a man was sitting placidly in her lap, grinning up at him. He had materialized, so to speak, out of nowhere. Only a stir of wind, breathing freshly over Floyd's face, convinced him that he was not dreaming. A volume of air, equal in volume to the tangible bulk that had displaced it, had pushed outward. The man—
Floyd blinked again. Schley's blush of embarrassment had given way to a deathly pallor. The sweet young thing who had started the argument let out a shriek, and promptly fainted away. It was not a man—at least no such man as anyone in all that crowded train had ever seen before.
He was fat and solid and dark. In girth he billowed almost to the vast dimensions of the lady in whose embrace he had affectionately, if unaccountably, appeared. In height he lacked an inch or two of five feet. His nose was round and bulbous and glowed with a reddish phosphorescence. His eyes were equal saucers; there were no lids to veil their fish-like intensity. His thickish lips were parted in a toothless grin. It was not that age had divested him of those indispensable adjuncts to humanity's happiness; there were no gums to prove that they had ever existed. His legs were decidedly curved and short; they dangled from their perch and missed the solid floor by inches.
His mountainous body was encased in a glittering, tight-fitting material of metallic-seeming scales, yet it gave with the softness and ease of silk to every movement of his limbs.
For one breathless moment the woman whose lap he had usurped sat rigid. Then anguished nature took its course. She let out a smothered scream. Her broad, red face, gasping for breath under the weight that crushed her down, appeared to one side. A stream of most unlady-like imprecations poured from her lips.
"Get offa me, you soandso! Help! Ain't there any gentlemen in this here car?"
The strange figure in her lap remained calmly seated. Her cries, her unavailing struggles against the undoubted solidity of his weight, did not move him.
Ordinarily, Floyd Garrett was an extremely chivalrous young man. He went out of his way to rescue kittens from the ministrations of scatter-brained young dogs; he would dance with the oldest and plainest wallflower at university functions, to the vast discontent of all the young things who had come prepared to cut out and carry off in triumph the extremely good-looking young instructor in biology.
But now he had frozen to unmoving paralysis at the sight of this strange being who had plopped into the lady's lap.
Then it was that Sampson T. Schley rose to the heights. A strain of hidden gallantry welled to the surface. He forgot his own unfortunate contretemps; he forgot that the lady in question had accused him of unutterable things; he overlooked even the bizarre features of the man. His eyes flashed behind their thick, obscuring lenses with noble indignation.
"Get off that lady," he sputtered. "You... you cad!"
The creature looked up at him. The grin widened. It was a pleasant grin—albeit toothless—it was even infectious.
"Why?" he demanded suddenly. "I find it quite comfortable here."
HIS English was impeccable, yet grotesque. The syllables were all there, but the values were distorted; there were no accented beats; and—he lisped !
Professor Schley looked helplessly around. "Why?" he repeated. He was beyond his depth, floundering. "Because... uh... till—"
Floyd repressed an irresistible desire to laugh. It was time to take a hand. But as he pressed forward, another passenger had already intervened. He was a burly brute, roughly clad, his mashed nose and cauliflower ears proclaiming the punch-drunk fighter.
"I'll tell yuh why!" he growled. "Youse foreigners oughta go back where yuh came from."
The stranger shifted his lidless gaze to his new interlocutor. "But I can't," he said mildly. "At least, not yet." He grinned engagingly. "You see," he explained, "I've come from the planet you call Jupiter. A silly name, I must confess. And I can't return until I've investigated your Earth and decided whether or not it is fit for colonization."
Floyd stiffened in his tracks. Schley nervously adjusted his glasses. This was madness, yet—
Then things happened too fast for them to intervene. A passenger began to laugh hysterically. The submerged little man came up for air, took one look at the Jovian, said, "Oh, Lord!" in a dying tone, and burrowed back out of sight. The obese woman who was his unwilling cushion cried faintly: "Help! Get him off! He weighs a ton!"
The ex-fighter's face had darkened. "A wise guy, huh!" he snarled, and let go a solid roundhouse for the side of the stranger's head.
Floyd jerked forward. "Don't do that!" he exclaimed sharply. But it was too late. The swing was already connecting.
The Jovian had not stirred. He had not attempted to duck. But his face suffused with a reddish glow. His already fiery nose blazed into a strange incandescence.
The heavy fist, packed with a pile-driver wallop, bounced back as though from armor plate. Scarlet sparks flew in all directions. The clenched fingers seemed to disintegrate, to leave but a stump behind.
"Owww!" shrieked the fighter in an agony of pain.
Instantly the car was in a panic. There was a mad dash for the doors. Someone pulled the emergency cord. The train shuddered, strained, and came to an abrupt stop. Screaming men and women piled on each other in their terrified rush to get away. In seconds the car was cleared—except for the Jovian, the woman on whom he sat, Floyd, Professor Schley, and the prize fighter, who was staring foolishly at the stumps of his fingers.
Slowly the stranger heaved to his short, ludicrously curved feet. His grin seemed painted on. But there was nothing funny about him now to Floyd or to the others. The red glare that enveloped him died down.
"I do not like to be hit," he explained unnecessarily. "In Baridu—or Jupiter, as you call it—such things are not done. They are considered dreadful insults. As for the woman," he turned with courteous gesture, "I am sorry. I did not realize that perhaps my weight might smother her. But she was so comfortable," he sighed.
SHE did not hear. She was gone, pawing with screeching terror over the backs of the passengers who were unlucky enough to have been in her way. And after her, with a sudden howl, went the maimed prize fighter.
Lloyd said warily. "Did you... uh... mean what you just said?"
The creature nodded in some surprise. "Of course. We Jovians never lie. We have no such word in our vocabulary."
"But where did you learn our tongue?"
He smiled happily. "I didn't. I don't know it even now." He noted their incredulous looks. "You see," he explained, "I carry a translator." He flipped back the silvery scales of the high neck of his garment. A mesh of tiny wires was woven inside. Around the rim ran a series of green concavities that looked very much like flat suction cups.
"I set up an extremely high oscillating current," he continued in that toneless lisp of his, "that has a particular affinity for the atmospheric waves caused by sound. A selective wall of vibration is erected against which both my speech and yours impinge. The current analyzes the speech waves into their universal constituents; synthesizes them immediately into the opposite speech. I am speaking in the tongue of Baridu, yet what filters through is the language to which you are accustomed. I hear your peculiar talk likewise in the purring syllables of my own planet. It is simple, is it not?" he finished with a toothless grin.
"Very!" said Dr. Schley in much bewilderment. "But come now, Mr.... uh—"
"Pilooki," said the other promptly.
"Palooka!" Lloyd muttered under his breath.
The Jovian's translator-beam was supersensitive. The creature's bulbous nose lit up like a lantern. He nodded vigorously. "That's it. Palooka!"
And so, until the end of his incredible stay, was the Jovian known to all and sundry. Fortunately, there was no Jovian counterpart or exact translation for this very expressive Earthian term.
But Dr. Schley did not even smile. It is doubtful whether he even knew that there was such a word in the great American slang. Besides, all his scientific curiosity had been aroused. "But come now, Mr. Palooka," he repeated in a tone of remonstrance, "how was it possible for you to have translated yourself through some four hundred million miles of space like... er... this?"
The Jovian smiled commiseratingly. His nose, always phosphorescent, glowed like a signal lantern when he smiled. "The principle is most elementary," he said. "We dissociate ourselves into our primal quanta states. These streams of pure energy are projected along a carefully plotted path in space to a focal point upon your planet. At the given focus, the quanta of energy interact and recapitulate the original pattern of our beings.
"Of course," he added apologetically, "the determination of the terminal focal point requires rather delicate calculation. A trifle too far, and I might have found myself taking shape within unyielding rock; a trifle short, and I would have catapulted down through your very thin atmosphere with unfortunate results. That was why there was but a single volunteer for the scouting expedition—myself !"
FLOYD'S jaw tightened. "And what," he demanded carefully, "is the object of your exploration on Earth?"
Palooka looked surprised. His face was open, filled with almost infantile candor. "Why, I thought I told you!" he exclaimed. "I am to determine if this little planet of yours is fit for colonization by my people. You see, Baridu is all right as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough."
"Eh, what's that?" Schley ejaculated, blinking. "Jupiter is hundreds of times larger than Earth."
The Jovian shook his head as to a child. "In size, yes. But not in inhabitable area. For a moment I thought you were rather intelligent people, but I see I must explain the obvious."
"Of course we know Jupiter is a huge mass of liquid ammonia and mixed hydrocarbons," Floyd said indignantly. "In fact, we were wondering where the devil you could possibly live on such a planet."
Palooka's lidless eyes grew rounder. His bulbous nose lit up with a beacon shine. "Good!" he crowed. "You do know something. Baridu in fact is as you describe it. But within that shifting ocean a smaller world swims. A world about the size of yours, and warmed by interior fires. An atmosphere of radioactive gases surrounds the core, reddish-brown in color, and so charged electrically as to repel to a safe distance the floods of ammoniacal liquid that threaten always to overwhelm us."
"So that is the explanation of the Great Red Spot," breathed Schley in great excitement. "Wait until the next meeting of the Academy—"
"If Baridu is the same size as Earth," Floyd argued reasonably, "why look elsewhere?"
The Jovian sighed. His round face was ludicrously sorrowful. "We are a lazy folk," he said in mournful accents. "Our protective blanket of activated atmosphere requires constant vigilance. The surrounding oceans of the greater planet seek always to break through." He looked down at his squat, powerful body and his bowed legs with a comical expression. "The tremendous gravity holds us down. When we walk, we use up considerable energy. Work is a necessary function of our existence."
He stared at them plaintively. "We do not like to work. We like to loll and take our ease. On Baridu we cannot. But here, on your slighter planet, with its lesser gravity, its unattended atmosphere, life would be easy, delightful." He stretched his arms with anticipatory sybaritic pleasure. "We used to gather round our scanners and observe the green peacefulness of your Earth with envious longing."
Dr. Schley gulped. "But what about the dignity of labor?" he exclaimed. "We work; all mankind works."
"I do not understand that phrase," Palooka replied. "There is nothing dignified about labor. It calls for strain and concentration; it takes up time that could be better employed in contemplation and the ecstasy of living. Hasn't your planet enough of natural resources to support you all with a minimum of work?"
"Yes," said Schley doubtfully.
"Then why must everyone toil?"
"It's our setup," Floyd explained. "There is enough to go around, but our system of distribution is badly adjusted. As a result, some have too much, and have that, leisure which you extoll; others must work long and painfully for the little they get."
"You have given me an idea," the Jovian replied with a sage nod. "It was our intention, if I found your world suitable for our race, to remove painlessly its present inhabitants. But if they like to toil, and are already accustomed to do so for the benefit of others, why should we not permit them to labor for us? Thereby we should be content, and so would they."
HIS face lit up. "It is a most happy solution. I thank you both for this very welcome idea. You know," he said with confiding candor, "you will laugh at me when you hear this. But I really felt uncomfortable at the thought that we would have to eliminate your race from the planet on which it had lived so long. Of course," his mouth rounded with distaste, "some of your people, like that idiot who tried to hit me, or that beautifully plump person who objected to my presence in her lap, are not exactly pleasant in type; but I like you two."
"Er... thanks," declared Schley in some agitation, "but—"
Floyd Garrett's face hardened. "So you think," he said tightly, "that we'd prefer to live on as slaves to your race rather than suffer what you euphemistically describe as elimination?"
Palooka was surprised. "Why not?" he demanded. "You work now. You tell me that for most of you the fruits of your toil accrue to others. What difference would it make if the race of Baridu were the recipients? We would see to it that the Earthians would not starve."
Floyd was appalled at such logic. "But our liberty—" he exclaimed. "We would no longer be free."
"Are you free now? Can you do as you please; can you stop this dignified labor of yours when you wish?" The Jovian rose to his bowed legs. "But enough of idle talk. This strange conveyance of yours is too confining. I wish to see the surface of your world. Take me there."
PALOOKA was a new sensation to a sensation-torn Earth. The World's Fair had just reopened in New York with another tremendous fanfare and Grover Whalen. England had delivered its one-hundred-and-fifty-sixth note to Messieurs Hitler and Mussolini, warning both of these gentlemen that if they did not cease and desist, they could expect to receive still another billet-doux. China lost ten pitched battles in a row—and was winning the war. Shirley Temple essayed Juliet to Bobby Breen's Romeo. Shakespeare turned over in his grave, and Super-Colossal Pictures cleaned up ten million. In short, this planet had headaches enough of its own without the advent of the Jovian.
Grover Whalen at once made him an offer to appear in person at the Fair. Three competing brands of cigarettes clamored for his endorsement of their products. The tooth-paste people were disconsolate. Palooka had no teeth. One enterprising concern, however, began to advertise the merits of its particular concoction as a spread to protect phosphorescent noses against the alien glare of the sun, in anticipation of the Jovian invasion. Haile Selassie sent an emissary to discuss the possibility of regaining his Empire, on the basis of a legend that his people had originally migrated from Jupiter.
But nobody took Palooka's cheerfully announced intention of taking over Earth seriously. Nobody, that is, with the exception of Dr. Sampson T. Schley and Floyd Garrett.
They attended the Jovian everywhere. They showed him the face of the Earth, as he insisted. They took him in airplanes to the far places; they conducted him through factories and scientific establishments. They pointed with pride to their mighty cities and gigantic engines of warfare.
But Palooka refused to be impressed by the show they put on. He dismissed their most prized evidences of civilization and power with a shrug of his broad-beamed shoulders and a good-natured smile of amusement. They were toys, elementary in form and crude in technique. Earth's scientific knowledge was halting; and as for lethal weapons—pouf!
With seeming naiveté he permitted himself to be shot at with rifles, bombed with half-ton projectiles, immersed in poison gas, sprayed with shrapnel. But bullets did not penetrate nor gas smother him. The curious glow that lit his nose spread in reddish tints over his entire body, encased him in an armor of interlocked vibrations from which everything rebounded in a shower of disintegrating sparks.
Floyd shook his head in dismay at the results of these secretly cherished tests. "Palooka isn't as naive as he pretends," he told Dr. Schley in the privacy of their own room after a particularly vicious bombardment with sixteen-inch guns. "That's his way of proving to us that resistance to his race is hopeless; and that we'd better submit cheerfully and like it, if we know what's good for us."
The physicist scratched the tip of his nose thoughtfully. "You know, Floyd," he said, flushing, "while naturally I had hoped that at feast one of our weapons might have penetrated those curious vibrations of his, and put an end to the possibility of our enslavement, nevertheless I felt a curious shrinking of the flesh every time a shell roared in his direction." He thrust back his head with a defiant gesture. "F... I sort of like Palooka."
"So do I," Floyd admitted. "He's a likable chap—good-humored, always smiling. And his scientific attainments are way beyond ours. He has nothing but the kindliest feelings for our race. He says so, and I really believe him. According to his point of view, we'd be better off under the domination of Baridu than in our present parlous state. Claims they would teach us how to live in harmony; to produce with a minimum of labor ample supplies both for them and for ourselves."
"Damn it!" exploded Schley. "There's something in that, my boy. It sounds wrong and detestable—but is it? I was a bit ashamed of our own kind when he started to pick things apart. A lot of liberty there is in most of Europe and Asia today. Men slaughtered by the millions, women and children dying of hunger, ruthless dictatorships everywhere. Perhaps Palooka is right."
Floyd said grimly, harshly: "No, be is not. Liberty—the sense and dignity of freedom—is worth more than bread and butter, than long life and slothful ease. It is born of danger and suffering, but it lifts us above the brute. I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. Earth is in travail just now, yet there is always the chance to win back to peace and decency and the triumph of the human mind. Under the rule of Baridu, no matter how kindly or well-intentioned, we shall be condemned forever to a state of hopeless slavery from which it will be impossible to emerge."
Schley looked blank. "But what can we do? Palooka laughs at our weapons. In a short while he will have completed his survey. We know the results already. He is delighted with our planet. In fact, he should have returned to Jupiter already if it weren't for his essential laziness. He is enjoying himself so much he keeps on putting off the day of departure. But sooner or later he will go, and then—"
"He will return with his whole race to claim our planet as their own," Floyd finished. "I wish to God I knew how to stop him!"
MEANWHILE Palooka was enjoying himself thoroughly. Little, unexpected things to which Earthians were wholly indifferent, gave him the keenest pleasure. The soft green of grass, the warmth of the overhead sun, the bright, clear sparkle of snow crystals, the paintings of El Greco, the Adagio of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony—and above all, the sense of release from gravitational pull—these things all filled him with unutterable delight.
"Baridu," he told his Earthian friends, "is a gloomy place in comparison. Our vegetation is a dull red brown; our climate is a dead uniformity of ceaseless warmth; and we are not an artistic race."
He leaped high in the air and kicked his feet for the sheer joy of it. His muscles, inured to the tremendous pull of Jupiter, sent him soaring over their astonished heads. He seemed shod with Seven League boots when he went for a walk. They had to accompany him in an automobile to keep on even terms.
His antics were funny; his cavorting leaps and his curving legs churning vigorously in the air were irresistibly humorous. But somehow, neither Floyd nor Dr. Schley could laugh. Each spasm of delight for the good things of Earth meant but another driving nail in the coffin of Earth's liberties.
At first the governments had been inclined to scoff at his claims, but the tests with guns and bombs aroused them at length to the seriousness of the situation. Committees of scientists, of high officials of government, met in solemn conclave with the Jovian. Speeches were made to him, alternately cajoling and threatening.
He listened to both cajoleries and threats with the same eternal good humor. And to all arguments he interposed the same impregnable retorts. Firstly, the race of Baridu would be better off on Earth; secondly, the race of Earth would be better off under their genial rule than in its present state.
He made pointed references to the war in China, the holocaust in Spain. He spoke of conditions as he had observed them in Italy and Germany; he politely called England's attention to India; he merely mentioned to the Russian representative the number of political executions that had taken place in that country the previous year. He gently reminded the Americans of the millions on relief, the slums of their great cities, and the distress of the share-croppers in the South.
"I am sure, my friends," he would invariably murmur at the end, "you would all be infinitely happier under our benign rule."
The news of these convocations made headlines in that part of the world's press which was still free, and filtered in by subterranean channels to the people of those countries where the press was forbidden to publish such subversive accounts.
For, without question, the arguments of this solitary alien invader were subversive.
The oppressed people of many lands, the underprivileged everywhere, began to murmur. There was much truth in what this Jovian said, they whispered among themselves. He promised them but little work, and a plentiful supply of the world's goods. What more could they wish? Liberty? Freedom to govern themselves? Bah! Empty, meaningless words! A pitiful mockery to those who writhed in the grip of dictatorships. Slogans that did not fill the stomachs of those who lived in the depression-clouded democracies.
THE murmurs and whispers grew in volume; they became threatening shouts. The rulers of Earth quaked in their shoes. Ineradicable hatred filled them for the bland, genial Jovian who was responsible. The dictators, distant from the scene, believed the whole thing to be a frame-up. They accused the democracies of having put up a charlatan to overthrow their governments. Officially, they decried his pretense to Jovian parentage. He was but a sideshow freak, they sneered; a monster with agile muscles. Even his silly name was but the comic invention of American humor. The whole affair was ridiculous, they declared. And meanwhile they suppressed with ruthless venom the first rustlings of revolt in their own realms.
One day, about two months after he had appeared in a New York subway train, Palooka bounded into the laboratory of Dr. Schley. Floyd Garrett had just preceded him. There was much of painful import he wanted to discuss. But the Jovian gave him no chance. His round, dark face with its glowing headlight of a nose was wreathed in grins. Throaty chuckles bubbled out from toothless mouth, came unimpeded through the translation-screen.
"Good news, my friends," he cried "Good news!"
Dr. Schley looked up quickly from the feed line he was tightening. Floyd Garrett pivoted around. A strange feeling of alarm clutched at his heart. "What," he demanded, "do you call good news?"
"I have received a message from the Council of Baridu. They were finally able to locate me on their search-beams. They wish me to return immediately and report."
Something whirred within Floyd; stopped. He heard as from a great distance Schley's gasp of dismay.
"And you are going?" he asked in a choked voice. Carefully, slowly, his hand slid into his pocket.
Palooka surveyed him in round-eyed surprise. "Why, of course!" he exclaimed. "My mission is ended."
It was hard, what Floyd was going to do. In spite of everything, he had developed in these two short months a considerable fondness for the merry Jovian. Yet it had to be done. The liberty of Earth depended on it. He had thought it out carefully during long hours of sleepless tossing. If he could catch the Jovian off guard—
His hand whipped out suddenly. He shot from the hip, emptying his automatic full in the face of the alien. Palooka would have no time to adjust his defensive screen—
The steel bullets bounced back as though they were made of rubber. Great red sparks flew outward, caught them on the rebound, disintegrated them into little puffs of smoke.
The gun dropped from Floyd's fingers. He was suddenly weary. His last attempt to save Earth had failed. Pale, composed, he faced the Jovian. Without doubt the man from another planet, enraged at this sudden attempt upon his life, would blast him down. Well, it did not matter! Nothing mattered any more!
For once the eternal grin deserted Palooka's face. The scarlet vibrations gradually died away. He looked inscrutably at Floyd, at Dr. Schley. For a long moment no one spoke.
Floyd said quietly: "Go on, Palooka, kill me! What are you waiting for? I tried to kill you."
Slowly the Jovian raised his hand. Floyd braced himself against inevitable death. Dr. Schley cried out sharply. Then the hand dropped as slowly.
"I won't kill you," the man from Jupiter replied in toneless accents. "You both may go. I require this laboratory to set up my return apparatus."
"You might as well," Floyd cried passionately. "I'd rather die than live a slave to you and your kind, no matter how benevolent your rule. Take warning, Palooka, and put an end to me. Once I go out, I'll rouse the world to prevent your ever leaving this planet. We'll blast you out of existence if we can."
The Jovian's gaze was inscrutable. "Go!" he repeated.
Slowly, unwillingly, they went out.
THE news they flung around the world brought sudden realization to millions who had secretly believed the whole episode to be a gigantic hoax. A wave of hysteria swept the peoples. The American government acted promptly. Troops were rushed to the laboratory of Dr. Schley, armed with the latest death-dealing equipment. Scientists, under the leadership of the dispossessed physicist, went into huddles and evolved strange new electrical barrages.
But the isolated laboratory, standing on a little knoll outside the city of Washington, was impregnable.
It was completely inclosed in a transparent, tenuous play of light. Bombing squadrons roared overhead, dropping tons of detonite; great tanks crashed in vain against those immaterial surfaces; thousands of shells described screaming arcs through the flaming atmosphere. The fragile building remained intact, while Palooka could be seen through the unshattered windows calmly engaged in erecting a curious platform ringed in by shining tubular columns of steel.
The secretary of war, who had taken personal charge of operations, groaned in despair. "There is nothing we can do to stop him," he said bitterly.
"Yes, there is," Floyd snapped back. "We can rouse the peoples of the world to a sense of their future degradation. We can teach them to prefer death to slavery, now or hereafter. Let them descend upon this plain by the millions; let them prove to Palooka that they will die rather than lift a finger in toil for a master Jovian race; let them swear to lay Earth waste from end to end in one vast holocaust; and Palooka will see that the game is not worth the candle."
The secretary of war shook his head. "You can never rouse them to that extent, Garrett," he said. "Half of Earth's billions today live under dictatorships, under conditions far worse than any they might expect from the Jovians. They never fought for their freedom before."
"They will now," Floyd promised. "Their present slavery was sugar-coated with words; their future is a stark reality that even the most befuddled intellect can grasp."
His insistence won. The troops were called off. Only a strong guard remained to surround the laboratory; where, day by day, with strange slowness, the Jovian could be seen pottering about his queer apparatus.
The air waves were opened to Floyd. His winged, passionate words hurtled out on a hundred different wave lengths. Interpreters translated them immediately into all the languages and dialects of humankind.
HIS speeches were fiery to the point. "An alien race intends to make you slaves," he thundered. "You are alarmed, hysterical over the prospect. But you are slaves even now—slaves to the few who rule you with iron fists, slaves to your own selfishness and stupidity that do not permit you to enjoy in peace and plenty the abundant fruits of the earth. Show now that you are men, worthy of freedom—yes, ready to die for it, if need be—and perhaps we can still overwhelm the Jovian and prevent his return."
The dictators, the warlords of Europe and Asia, screamed out their wrath. Now more than ever, they were convinced that the whole affair was a plot to stir up revolution among their subjects. They tried to jam the air in order to prevent the subversive words from being heard, but the skill and resourcefulness of the American technicians battered down all interference.
Then they declared war upon the United States.
But their people had heard the propaganda. They mobilized with suspicious placidity. They obediently received their weapons. Then, in a single resistless wave, they flowed over their oppressors, obliterated them from view. Revolutionary governments, based on democratic principles, were hastily formed. That need to arm an army that might use those arms to revolt had ever menaced dictatorship.
"We are ready," they cried across the oceans. "Lead us against the Jovian. We are not afraid to die."
Night and day, by ship, by plane, by submarine, by every manner and mode of conveyance, millions of armed men, of a myriad races, converged on Washington. In all their diverse eyes, once separated by mutual hatreds, there now gleamed a common mighty determination. Liberty, the brotherhood of Earth, were mere words no longer. They were realities that no alien, no matter how mighty in science and superior knowledge, could take away.
In another week, Washington and the vast tidal plains of the Potomac seethed with a resistless horde. A hundred million men chanted in unison: "We will die rather than yield to the alien."
And still Palooka could be seen by the watchful guards going calmly about his work, without haste, without seeming heed of the mighty events that were shaking the world outside to its very foundations.
"I can't understand him," declared Dr. Schley, puzzled. "He seems to be making little or no progress with that apparatus he is erecting. I'm only a rank amateur in science compared to him, and possessed of one tenth his physical strength, yet I could have had the whole thing assembled a week ago."
"Whatever the reason," Floyd retorted grimly, "it's giving us our last chance. If necessary, we'll throw millions of men against his power barricade. They'll die, yes; but in the dying they'll pave the way for the living to break through. I'm positive Palooka can't control unlimited energy. Sooner or later his supply must become exhausted."
Dr. Clyde turned from the window of their temporary headquarters. It commanded a view of his old laboratory. "It is too late," he said dully. "Palooka has completed his quanta disintegrator. He is already taking his position between the steel columns."
Floyd paled, then galvanized into action. "We move at once," he exclaimed, and hurtled for his loud-speaker system.
BUT as his hand reached for the switch, a voice broke into the room. The intonationless, lisping voice of Palooka.
"It is no use, friend Floyd," it said. "All your sacrifice, or the sacrifice of millions of your comrades, will not help. The power I tap for my defensive, screens is unlimited. It comes from the magnetic beams that surge through space. And I am ready even now to take off for Baridu. But if you and Dr. Schley will come alone into this laboratory, I have something to say to you." The voice ceased. The two men stared at each other in dismay. Then, without a word, they went out through the door, through the silent guard lines, walking with death in their hearts toward the impalpable shimmer of light.
Millions of curious eyes followed their steady progress, wondering, waiting. The light darkened as they came to it; lit up again as they penetrated.
They found Palooka serious and pale-faced within the circle of his quanta disrupters.
"I am glad you came," he said. "I wish to say goodby. I am returning to my native Baridu; once more I shall see those of whom I am a part." A momentary grin illumined his features; died. "You were my friends, even though you tried your best to kill me."
"We loved you, Palooka," Floyd declared vehemently. "But even now, if we could, we would do our best to kill you." Something choked him, hurried his words. "For the first time in human history, man has achieved freedom and a sense of unity—when it is too late. Goodby! And take this message to your people. They will find a barren planet when they come to colonize. We shall destroy and lay waste every fertile field, obliterate our forests, blow up our mines and factories. We shall perish in a single universal holocaust rather than live on as slaves to an alien folk." The Jovian smiled gently. "That won't be necessary," he said. "Our people of Baridu will never leave their present home to seek your alien planet."
"What!" The simultaneous exclamation burst from both the Earthmen's lips.
"I am reporting to my people," said Palooka with a grimace, "that Earth is not inhabitable by the men of Baridu. As they knew beforehand. Your atmosphere, for one thing, is too thin; the hideous, raw sunlight that beats with blinding fierceness upon your planet is insupportable to eyes accustomed, as ours, to soft pastel shades and modulated tones. Your gravitational pull is so weak that my muscles ache all over from lack of effort. I hate the interminable and particularly poisonous green that pervades every nook and cranny of your world. I shall be happy once more to feast my eyes on lovely browns and reds. Obviously, your world is pleasant to you because you were designed to live in it. Equally obviously, someone designed for a different kind of world would find it hideous. I assure you, it is."
"But—but—" Floyd stammered, "you said all along how glorious you found life on Earth as compared to Baridu." Palooka grinned. "Sheer buncombe!" he avowed. "Every moment has been a torture to me. I couldn't wait for this day. Green and blue—green and blue! It's a wonder my eyes still function. Would you like to live on a world all crimson and violet?"
"Then why," demanded Dr. Schley, "didn't you go back at once instead of scaring the living daylights out of Earth?"
The Jovian's lidless eyes probed deep into their own. "I found," he murmured, "a people disunited, cooped up into artificial divisions, hating each other, killing. I am leaving a race united, strong in new-found understanding and mutual trust. A little session of unhappiness to a single being of Baridu did not matter."
He smiled. His hand moved downward. There was a flash of blinding light. The two men blinked, stared at the vacant platform.
Palooka was gone, and the complex machinery he had erected was crumbling before their eyes to a silting powder, incapable of examination or reconstruction.
Floyd said in awed tones. "He deliberately chose this method as the best means of uniting the peoples of Earth into a proud, free race. He purposely delayed until he saw that his work was accomplished. He was a great man; greater than any our race has even possessed.
Dr. Sampson T. Schley found it necessary to take off his glasses. They were misty. "Delayed !" said he, indignantly. "He came for that."
"Good old Palooka!" said Floyd fervently.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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