His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

DURING THE INCREDIBLY long three minutes that ensued, they made ready their weapons for what might prove to be a siege, while Battle explained in rapid-fire undertones what he had had no time for during the plane-ride from Manhattan.

As he checked the load of his quickfirers he snapped: "Invaders—fooey!

Anybody could tell that those women were fresh from an office. They had the clerical air about them. The only invader—as a carefully logical process of deduction demonstrated—was the gruesome creature who's been posing as Cromleigh. Just murdered the old guy—I suppose—and took over his body. Him and his friends whom he just signaled. He's the only baby who hypnotized the Phi Beta Kappas they use for busboys.

"Why did he risk sending me in there? The inevitable mark of a louse.

Doesn't trust anybody, not even his own office-staff dyed a pale green and reduced to half gnat-size. So he sent me in for a spy on them. The whole cock-and-bull story of the creatures from an asteroid was so that there'd be no suspicion directed at him in case some bright waiter should find the louse-people. Wouldn't be surprised if he's from an asteroid himself. Crazy business! Craziest damned business!"

"How about the financial angle?" asked Vaughn, who could be intelligible when money was involved.

"I picked that bird's pocket slick as a whistle just before I conked him.

Feels like a hundred grand."

"Here they come !" snapped Miss Millicent.

"They" were creatures of all shapes and sizes who were streaming through the only door to the lab, at the other end of the room.

"Awk!" gulped the lady involuntarily. "They" were pretty awful. There were a hundred or so of them, many much like men, a few in an indescribable liquid-solid state that sometimes was gaseous. The luminous insides of these churned wildly about; there were teeth inside them two feet long.Others were gigantic birds, still others snakes, still others winged dragons.

"That settles it," grunted the Russian philosopher as he flicked his gun into and out of its holster faster than the eye could follow. "That settles it. They are amoebic, capable of assuming any shape at all. One is changing now—awk!" He persevered. "Indubitably possessed of vast hypnotic powers over unsuspecting minds only. Otherwise they would be working on us."

"They" were rolling in a flood of shifting, slimy flesh down the floor of the lab.

"The machine! The sofa!" cried Miss Millicent. Battle breathed a long sigh of relief as the cabinet-like expander exploded outward and the sofa it held kept on growing—and growing—and growing—and growing! It stopped just as it filled the segment of the lab that it occupied.

With a squeaking of tortured timbers the laws of cross-sectional sufferance power asserted themselves and the hundred-yard-high sofa collapsed in a monstrous pile of rubble.

"Sit very still," said the Lieutenant. "Be quite quiet and blow the head off any hundred-yard centipede that wanders our way."

There were agonized yells from the other side of the couch's ruins.

"That couch," Battle informed them, "was just plain lousy. Full of centipedes, lice, what have you. And when a louse smells blood—God help any invaders around, be they flesh, fish, fowl or amoebic!"

AFTER TEN MINUTES there was complete quiet.

"What about the insects?" asked Vaughn.

"They're dead," said Battle, rising and stretching. "Their respiratory system can't keep up with the growth. They were good for about ten minutes, then they keel over. Their tracheae can't take in enough oxygen to keep them going, which is a very good thing for the New Jersey countryside."

He strolled over to the vast pile of rubble and began turning over timbers, Miss Millicent assisting him.

"Ah!" he grunted. "Here it is!" He had found the body of an apple-green young lady whose paint was beginning to peel, revealing a healthy pink beneath. With many endearing terms he brought her out of her swoon as Miss Millicent's eyebrows went higher and higher.

Finally she exploded, as the two were cozily settled on a mountainous upholstery-needle that had, at some time, got lost in the sofa.

"Just when, Lieutenant, did you find out that these people weren't invaders from an asteroid?"

Rattle raised his eyebrows and kissed the girl. "Have no fear, darling,"

he said. "A gentleman never—er—kisses—and tells.

Gomez

[The Explorers, Ballantine, 1954]

Now that I'm a cranky, constipated old man I can afford to say that the younger generation of scientists makes me sick to my stomach. Short-order fry cooks of destruction, they hear through the little window the dim order: "Atom bomb rare, with cobalt sixty!" and sing it back and rattle their stinking skillets and sling the deadly hash—just what the customer ordered, with never a notion invading their smug, too-heated havens that there's a small matter of right and wrong that takes precedence even over their haute cuisine.

There used to be a slew of them who yelled to high heaven about it.