Fredric Brown - The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

I was tired. I put my head on my arms on top of the desk, and I must have dozed off for a minute.

I looked up at the sound of footsteps coming through the doorway; they weren’t Reagan’s footsteps. The illusions were getting better now, I saw. It was—or appeared to be—a gorgeous redhead. It couldn’t be, of course. There are a few women on Placet, mostly wives of technicians but—

She said, “Don’t you remember me, Mr. Rand?” It was a woman; her voice was a woman’s voice, and a beautiful voice. Sounded vaguely familiar, too.

“Don’t be silly,” I said; “how can I recognize you at mid-per—”

My eyes suddenly caught a glimpse of the clock past her shoulder, and it was a clock and not a funeral wreath or a cuckoo’s nest, and I realized suddenly that everything else in the room was back to normal. And that meant midperiod was over, and I wasn’t seeing things.

My eyes went back to the redhead. She must be real, I realized. And suddenly I knew her, although she’d changed, changed plenty. All changes were improvements, although Michaelina Witt had been a very pretty girl when she’d been in my extra-terrestrial Botany III class at Earth City Polytech four—no, five years ago.

She’d been pretty, then. Now she was beautiful. She was stunning. How had the teletalkies missed her? Or had they? What was she doing here ? She must have just got off the Ark , but—I realized I was still gawking at her. I stood up so fast I almost fell across the desk.

“Of course I remember you, Miss Witt,” I stammered. “Won’t you sit down? How did you come here? Have they relaxed the no-visitors rule?”

She shook her head, smiling. “I’m not a visitor, Mr. Rand. Center advertised for a technician-secretary for you, and I tried for the job and got it, subject to your approval, of course. I’m on probation for a month, that is.”

“Wonderful,” I said. It was a masterpiece of understatement. I started to elaborate on it: “Marvelous—”

There was the sound of someone clearing his throat. I looked around; Reagan was in the doorway. This time not as a blue skeleton or a two-headed monster. Just plain Reagan.

He said, “Answer to your radiotype just came.” He crossed over and dropped it on my desk. I looked at it. “O.K. August 19th,” it read. My momentary wild hope that they’d failed to accept my resignation went down among the widgie birds. They’d been as brief about it as I’d been.

August 19th—the next arrival of the Ark . They certainly weren’t wasting any time—mine or theirs. Four days!

Reagan said, “I thought you’d want to know right away, Phil.”

“Yeah,” I told him. I glared at him. “Thanks.” With a touch of spite—or maybe more than a touch—I thought, well, my bucko, you don’t get the job, or that message would have said so; they’re sending a replacement on the next shuttle of the Ark.

But I didn’t say that; the veneer of civilization was too thick. I said, “Miss Witt, I’d like you to meet—”

They looked at each other and started to laugh, and I remembered. Of course, Reagan and Michaelina had both been in my botany class, as had Michaelina’s twin brother, Ichabod. Only, of course, no one ever called the redheaded twins Michaelina and Ichabod. It was Mike and Ike, once you knew them.

Reagan said, “I met Mike getting off the Ark . I told her how to find your office, since you weren’t there to do the honors.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Did the reinforcing bars come?”

“Guess so. They unloaded some crates. They were in a hurry to pull out again. They’ve gone.”

I grunted.

Reagan said, “Well, I’ll check the ladings. Just came to give you the radiotype; thought you’d want the good news right away.”

He went out, and I glared after him. The louse. The—

Michaelina said, “Am I to start work right away, Mr. Rand?”

I straightened out my face and managed a smile. “Of course not,” I told her. “You’ll want to look around the place first. See the scenery and get acclimated. Want to stroll into the village for a drink?”

“Of course.”

We strolled down the path toward the little cluster of buildings, all small, one-story, and square.

She said, “It’s—it’s nice. Feels like I’m walking on air, I’m so light. Exactly what is the gravity?”

“Point seven four,” I said. “If you weigh—umm, a hundred twenty pounds on Earth, you weigh about eighty-nine pounds here. And on you, it looks good.”

She laughed, “Thank you, Professor—Oh, that’s right; you’re not a professor now. You’re now my boss, and I must call you Mr. Rand.”

“Unless you’re willing to make it Phil, Michaelina?”

“If you’d call me Mike; I detest Michaelina, almost as much as Ike hates Ichabod.”

“How is Ike?”

“Fine. Has a student-instructor job at Poly, but he doesn’t like it much.” She looked ahead at the village. “Why so many small buildings instead of a few bigger ones?”

“Because the average life of a structure of any kind on Placet is about three weeks. And you never know when one is going to fall down—with someone inside. It’s our biggest problem. All we can do is make them small and light, except the foundations, which we make as strong as possible. Thus far, nobody has been hurt seriously in the collapse of a building, for that reason, but—Did you feel that?”

“The vibration? What was it, an earthquake?”

“No,” I said. “It was a flight of birds.”

“What?”

I had to laugh at the expression on her face. I said, “Placet is a crazy place. A minute ago, you said you felt as though you were walking on air. Well, in a way, you are doing just exactly that. Placet is one of the rare objects in the Universe that is composed of both ordinary and heavy matter. Matter with a collapsed molecular structure, so heavy you couldn’t lift a pebble of it. Placet has a core of that stuff; that’s why this tiny planet, which has an area about twice the size of Manhattan Island, has a gravity three-quarters that of Earth. There is life—animal life, not intelligent—living on the core. There are birds, whose molecular structure is like that of the planet’s core, so dense that ordinary matter is as tenuous to them as air is to us. They actually fly through it, as birds on Earth fly through the air. From their standpoint we’re walking on top of Placet’s atmosphere.”

“And the vibration of their flight under the surface makes the houses collapse?”

“Yes, and worse—they fly right through the foundations, no matter what we make them of. Any matter we can work with is just so much gas to them. They fly through iron or steel as easily as through sand or loam. I’ve just got a shipment of some specially tough stuff from Earth—the special alloy steel you heard me ask Reagan about—but I haven’t much hope of it doing any good.”

“But aren’t those birds dangerous? I mean, aside from making the buildings fall down. Couldn’t one get up enough momentum flying to carry it out of the ground and into the air a little way? And wouldn’t it go right through anyone who happened to be there?”

“It would,” I said, “but it doesn’t. I mean, they never fly closer to the surface than a few inches. Some sense stems to tell them when they’re nearing the top of their ‘atmosphere.’ Something analogous to the supersonics a bat uses. You know, of course, how a bat can fly in utter darkness and never fly into a solid object.”

“Like radar, yes.”

“Like radar, yes, except a bat uses sound waves instead of radio waves. And the widgie birds must use something that works on the same principle, in reverse; turns them back a few inches before they approach what to them would be the equivalent of a vacuum. Being heavy-matter, they could no more exist or fly in air than a bird could exist or fly in a vacuum.”