Erik Fennel

“ Mike was shaking me roughly and there was a wild gleam in his eyes. A glance showed me he'd pulled off Bill's sleep mask too.
"—— —— ——!" Mike yelled, but of course I couldn't hear him. In those Wilson-drive spaceships it was utterly impossible to talk between blast-off and landing.
Then he shoved a pad under my nose.
"MARTIANS TAKING OVER!!! EARTH IN DEADLY PERIL!!!" he had written.
Little slimy bugs with ice-cold, prickly feet marched up and down my spine. Every man has his private, personal phobia, something that throws him into an irrational panic, and mine has always been lunatics. ”

“ If they'd been humans I'd have yelled for help, but with Marties I'd have been wasting my breath.
Mike kept stepping up the power. His lips were tight and his eyes squinted in concentration. And then I saw one of the Marties move. Actually make an aimless movement. He shifted from one foot to the other. The second turned his hand from side to side as though uneasy. The third took a few steps back and forth. And Martians just didn't act like that. ”

“ It was like that all over Earth. Each day more and more people got longer spells where they'd do absolutely nothing. It was raising the very devil with organized civilization and nobody could do anything about it. And the worst of it was that the victims didn't seem to mind. Everything was slowing down, and it made it plenty tough to do business with the outfits that furnished our supplies. People kept acting more and more like zombies—or Martians. But nobody thought of connecting the Complex with the Cultural Emissaries.
The whole thing hit me right in my pet phobia. ”

“ Bill pulled his head in again, and while we waited we turned off Mike's sleep gas once more. This time we really had a faint hope that with the Wilsons off he'd be himself.
But his first words were, "Will you damned fools turn me loose? I'm not crazy! We've got to do something, and quick. Hell, I don't want to be like a damned Martie! They don't get any fun out of life." ”

“ Mike swears the Thing meant no harm and the Cultural Emissaries couldn't help themselves, and I believe him. In fact I feel rather sorry for the poor Marties themselves. It must be tough on them to have to live with themselves and each other.
The psychos would probably name the Marties' current condition Acute Virulent Mass Burke-itis and laugh it off. But the psychos don't know Mike as Bill and I do. So Bill insists it's our duty as Earth citizens to divulge everything, and I'm inclined to agree. The thought of a whole planetful of Marties obsessed with Mike's sense of humor is appalling. ”

“ It sizzled.
"My!" he said, sounding like the smooth menace from some telaudio spooky-show. "What a nice red nose you're going to have—if you don't start talking!"
"Mike!" I begged. "You can't do that to me! We're old friends! Remember?"
But he did it. The tip of the iron on the tip of my nose, and it hurt. I yowled, mostly in utter panic rather than pain. My phobia was working overtime.
"Enough?" he asked. "I'll keep it up if I have to."
I thought it over. Crazy as he was, he might throw a dead short across the secondaries. Fission packs won't stand that without exploding. So I talked. ”

“ I'd tried the Hustic once and it hadn't worked at all.
"See," I said. "There aren't any Martians in there. They aren't making war on Earth."
"Stop interrupting," he snapped.
How much of what happened next was his own idea and how much he got from Polly I still don't know. For minutes at a time he'd think into the machine. Then I'd switch over and he'd lie there and grin. Finally he lay there listening so long and so quietly I thought he'd gone to sleep. I began to relax.
Then Mike screamed and I came out of my chair like a shot.
"Take it off! Take it off!" he shouted. ”

“ But we are lucky. The Marties never explained why they called home their Cultural Emissaries, abandoned space travel, cut off Luminophone contact and excluded Earthmen and Earth ships from Mars. They couldn't, because they themselves weren't sure what had happened. And amid the confusion on Earth the last Mars transit of the spaceship Banshee escaped official attention, which was largely due to Polly's good sense in making Mike see he'd better keep his big mouth shut. Our story would only have caused us trouble, even after the Scare died down. ”

“ Bill and I took a good look. That stubborn, crazy Irishman had made a new bar to replace the one I'd hidden and cut down an empty food can as a tube shield.
"GOT TO TURN BACK, WARN EARTH," Mike wrote. "THE CULTURAL—"
Bill and I looked at each other. Swinging a ship in mid-transit can be done, but it's hardly safe or good practice. Mike was no puny infant, and we knew we had to get him before he became really violent.
Mike read our faces and started to draw back, but he was too late. Bill pinioned his arms in a bear hug and I slipped a sleep mask over his face. ”

“ And we knew Polly was going to take it awfully hard.
The rest of that transit was twelve on and twelve off for Bill and me, and every minute I was awake I was afraid I might follow Mike down Lunacy Lane. Or that he might get loose. A couple of times we brought him awake, but each time we were glad we'd turned extra air pressure into his cushions. He struggled, and by watching his lips we knew he was still raving.
The calculations for landing spiral made us sweat. We'd left the astrogation to Mike so completely we'd gotten rusty. We missed him even more making contact. ”

“ Such complications! They have many different governments with a hundred different political parties, and they talk and talk, vote and vote. They argue.
"Things like Earthmen's gloves they make. Of course they will not fit Martian hands and they carry them only to hit in each other's faces. Then they fight duels.
"They make liquor and drink it, and how crazy-drunk they get. Then, Great Space, they even try to sing!
"They make jokes and play pranks, too, something they never did before."
Tlenow was slit-eyed with amazement at such illogical Martian behavior. ”

“ So Bill packed the saddlebags of the little sandcycle and went sputtering off to question Marties about other Marties who might know of still other Marties who might know what rhudite was and perhaps with enough patient prodding might divulge some method for making a trade and getting the stuff to our ship. And each question would take ten minutes, minimum, for an answer. The three hundred Cultural Emissaries had been admitted to Earth on the theory that they might pick up Earth ideas that would facilitate trading. ”

“ And because the Thing was aware of every sensation of a whole planetful of creatures it grew very tired of processing irrelevant information and began to propagate the idea that any thought or action not absolutely essential for survival was wrong and should be suppressed, and that emotions—which interfered with transmission of factual data—were unthinkably degenerate, to be shunned at all costs. ”

“ Everything powered off the secondaries—which meant nearly everything but the main drivers—was dead. Mike had really fixed that.
Then one of the Wilsons burned a liner, and with grave misgivings we had to turn Mike loose. We didn't like the notion of spacing a trajectory on power settings plotted by a crazy man, but the calculations for unbalanced drive needed his astrogating skill. With the mechanical astroplotter out of action it was too much for Bill and me. ”

“ Wilsons did something to a man's nerves and emotions. A crew might be good friends on the ground, but that constant barrage of driver supersonics made them hate each other as long as they were in transit. Occasionally some poor guy would crack wide open, go space-batty, and when that happened the victim almost always wanted to kill his crewmates and wreck the controls. Earplugs were useless, for you don't hear supersonics. They sneak in through your pores and get under your toenails and even come down through the hairs of your head. They get in everywhere. ”

“ Mike grunted. "I'm not tuned on them, but the wave spills over."
"Huh?"
Mike didn't answer. He just sat there thinking into the Hustic.
An hour passed that way. Then I heard a sound like a whole forest full of infuriated parrots. It came from the direction of T'lith, and it grew louder by the minute.
Mike looked up. "Bill should be here soon."
He was right. I heard the sandcycle, and then the squeal of its brakes below the entry port.
"Olsen!" Bill was yelling as he scrambled in. "Hell is loose out there! The Marties—"
I was at the mercy of a lunatic—and the Marties waiting outside! ”

“ Mike opened the Hustic case, whistling off key as he moved around, and replaced the original bar and tube shield and condenser with his homemade parts. Then he got to work on the bar with my delicate and expensive set of instrument files ruining them completely on the soft copper alloy.
"Be quiet, lunatic!" he barked every time I protested.
He spent hours filing on that bar, putting on the helmet and testing, then filing some more. And there was absolutely nothing I could do. He had so much air pressure in my cushions I couldn't even squirm. ”

“ The only pleasant part of spaceflight before the Halstead-Jenkins Mass Diminutors replaced Wilson drivers two years ago were the off-shifts when you could crawl into the cushions and turn on the sleep gas. Every sane and normal spacehand gassed out as much of the time as possible. It was safest.
For the Wilsons radiated supersonics with a frequency somewhere in the neighborhood of a fingernail scratching down a blackboard. Only amplified a million, billion, jillion stinking times. ”

“ That's how you get with Wilsons running.
On my next time up I found a sketch of myself wet-nursing the power packs fastened to the bulkhead, and an alleged poem that was mostly putrid puns. Mike's idea of humor.
Out of curiosity I put on the electrode-studded Hustic helmet and turned the set to receive.
Wham! Stars wheeled and comets fizzed and vague dark shapes glided and circled and balls of fire grew and exploded in showers of multicolored sparks.
I yanked the helmet off. But quick. ”