Fredric Brown - The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

The President smiled grimly. “What word, Walter? The only single word of importance I can think of has already been given—and hasn’t done army morale any good at all. Tell General Wickersham to wait; maybe I’ll be able to see him within a few days. Who’s next on the list?”

“Professor Gresham of Harvard.”

“His specialty?”

“Philosophy and metaphysics.”

The President sighed. “Send him in.”

“You actually mean, Professor, that you have no opinions at all? You won’t even guess whether X is God, devil, extra-galactic superman, terrestrial scientist, Martian—?”

“What good would a guess do, Mr. President? I am certain of only one thing—and that is that we will never know who or what X is. Mortal or immortal, terrestrial or extra-galactic, microcosmic or macrocosmic, four dimensional or twelve, he is sufficiently more clever than we to keep us from discovering his identity. And it is obviously necessary to his plan that we do not know.”

“Why?”

“It is obvious that he wants us to disobey that command, isn’t it? And who ever heard of men obeying a command unless they knew—or thought they knew— who gave it? If anybody ever learns who gave that command, he can decide whether to obey it or not. As long as he doesn’t know, it’s psychologically almost impossible for him to obey it.”

The President nodded slowly. “I see what you mean. Men either obey or disobey commands—even commands they think come from God—according to their own will. But how can they obey an order, and still be men, when they don’t know for sure where the order came from?”

He laughed. “And even the Commies don’t know for sure whether we Capitalists did it or not. And as long as they’re not sure—”

“Did we?”

The President said, “I’m beginning to wonder. Even though I know we didn’t, it doesn’t seem more unlikely than anything else.” He tilted back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. After a while he said softly, “Anyway, I don’t think there’s going to be a war. Either side would be mad to start it.”

There wasn’t a war.

The big sun was crimson in a violet sky. At the edge of the brown plain, dotted with brown bushes, lay the red jungle.

McGarry strode toward it. It was tough work and dangerous work, searching in those red jungles, but it had to be done. And he’d searched a thousand of them; this was just one more.

He said, “Here we go, Dorothy. All set?”

The little five-limbed creature that rested on his shoulder didn’t answer, but then it never did. It couldn’t talk, but it was something to talk to. It was company. In size and weight it felt amazingly like a hand resting on his shoulder.

He’d had Dorothy for—how long? At a guess, four years. He’d been here about five, as nearly as he could reckon it, and it had been about a year before he’d found her. Anyway, he assumed that Dorothy was of the gender sex, if for no better reason than the gentle way she rested on his shoulder, like a woman’s hand.

“Dorothy,” he said, “reckon we’d better get ready for trouble. Might be lions or tigers in there.”

He unbuckled his sol-gun holster and let his hand rest on the butt of the weapon, ready to draw it quickly. For the thousandth time, at least, he thanked his lucky stars that the weapon he’d managed to salvage from the wreckage of his spacer had been a sol-gun, the one and only weapon that worked practically forever without refills or ammunition. A sol-gun soaked up energy. And, when you pulled the trigger, it dished it out. With any weapon but a sol-gun he’d never have lasted even one year on Kruger III.

Yes, even before he quite reached the edge of the red jungle, he saw a lion. Nothing like any lion ever seen on Earth, of course. This one was bright magenta, just enough different in color from the purplish bushes it crouched behind so he could see it. It had eight legs, all jointless and as supple and strong as an elephant’s trunk, and a scaly head with a beak like a toucan’s.

McGarry called it a lion. He had as much right to call it that as anything else, because it had never been named. Or if it had, the namer had never returned to Earth to report on the flora and fauna of Kruger III. Only one spacer had ever landed here before McGarry’s, as far as the records showed, and it had never taken off again. He was looking for it now; he’d been looking for it systematically for the five years he’d been here.

If he found it, it might—just barely might—contain intact some of the electronic transistors which had been destroyed in the crash-landing of his own spacer. And if it contained enough of them, he could get back to Earth.

He stopped ten paces short of the edge of the red jungle and aimed the sol-gun at the bushes behind which the lion crouched. He pulled the trigger and there was a bright green flash, brief but beautiful—oh, so beautiful—and the bushes weren’t there any more, and neither was the lion.

McGarry chuckled softly. “Did you see that, Dorothy? That was green, the one color you don’t have on this bloody red planet of yours. The most beautiful color in the universe, Dorothy. Green! And I know where there’s a world that’s mostly green, and we’re going to get there, you and I. Sure we are. It’s the world I came from, and it’s the most beautiful place there is, Dorothy. You’ll love it.”

He turned and looked back over the brown plain with brown bushes, the violet sky above, the crimson sun. The eternally crimson sun Kruger, which never set on the day side of this planet, one side of which always faced it as one side of Earth’s moon always faces Earth.

No day and night—unless one passed the shadow line into the night side, which was too freezingly cold to sustain life. No seasons. A uniform, never-changing temperature, no wind, no storms.

He thought for the thousandth, or the millionth, time that it wouldn’t be a bad planet to live on, if only it were green like Earth, if only there was something green upon it besides the occasional flash of his sol-gun. It had breathable atmosphere, moderate temperature ranging from about forty Fahrenheit near the shadow line to about ninety at the point directly under the red sun, where its rays were straight down instead of slanting. Plenty of food, and he’d learned long ago which plants and animals were, for him, edible and which made him ill. Nothing he’d ever tried was outright poisonous.

Yes, a wonderful world. He’d even got used, by now, to being the only intelligent creature on it. Dorothy was helpful, there. Something to talk to, even if she didn’t talk back.

Except—Oh, God—he wanted to see a green world again.

Earth, the only planet in the known universe where green was the predominant color, where plant life was based on chlorophyll.

Other planets, even in the solar system, Earth’s neighbors, had no more to offer than greenish streaks in rare rocks, an occasional tiny life-form of a shade that might be called brownish green if you wanted to call it that. Why, you could live years on any planet but Earth, anywhere in the cosmos, and never see green.

McGarry sighed. He’d been thinking to himself, but now he thought out loud, to Dorothy, continuing his thoughts without a break. It didn’t matter to Dorothy. “Yes, Dorothy,” he said, “it’s the only planet worth living on—Earth! Green fields, grassy lawns, green trees. Dorothy, I’ll never leave it again, once I get back there. I’ll build me a shack out in the woods, in the middle of trees, but not trees so thick that the grass doesn’t grow under them. Green grass. And I’ll paint the shack green, Dorothy. We’ve even got green pigments back on Earth.”