Tom W. Harris

“ Archy, June and Otto were still in Washington, and the President had called another conference. Of all the projections, the one of himself distressed Archy the most. They were insufferably arrogant. One had tried to pilot the plane that took him to the capital. Dozens had congregated at Full-Projection Studios, issuing orders to the staff. Twice, one had talked his way into a Presidential conference. "The only way you can tell they aren't real," said a guard, "is to poke them. I should poke somebody coming to see the President?"
"Can't people tell they aren't me by the way they act?" ”

“ Then one of the grey bats stirred, drew up its legs, and launched itself off the bulkhead. The others began to move. A laugh rolled in Bailey's throat. Like him, they had only been stunned.
They froze the encapsulated dead and patched the hole as best they could and found a clock still running and re-set their instruments, and each man had a souvenir piece of meteor stone, and less than two weeks after this was done the boredom dropped over them again as though excitement had never been. ”

“ It sounds quite strange."
"It's something that happens to humans," said Chester, "and I knew no Ravian could put up with it. Illogic disturbs you, and you tour in human beings only for the sake of one kind of emotion, the pleasant kind. In that room there was no logic, and the emotions were of a different kind, a kind you haven't heard of. The humans there were in what is called a depressive ward. They are illogically unhappy, all the time."
"I see," said Monnn through the lips of the attendant. "You have good logic, Mr. Forge. I have a new respect for human logic. ”

“ The next night Mattup began a fantastic streak of luck. It seemed he couldn't lose, and he was as unpleasant a winner as he was a loser.
"You boys don't know what card-playin' is," he'd gloat. "Think you're pretty smarty with all that science stuff but you can't win a plain old card game. You know why you can't beat me, boys?"
"Because you're too smart, I guess," said Danny. ”

“ The gray-haired woman's thoughts ran to the husband torn and destroyed when the early test ship burst on the moon-run, and the other woman's mind reached grieving toward her own husband, the gray-haired woman's son, whose ship had turned in an instant to a molten glob when its white metal coating suddenly peeled and it took the full, brutal hammer of the sun. ”

“ I said, drooling at the thought of what Myron Ferdinand would do for me when I told him the story.
"Well," said Renn, "it's really because of the Martians. As you know, they aren't awfully advanced—or maybe they've retrogressed—but they do have some wonderful things in medicine. Their medicine, or whatever it is, works on body cells. You've heard about the lizards that grow a new tail when the old one is cut off? Or a lobster growing a new claw? Well, all living body cells, including human, have some of what they call regenerative power. With most animals it's faint ”

“ He was staggering in ragged rings, his mouth gnashing at the bar, moving slower and slower like a machine running down. He stumbled into some little bushes, tangled, toppled, and there was a thrashing. The air stunk with the escaping vapor. ”

“ The cowboy hero projections are fighting the villains in a million bar-rooms. Fortunately they can't use real guns, but customers aren't convinced."
"Who cares about a bunch of drunks?" said Archy. Everybody scowled.
"The Pixie Owens projections I needn't dwell on. They've caused thousands of auto wrecks just by appearing along highways.
"The clowns and jugglers have put the circuses out of business by invading at show time. The jugglers get into ping-pong tournaments, juggle the balls. Nobody can keep them out. ”

“ With a surge of concentration he pushed the body forward. The umbrella-tip touched the driver, Minnn drove himself down the metal ferrule, somewhere an artery burst, and the body of the Perfesser sagged, wobbled, and, still carried forward by momentum, smashed into a wall and toppled over. It lay there on its back. Being front-man for a Ravian had been Perfesser Frye's last falsehood.
The truck got out of the alley, going fast, and kept going fast until it came to the asylum. The driver did not go to the back door—there might be people waiting for him. ”

“ Pete manipulated the button. Then he held his breath, glanced at Murph, and slipped into the pilot's cradle. It was too wide and deep but he imagined that he filled it. He imagined the switchboard alive and winking and his body weighing a thousand tons, then weighing nothing at all. The Hester had passed escape velocity, cast off gravity, and earth lay already ten thousand miles behind her. The board showed she had slewed a little because of the slight warp in the hull. ”

“ Matt had never told anyone how he felt about space. It was a freezing, heart-killing loneliness that waited icily, and now it had come in through the hull and was with him. His jaw clenched. He had no idea whether he could carry on alone, but he was going to. ”

“ Mice—in my studio! Number two—how soon can you have a scrambler going?"
"Fifteen minutes," said Otto proudly.
"Make it ten. Buzz me in the studio. We'll cut right into the program."
Back in the elevator, Archy crowed. "That's it, Baby—Archy House in action, everything taken care of."
"No credit for Otto?"
"You kidding. Otto's smart enough to work for me, but I'm smart enough to hire him. So who's smartest?" He juggled the mouse in his hand, reflectively. "Without me, Otto'd be nowhere. Somebody else'd have his idea. The smart guys are the promoters, chick. Why not marry one?" ”

“ Just behind Renn was a snarling tawny.
Renn laughed. "Little watchdog I brought back. He's a runt, you'll notice. Only about five feet high. Weighs about fifteen hundred pounds. He keeps prowlers off the grounds at night—so many people are curious these days. But don't worry, he can't get at you."
The runt was tied with steel cables about two inches thick. He was giving the cables a hard time.
"Come on in," laughed Kettering. "Those cables would hold an elephant." ”

“ It took DiCredico ten minutes to get through his talk with Bailey, speaking in tough, slicing sentences. The service was no bed of roses, said the skipper, and nobody in the service had ever claimed it was. It was a damned mean racket and nobody asked you to get into it. You volunteered. And you didn't have to stay. Before each voyage you could ask for honorable discharge, or earth duty if available. But once you blasted off, you had to stand the gaff. You had to.
There were men who cracked. There were whole crews. If one man lost control, another might, and finally all of them. ”

“ I don't see why we don't have all ponics, like everybody else. Gee whiz, can't I skip it just today. It's the next to the last day for the Hester."
"What's the Hester, for goodness sake?"
"Why, the rocket! The glass rocket!"
She held her son's head between her hands and held her eyes on his. "Pete, we told you not to go near that rocket. I mean it. Stay ... away ... from ... it! I know what I'm saying. Stay away from it!" ”

“ We're after the man Minnn moved to."
Monnn was unperturbed. "Good. You have about an hour."
"One thing," said Chester. "You say Minnn might kill. Any special way he'd go about it?"
"How should I know?" asked Monnn. "Minnn is an outlaw, under pursuit and away from his planet. On our planet there are no killings." And he hung up....
The Perfesser, umbrella under his arm, black serge suit dusty, walked down a long alley and into Steve's Beer Bar. Beer, he always figured, was a real help when you were perplexed. ”

“ Myron meant what he said. "I'll get it," I said with beautifully faked confidence.
"Renn Kettering will be glad to see you at his party tonight," Myron grinned. "I planted a rumor that you want to leave me and go to work for him. Maneuver a private talk, get him on the subject of how he made that damned movie. Maybe he'll let something slip."
"Great idea," I said. Movie magnates always have great ideas.
"Talk to his cast. And slip off alone if you can and look his house over. I don't care what you do, but come back here with the information. And don't get big ideas on selling out to Kettering. ”

“ Things went on almost normally at the Bayless reactor. It was a privately-owned pool-type reactor, and we were sent samples of all sorts of material for irradiation from all over the country. Danny was one of the irradiation men; I generally handled controlling. The Outsiders had filled the place with telescreens and guards, and all mail was opened, but there was no real interference with the work. I began to worry a little about Danny. Almost every afternoon he spent an hour alone in our room, with the door closed.
Mattup kept getting worse; an animal with power. ”

“ The tension about their mission to Krotzer, tighter from hour to hour only made it worse. They began to hate each other's mannerisms, the way a person scratched an ear or cleared a throat. It's getting you, Bailey, Matt told himself. This way men go nuts.
... Go nuts, echoed the minds that were him without knowing. Go nuts ... go nuts ... go nuts ...
It was after chow that he did it. He walked over and turned off the television. All kinds of emotions stood on the faces of the others. Rage was the one on the face of a hulking man named Regan. ”

“ The Archy projections are organizing them. They've horned into every village, town, city, state, and national governmental conclave.
"Projections hunt audiences. They have disrupted every stage show in the country. They put on shows in people's living rooms, in parks, in the middle of the street. A few got jobs with stock companies, in movies, and so on, but they can only play one part—the one they were doing for Full-Projection."
"I'm entitled to a percentage of their earnings," said Archy.
"They've all been fired," said Otto. ”

“ He could learn to live on this planet—perhaps he could even get governmental sanctuary, though that was not essential. He would not be lonely. Ravians do not get lonely. They do, however, have a sense of power.
But the pursuers were coming down the hall, the Ravian in the talking-attendant attempting to sort through the twisted minds, the person from the tourist service almost out of his own mind. And though Minnn was having sport, he was a little tired. He turned the eyes of his host toward the group of hunters, and saw that they had stopped coming and stood talking. ”

“ Mattup was a guard at the reactor installation at Bayless, Kentucky, where my friend Danny Hern and I were part of the staff when the Outsiders took everything over. In what god-forsaken mountain hole they had found Mattup, and how they got him to sell out to them, I don't know. He was an authentic human, though. You can tell an Outsider.
Mattup and Danny and I were playing high-low-jack the night Uncle Pete was killed, sitting on the widewalk where Mattup had a view of the part of the station he was responsible for. High-low-jack is a back-country card game ”

“ And I owed it to myself, my career, and to Myron to stay with her just a bit longer. The fact that I couldn't see any scars didn't prove there weren't any. I would try to get a chance for a more thorough check. The sense of touch versus the sense of sight.
"You people did a wonderful job in 'Mars Hazard,'" I said. "I suppose the party is kind of in your honor." Then I noticed something, and ran my eyes over the crowd to check. "It looks like Renn only invited the actors from the Mars part of the film!"
"It isn't really a party for the whole cast. Some of us happen to be staying out here." ”

“ An unconvincing smile crossed his face, which like all their faces was dead white from months of being away from anything like sunlight. "A lot of lousy things can happen in space. I hope we get less than our share of them."
Bailey snugged the headset over his ears. The voice of Krotzer was weaker. Bailey pictured him crouched in his bubble, his radar broken and only fit for sending, wondering if any lonely ship at all was hearing him, and if it was, if it would arrive in time. Krotzer had a wife, and a child he had never seen. ”

“ Pete basked in the shared male moments. "What was it you were telling me about hyperspace yesterday?"
Murph told him more about hyperspace, the untapped dimension which had to exist, the magic hole in space into which a ship would slip someday and emerge not in new systems but new galaxies. "When we find hyperspace and get the photon drive—then we'll really be making it." ”

“ Find out how Renn Kettering of PGP Studios had shot those startling sequences Mars Hazard, an international hit. It was super realism—the critics were calling it "Art's answer to the newsreel" and stuff like that. The scenes had been shot on Mars. Renn had fabulous influence. In this case he must have paid off the government itself, because the crew of the third ship to touch the new planet had been mostly his own actors and technicians and Renn himself was along. These factors were known to every hipster. ”

“ Interviews with Ravians always made Chester nervous. They wouldn't use the psi-control voice sets, and there was something uncanny in talking to a human, a talking-attendant, when you knew it wasn't the man speaking at all, but the alien intelligence he was temporarily host to. ”

“ Danny told him. "Thing to do is ride out the bad luck, not fight it."
Orley picked his nose and looked at his cards, "Bid four," he growled.
Four is the highest possible bid. Tim played his cards well and he had good ones. He had sewed up three of his points when we heard somebody moving around down on the reactor floor. It was old Uncle Pete Barker, one of the technicians.
"What you want down there?" bawled Mattup.
"Just left my cap by the control room," said Uncle Pete, "and thought I'd go get it."
"You keep the hell away from there," grunted Mattup. ”

“ Basically a projection is a replica of the person being projected. Pixie, for instance, has never strip-teased on one of the shows...."
"I should hope not!" snuffed the Secretary.
"... but the projection Pixie does what the real Pixie has implicit in her nature. Our friend the armadillo, being only a cartoon, is different. About all he can do is repeat commercials.
"Physically, the projections eat no food. ”

“ And after the war thousands of the rockets had been sold, and many had gone to the young men like Murph whom the war had made into spacemen before they had a chance at any other business and who did not want now, ever, to be anything but spacemen, rocketmen. They went about the country selling rocket rides. Tradition had given them a name from another postwar epoch: barnstormers.
Pete handed the wrench to the barnstormer. "Which are the dark-light controls?"
"Holy tubes," grinned Murph, pushing the black hair from his eyes, "If you weren't such a handy kid you'd be a nuisance. Here." ”

“ Nobody saw anything.
"Something's damned queer," said Regan.
"Something's always queer," said DiCredico. "Now, here's the plan. Get your suits on. From Krotzer's reports, whatever is after him is stopped or impeded by material substance. Then we go in one at a time. I go first. If nothing happens to me, Regan comes in. If he makes it, Bailey. Then Fry. If anything goes wrong, I want the man with next turn to try the other side of the bubble. Except you, Fry. If you're the only one left, get back to the ship. You'll have to make a report, and you and the men can decide the next step. ”

“ I make a very nice salary working for Renn up here—mostly newsreels and a few dramas, although even with the medicine nobody will volunteer to make a show where the tawnies tear them up. And there are some very nice things about being a Martian. Arden is even more interesting now that we both have three more senses. And Mars is wonderful. ”

“ Minnn was not enjoying himself. Humans were fun when they were having fun, but other moods were unendurable. Coupled with illogic it was worse. Minnn was considering shifting to the truck driver when the man suddenly arose. "Well, night, Steve, Perfesser—I gotta get the sheets a-rolling," said the man, and vanished out the back door. ”

“ Archy asked June. "Cheeky, bossy—OBVIOUSLY they aren't me."
"Obviously, huh?" said June. "Let's go, or we'll miss the conference."
President Conklin opened the discussion with general remarks.
"In the first place, the Attorney-General informs me that Mr. House is legally responsible for the behavior of these projections—they are his agents, insofar as they are beings; his possessions, insofar as they are things. If Mr. House cannot rid the country of them, he is liable to extremely grave consequences."
"Hold on," blurted Archy, with a dark glance at Otto. "My master-scrambler was sabotaged. ”

“ I was about halfway to the house when I saw the tawny. It was coming toward me, from behind the house a quarter-mile away. I crouched and started a trot, and that seemed to attract it. It came in long, clumsy bounds, and I could hear it huffing.
It was time to try the stunt from the old movie. The flick showed some jungle joes hunting boar. This character was kneeling on the ground with a spear in his hands. The butt was braced against the ground and the point was toward the boar. The boar was charging. The idea seemed to be that it would spit itself. ”

“ The conference moved to another room. "Better chink the door," said Otto.
The Secretary of the Interior began anew. Archy listened closely; there would be a chance to trip this guy up.
"It's estimated that 500,000,000 projections are at large," said the secretary. "Here are some things that have happened:
"Throngs of the cowboy projections are heading west. They get on horses and chase cattle. The horses buck them off, they climb right back on. Half the horses in the country are so crazed they'll be useless forever. Villain projections are hiding all over the nation. ”

“ He had something to ask Murph.
"Aw fooner," he muttered.
His mother swung him to her lap. "Shall we tell him about the surprise?"
Pete thought he caught something odd—a nearly invisible craft or knowingness—in the glance they traded.
"You didn't get much for your birthday last week, Pete," his mother beamed, "so we decided to give you a kind of late birthday party. You're going to have that picnic on Indian Hill. It'll be an all-day picnic, with all the youngsters you know, hunting for arrowheads and relics. We're going in Mr. Fobey's copter." ”