Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Vulcan?” said Mr. Johnson, horrified. “A fire sign on a Wednesday?”

“What?” said the driver. “Anyway, I said to myself if I got no fare between here and there I’d bet the ten, but if anyone looked like they needed the cab I’d take it as a omen and I’d take the ten home to the wife.”

“You were very right,” said Mr. Johnson heartily. “This is Wednesday, you would have lost your money. Monday, yes, or even Saturday. But never never never a fire sign on a Wednesday. Sunday would have been good, now.”

“Vulcan don’t run on Sunday,” said the driver.

“You wait till another day,” said Mr. Johnson. “Down this street, please, driver. I’ll get off on the next corner.”

“He told me Vulcan, though,” said the driver.

“I’ll tell you,” said Mr. Johnson, hesitating with the door of the cab half-open. “You take that ten dollars and I’ll give you another ten dollars to go with it, and you go right ahead and bet that money on any Thursday on any horse that has a name indicating ... let me see, Thursday . . . well, grain. Or any growing food.”

“Grain?” said the driver. “You mean a horse named, like, Wheat or something?”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Johnson. “Or, as a matter of fact, to make it even easier, any horse whose name includes the letters C, R, L. Perfectly simple.”

“Tall Corn?” said the driver, a light in his eye. “You mean a horse named, like, Tall Corn?”

“Absolutely,” said Mr. Johnson. “Here’s your money.”

“Tall Corn,” said the driver. “Thank you, mister.”

“Goodby,” said Mr. Johnson.

He was on his own corner and went straight up to his apartment. He let himself in and called “Hello?” and Mrs. Johnson answered from the kitchen, “Hello, dear, aren’t you early?”

“Took a taxi home,” Mr. Johnson said. “I remembered the cheesecake, too. What’s for dinner?”

Mrs. Johnson came out of the kitchen and kissed him; she was a comfortable woman, and smiling as Mr. Johnson smiled. “Hard day?” she asked.

“Not very,” said Mr. Johnson, hanging his coat in the closet. “How about you?”

“So-so,” she said. She stood in the kitchen doorway while he settled into his easy chair and took off his good shoes and took out the paper he had bought that morning. “Here and there,” she said.

“I didn’t do so badly,” Mr. Johnson said. “Couple young people.”

“Fine,” she said. “I had a little nap this afternoon, took it easy most of the day. Went into a department store this morning and accused the woman next to me of shoplifting, and had the store detective pick her up. Sent three dogs to the pound— you know, the usual thing. Oh, and listen,” she added, remembering.

“What?” asked Mr. Johnson.

“Well,” she said, “I got onto a bus and asked the driver for a transfer, and when he helped someone else first I said that he was impertinent, and quarreled with him. And then I said why wasn’t he in the army, and I said it loud enough for everyone to hear, and I took his number and I turned in a complaint. Probably got him fired.”

“Fine,” said Mr. Johnson. “But you do look tired. Want to change over tomorrow?”

“I would like to,” she said. “I could do with a change.”

“Right,” said Mr. Johnson. “What’s for dinner?”

“Veal cutlet.”

“Had it for lunch,” said Mr. Johnson.

Miss Jackson, cheerfully convinced that there’s no help for it anyhow, saw no need to investigate the backgrounds or genealogy of her Dei Sans Machina. Willard Marsh (whose name is new to s-f readers, but more familiar in the literary quarterlies) now goes into great detail about his very definitely Ex Machina Super-Busybodies.

The missionaries came out of the planetary system of a star they didn’t call Antares. They called it, naturally enough, The Sun—just as home was Earth, Terra, or simply The World. And naturally enough, being the ascendant animal on Earth, they called themselves human beings. They were looking for extraterrestrial souls to save.

They had no real hope of finding humans like themselves in this wondrously diversified universe. But it wasn’t against all probability that, in their rummaging, there might not be a humanoid species to whom they could reach down a helping paw; some emergent cousin with at least a rudimentary symmetry from snout to tail, and hence a rudimentary soul.

The ship they chose was a compact scout, vaguely resembling the outside of an orange crate—except that they had no concept of an orange crate and, being a tesseract, it had no particular outside. It was simply an expanding cube (and as such, quite roomy) whose “interior” was always paralleling its “exterior” (or attempting to), in accordance with all the well-known basic and irrefutable laws on the subject.

A number of its sides occupied the same place at the same time, giving a hypothetical spectator the illusion of looking down merging sets of railway tracks. This, in fact, was its precise method of locomotion. The inner cube was always having to catch up, caboose-fashion, with the outer one in time (or space, depending on one’s perspective). And whenever it had done so, it would have arrived with itself—at approximately wherever in the space-time continuum it had been pointed.

When they felt the jar of the settling geodesies, the crew crowded at the forward visiplate to see where they were. It was the outskirts of a G type star system. Silently they watched the innermost planet float past, scorched and craggy, its sunward side seeming about to relapse to a molten state.

The Bosun-Colonel turned to the Conductor. “A bit of a disappointment I’m afraid, sir. Surely with all that heat…?”

“Steady, lad. The last wicket’s not been bowled.” The Conductor’s whiskers quivered in amusement at his next-in-command’s impetuosity. “You’ll notice that we’re dropping downward. If the temperature accordingly continues dropping—”

He couldn’t shrug, he wasn’t physiologically capable of it, but it was apparent that he felt they’d soon reach a planet whose climate could support intelligent life.

If the Bosun-Colonel had any ideas that such directions as up and down were meaningless in space, he kept them to himself. As the second planet from its sun hove into view, he switched on the magniscan eagerly.

“I say, this is more like it. Clouds and all that sort of thing. Should we have a go at it, sir?”

The Conductor yawned. “Too bloody cloudy for my taste. Too equivocal. Let’s push on,” he said languidly. “I have a hunch the third planet might be just our dish of tea.”

Quelling his disappointment, the Bosun-Colonel waited for the third planet to swim into being. And when it did, blooming like an orchid in all its greens and moistnesses, he could scarcely contain his excitement.

“Why, it looks just like Earth,” he marveled. “Gad, sir, what a master stroke of navigation. How did you realize this would be it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the Conductor said modestly. “Things usually have a habit of occurring in threes. I’m quite a student of numerology, you know.” Then he remembered the Mission and drew himself erect on all his legs. “You may prepare for landing, Mister,” he ordered crisply.

The Bosun-Colonel shifted over to manual and busied himself at the helm, luffing the square craft down the troughs of air. Gliding over the vast tropical oceans, he put down at a large land mass above a shallow warm sea, twenty-five degrees below the northern pole.

Too numbed for comment, the crew stared out at the alien vista. They’d heard of retarded life forms from other Missionary expeditions—of planets where the inhabitants, in extreme emergency, had been known to commit murder. But this was surely the worst, the most vicious imaginable in the galaxy.