'But hell,' he roared, 'it's all good now. Hear that? The rain in the ditches, the standing water in the pools, it's all good now. You should have been Lonely Man back when the going was bad, fella, when the bullhorns still came over and the stiffs shook when they did and Lonely Man didn't die but he wished he could …'
This time the storm took him unaware and was long in passing. His hands were ragged from flailing the-broken concrete and his eyes were so swollen with weeping that he could hardly see to shoulder his sack of cans. He stumbled often that morning. Once he fell and opened an old scar on his forehead, but not even that interrupted his steady, mumbling chant: 'Tain't no boner, 'tain't no blooper; Corey's Gin brings super stupor. We shall conquer; we will win. Back our boys with Corey's Gin. Wasting time in war is sinful; black out fast with a Corey skinful.'
They landed.
Five thousand insects of each 'life' heaved on fifteen thousand wires to open the port and let down the landing ramp. While they heaved a few hundred felt the pangs of death on them. They com-municated the minute all-they- knew to blank-minded standby young-sters, died, and were eaten. Other hundreds stopped heaving briefly, gave birth, and resumed heaving.
The three Visitors swarmed down the ramp, three living black car-pets.
For maximum visibility they arranged themselves in three thin black lines which advanced slowly over the rugged terrain. At the tip of each line a few of the insects occasionally strayed too far from their connecting files and dropped out of the 'life' field. These stag-gered in purposeless circles. Some blundered back into the field; some did not and died, leaving a minute hiatus in the 'life's' memory— perhaps the shape of the full-stop' symbol in the written language of a planet long ago visited, long ago dust. Normally the thin line was not used for exploring any but the smoothest terrain; the fact that they took a small calculated risk was a measure of the Visitors' slightly irked curiosity.
With three billion faceted eyes the Visitors saw immediately that this was no semi-deserted world, and that furthermore it was proba-bly the world which had colonized the puzzling outer planet. Entities were everywhere; the air was thick with them in some places. There were numerous artifacts, all in ruins. Here the entities of the planet clustered, but here the bafflement deepened. The artifacts were all decidedly material and ponderous—but the entities were insubstantial.
Coarsely organized observers would not have perceived them consis-tently. They existed in a field similar to the organization field of the Visitors. Their bodies were constructs of wave trains rather than atoms. It was impossible to imagine them manipulating the materials of which the artifacts were composed.
And as before, the Visitors were ignored.
Deliberately they clustered themselves in three huge black balls, with the object of being as obstreperous as possible and also to mobi-lize their field strength for a brute-force attempt at communication with the annoying creatures. By this tune their attitude approxi-mated:
'We'll show these bastards!'
They didn't—not after running up and down every spectrum of thought in which they could project. Their attempt at reception was more successful, and completely horrifying. A few weak, attenuated messages did come through to the Visitors. They revealed the entities of the planet to be dull, whimpering cravens, whining evasively, bleating with self-pity. Though there were only two sexes among them, a situation which leads normally to a rather weak sex drive as such things go in the cosmos, these wispy things vibrated with libido which it was quite impossible for them to discharge.
The Visitors, thoroughly repelled, were rippling back toward their ship when one signaled: notice and hide.
The three great black carpets abruptly vanished—that is, each in-sect found itself a cranny to disappear into, a pebble or leaf to be on the other side of. Some hope flared that the visit might be productive of a more pleasant contact than the last with those aimless, chittering cretins.
The thing stumping across the terrain toward them was like and unlike the wave-train cretins. It had their conformation but was ma-terial rather than undulatory in nature—a puzzle that could wait. It appeared to have no contact with the wave-train life form. They soared and darted about it as it approached, but it ignored them. It passed once through a group of three who happened to be on the ground in its way.
Tentatively the three Visitors reached out into its mind. The thoughts were comparatively clear and steady.
When the figure had passed the Visitors chorused: Agreed, and headed back to their ship. There was nothing there for them. Among other things they had drawn from the figure's mind was the location of a ruined library; a feeble-minded working party of a million was dispatched to it.
Back at the ship they waited, unhappily ruminating the creature's foreground thoughts: 'From Corey's Gin you get the charge to tote that bale and lift that barge. That's progress, God damn it. You know better than that, man. Liberty Unlimited for the Lonely Man, but it be nice to see that Mars ship land…'
Agreement: Despite all previous experience it seems that a sentient race is capable of destroying itself.
When the feeble-minded library detail returned and gratefully re-united itself with its parent 'lives' they studied the magnetic tapes it had brought, reading them direct in the cans. They learned the name of the planet and the technical name for the wave-train entities which had inherited it and which would shortly be its sole proprietors. The solid life forms, it seemed, had not been totally unaware of them, though there was some confusion: Far the vaster section of the li-brary denied that they existed at all. But in the cellular minds of the Visitors there could be no doubt that the creatures described in a neglected few of the library's lesser works were the ones they had en- countered. Everything tallied. Their non-material quality; their curi-ous reaction to light. And, above all, their dominant personality trait, of remorse, repentance, furious regret. The technical term that the books gave to them was: ghosts.
The Visitors worked ship, knowing that the taste of this world and its colony would soon be out of what passed for their collective mouths, rinsed clean by new experiences and better-organized enti-ties.
But they had never left a solar system so gratefully or so fast.
Sir Mallory's Magnitude
1
After Armageddon
There was a lusty scream from the visitors' gallery. The lights of the hall flickered for a moment; guards drew and fired at shadows on the wall or at each other. Panic threatened; the restless roar of a great crowd rose to a jabbering sound like monkey-talk. In the great gallery and on the vast floor a few dimwits began to dash for exits.
'Rot them,' growled Senator Beekman. He shoved the mike at Ballister.
'Shut them up,' he snapped. 'Use your precious psychology!'
Young Ballister took the mike, snapped on the button, dialed for heaviest amplification. 'Atten-shun!' he barked into it, with the genuine parade-ground note of command.
The monkey-talk stopped for a priceless moment. Ballister jumped into it with both feet. Soothingly he said: 'Now, folks, what's your hurry?
Stick around—these learned gentlemen put on a pretty good show for your benefit.'
The learned gentlemen who were dashing for exits purpled; the visitors in the gallery laughed loud and long at the feeble little joke. They resumed their seats.
'Take it, Senator,' snapped Ballister in an undertone. 'I'll scamper for a gander at the fuss up there.' He hopped nimbly from the platform into an elevator, which shot him up to the gallery. Displaying his Representative's
