Tales From the Spaceport Bar Read online

  The man in the brown suit chuckled. "That makes sense,” he said. "It must be nice to be a Martian.”

  "Why not? Up till now, no race ever successfully conquered and ruled another. The underdog could revolt or absorb. If you know you’re being ruled, then the ruler’s vulnerable. But if the world doesn’t know—and it doesn’t—

  "Take radios,” Lyman continued, going off at a tangent. "There’s no earthly reason why a sane human should listen to a radio. But the Martians make us do it. They like it. Take bathtubs. Nobody contends bathtubs are comfortable—for us. But they’re fine for Martians. All the impractical things we keep on using, even though we know they’re impractical—”

  'Typewriter ribbons,” the man in brown said, struck by the thought. "But not even a Martian could enjoy changing a typewriter ribbon.”

  Lyman seemed to find that flippant. He said that he knew all about the Martians except for one thing—their psychology.

  "I don’t know why they act as they do. It looks illogical sometimes, but I feel perfectly sure they’ve got sound motives for every move they make. Until I get that worked out I’m pretty much at a standstill. Until I get evidence—proof—and help. I’ve got to stay under cover till then. And I’ve been doing that. I do what they tell me, so they won’t suspect, and I pretend to forget what they tell me to forget.”

  "Then you’ve got nothing much to worry about.”

  Lyman paid no attention. He was off again on a list of his grievances.

  "When I hear the water running in the tub and a Martian splashing around, I pretend I don’t hear a thing. My bed’s too short and I tried last week to order a special length, but the Martian that sleeps there told me not to. He’s a runt, like most of them. That is, I think they’re runts. I have to deduce, because you never see them undressed. But it goes on like that constantly. By the way, how’s your Martian?”

  The man in the brown suit set down his glass rather suddenly.

  "My Martian?”

  "Now listen. I may be just a little bit drunk, but my logic remains unimpaired. I can still put two and two together. Either you know about the Martians, or you don’t. If you do, there’s no point in giving me that 'What, my Martian?’ routine. I know you have a Martian. Your Martian knows you have a Martian. My Martian knows. The point is, do you know? Think hard,” Lyman urged solicitously.

  "No, I haven’t got a Martian,” the reporter said, taking a quick drink. The edge of the glass clicked against his teeth.

  "Nervous, I see,” Lyman remarked. "Of course you have got a Martian. I suspect you know it.”

  "What would I be doing with a Martian?” the man in brown asked with dogged dogmatism.

  "What would you be doing without one? I imagine it’s illegal. If they caught you running around without one they’d probably put you in a pound or something until claimed. Oh, you’ve got one, all right. So have I. So has he, and he, and he—and the bartender.” Lyman enumerated the other barflies with a wavering forefinger.

  "Of course they have,” the man in brown said. "But they’ll all go back to Mars tomorrow and then you can see a good doctor. You’d better have another dri—”

  He was turning toward the bartender when Lyman, apparently by accident, leaned close to him and whispered urgently:

  "Don’t look now!”

  The man in brown glanced at Lyman’s white face reflected in the mirror before them.

  "It’s all right,” he said. "There aren’t any Mar—” Lyman gave him a fierce, quick kick under the edge of the bar.

  "Shut up! One just came in!”

  And then he caught the brown-suited man’s gaze and with elaborate unconcern said, "—so naturally, there was nothing for me to do but climb out on the roof after it. Took me ten minutes to get it down the ladder, and just as we reached the bottom it gave one bound, climbed up my face, sprang from the top of my head, and there it was again on the roof, screaming for me to get it down.”

  "What?” the brown-suited man demanded with pardonable curiosity.

  "My cat, of course. What did you think? No, never mind, don’t answer that.” Lyman’s face was turned to the brown-suited man’s, but from the comers of his eyes he was watching an invisible progress down the length of the bar toward a booth at the very back.

  "Now why did he come in?” he murmured. "I don’t like this. Is he anyone you know?”

  "Is who—?”

  "That Martian. Yours, by any chance? No, . I suppose not. Yours was probably the one who went out a while ago. I wonder if he went to make a report, and sent this one in? It’s possible. It could be. You can talk now, but keep your voice low, and stop squirming. Want him to notice we can see him?”

  "I. can’t see him. Don’t drag me into this. You and your Martians can fight it out together. You’re making me nervous. I’ve got to go, anyway.” But he didn’t move to get off the stool. Across Lyman’s shoulder he was stealing glances toward the back of the bar, and now and then he looked at Lyman’s face.

  "Stop watching me,” Lyman said. "Stop watching him. Anybody’d think you were a cat.”

  "Why a cat? Why should anybody—do I look like a cat?”

  "We were talking about cats, weren’t we? Cats can see them, quite clearly. Even undressed, I believe. They don’t like them.”

  "Who doesn’t like who?”

  "Whom. Neither likes the other. Cats can see Martians—shh!—but they pretend not to, and that makes the Martians mad. I have a theory that cats ruled the world before Martians came. Never mind. Forget about cats. This may be more serious than you think. I happen to know my Martian’s taking tonight off, and I’m pretty sure that was your Martian who went out some time ago. And have you noticed that nobody else in here has his Martian with him? Do you suppose—” His voice sank. "Do you suppose they could be waiting for us outside?” "Oh, Lord,” the brown-suited man said. "In the alley with the cats, I suppose.”

  "Why don’t you stop this yammer about cats and be serious for a moment?” Lyman demanded, and then paused, paled, and reeled slightly on his stool. He hastily took a drink to cover his confusion.

  "What’s the matter now?” the man in brown asked.

  "Nothing.” Gulp. "Nothing. It was just that—he looked at me. With—you know.”

  "Let me get this straight. I take it the Martian is dressed in—is dressed like a human?”

  "Naturally.”

  "But he’s invisible to all eyes but yours?”

  "Yes. He doesn’t want to be visible, just now. Besides—” Lyman paused cunningly. He gave the man in brown a furtive glance and then looked quickly down at his drink. "Besides, you know, I rather think you can see him—a little, anyway.”

  The man in brown was perfectly silent for about thirty seconds. He sat quite motionless, not even the ice in the drink he held clinking. One might have thought he did not even breathe. Certainly he did not blink.

  "What makes you think that?” he asked in a normal voice, after the thirty seconds had run out.

  "I—did I say anything? I wasn’t listening.” Lyman put down his drink abruptly. "I think I’ll go now.”

  "No, you won’t,” the brown-suited man said, closing his fingers around Lyman’s wrist. "Not yet you won’t. Come back here. Sit down. Now. What was the idea? Where were you going?”

  Lyman nodded dumbly toward the back of the bar, indicating either a jukebox or a door marked MEN.

  "I don’t feel so good. Maybe I've had too much to drink. I guess I’ll—”

  "You’re all right. I don’t trust you back there with that—that invisible man of yours. You’ll stay right here until he leaves.”

  "He’s going now,” Lyman said brightly. His eyes moved with great briskness along the line of an invisible but rapid progress toward the front door. "See, he’s gone. Now let me loose, will you?”

  The brown-suited man glanced toward the back booth.

  "No,” he said, "he isn’t gone. Sit right where you are.

  It was Lyman’s turn to rema
in quite still, in a stricken sort of way, for a perceptible while. The ice in his drink, however, clinked audibly. Presently he spoke. His voice was soft, and rather soberer than before.

  "You’re right. He’s still there. You can see him, can’t you?”

  The man in brown said, "Has he got his back to us?”

  "You can see him, then. Better than I can, maybe. Maybe there are more of them here than I thought. They could be anywhere. They could be sitting beside you anywhere you go, and you wouldn’t even guess, until—” He shook his head a little. ’They’d want to be sure ” he said, mostly to himself. "'They can give you orders and make you forget, but there must be limits to what they can force you to do. They can’t make a man betray himself. They’d have to lead him on—until they were sure.”

  He lifted his drink and tipped it steeply above his face. The ice ran down the slope and bumped coldly against his lip, but he held it until the last of the pale, bubbling amber had drained into his mouth. He set the glass on the bar and faced the man in brown.

  ’’Well?” he said.

  The man in the brown suit looked up and down the bar.

  "It’s getting late,” he said. "Not many people left. We’ll wait.”

  "Wait for what?”

  The brown-suited man looked toward the back booth and looked away again quickly.

  "I have something to show you. I don’t want anyone else to see.”

  Lyman surveyed the narrow, smoky room. As he looked the last customer besides themselves at the bar began groping in his pocket, tossed some change on the mahogany, and went out slowly.

  They sat in silence. The bartender eyed them with stolid disinterest. Presently a couple in the front booth got up and departed, quarreling in undertones.

  "Is there anyone left?” the brown-suited man asked in a voice that did not carry down the bar to the man in the apron.

  "Only—” Lyman did not finish, but he nodded gently toward the back of the room. "He isn’t looking. lot’s get this over with. What do you want to show me?”

  The reporter took off his wristwatch and pried up the metal case. Two small, glossy photograph prints slid out. The reporter separated them with a finger.

  "I just want to make sure of something,” he said. "First—why did you pick me out? Quite a while ago, you said you’d been trailing me all day, making sure. I haven’t forgotten that. And you knew I was a reporter. Suppose you tell me the truth, now?”

  Squirming on his stool, Lyman scowled. "It was the way you looked at things,” he murmured. "On the subway this morning—I’d never seen you before in my life, but I kept noticing the way you looked at things—the wrong things, things that weren’t there, the way a cat does—and then you’d always look away—I got the idea you could see the Martians too.”

  "Go on,” the brown-suited man said quietly.

  "I followed you. All day. I kept hoping you’d turn out to be—somebody I could talk to. Because if I could know that I wasn’t the only one who could see them, then I’d know there was still some hope left. It’s been worse than solitary confinement. I’ve been able to see them for three years now. Three years. And I’ve managed to keep my power a secret even from them. And, somehow, I’ve managed to keep from killing myself, too.”

  "Three years?” the man in brown said. He shivered.

  'There was always a little hope. I knew nobody would believe—not without proof. And how can you get proof? It was only that I—I kept telling myself that maybe you could see them too, and if you could, maybe there were others—lots of others—enough so we might get together and work out some way of proving to the world—”

  The brown-suited man’s fingers were moving. In silence he pushed a photograph across the mahogany. Lyman picked it up unsteadily.

  "Moonlight?” he asked after a moment. It was a landscape under a deep, dark sky with white clouds in it. Trees stood white and lacy against the darkness. The grass was white as if with moonlight, and the shadows blurry.

  "No, not moonlight,” the reporter said. "Infrared. I’m strictly an amateur, but lately I've been experimenting with infrared film. And I got some very odd results.”

  Lyman stared at the film.

  "You see, I live near”—the reporter’s finger tapped a certain quite common object that appeared in the photograph—"and something funny keeps showing up now and then against it. But only with infrared film. Now I know chlorophyll reflects so much infrared light that grass and leaves photograph white. The sky comes out black, like this. There are tricks to using this kind of film. Photograph a tree against a cloud, and you can’t tell them apart in the print. But you can photograph through a haze and pick out distant objects the ordinary film wouldn’t catch. And sometimes, when you focus on something like this—” He tapped the image of the very common object again. "You get a very odd image on the film. Like that. A man with three eyes.”

  Lyman held the print up to the light. In silence he took the other one from the bar and studied it. When he laid them down he was smiling.

  "You know,” Lyman said in a conversational whisper, "a professor of astrophysics at one of the more important universities had a very interesting little item in the Times the other Sunday. Name of Spitzer, I think. He said that if there were life on Mars, and if Martians had ever visited Earth, there’d be no way to prove it. Nobody would believe the few men who saw them. Not, he said, unless the Martians happened to be photographed—”

  Lyman looked at the brown-suited man thoughtfully.

  "Well,” he said, "it’s happened. You’ve photographed them.”

  The brown-suited man nodded. He took up the prints and returned them to his watchcase. "I thought so, too. Only until tonight I couldn’t be sure. I’d never seen one—fully—as you have. It isn’t so much a matter of what you call getting your brain scrambled with supersonics as it is of just knowing where to look. But I've been seeing part of them all my life, and so has everybody. It’s that little suggestion of movement you never catch except just at the edge of your vision, just out of the corner of your eye. Something that’s almost there—and when you look fully at it, there’s nothing. These photographs showed me the way. It’s not easy to learn, but it can be done. We’re conditioned to look directly at a thing—the particular thing we want to see clearly, whatever it is. Perhaps the Martians gave us that conditioning. When we see a movement at the edge of our range of vision, it’s almost irresistible not to look directly at it. So it vanishes.” "Then they can be seen—by anybody?”

  "I’ve learned a lot in a few days,” the man in brown said. "Since I took those photographs. You have to train yourself. It’s like seeing a trick picture—one that’s really a composite, after you study it. Camouflage. You just have to learn how. Otherwise we can look at them all our lives and never see them.”

  "The camera does, though.”

  "Yes, the camera does. I’ve wondered why nobody ever caught them this way before. Once you see them on film, they’re unmistakable—that third eye.”

  "Infrared film’s comparatively new, isn’t it? And then I’ll bet you have to catch them against that one particular background—you know—or they won’t show on the film. Like trees against clouds. It’s tricky. You must have had just the right lighting that day, and exactly the right focus, and the lens stopped down just right. A kind of minor miracle. It might never happen again exactly that way. But... don’t look now.”

  They were silent. Furtively, they watched the mirror. Their eyes slid along toward the open door of the tavern.

  And then there was a long, breathless silence.

  "He looked back at us,” Lyman said very quietly. "He looked at us... that third eye!”

  The reporter was motionless again. When he moved, it was to swallow the rest of his drink.

  "I don’t think that they’re suspicious yet,” he said. "The trick will be to keep under cover until we can blow this thing wide open. There’s got to be some way to do it—some way that will convince people.”
<
br />   "There’s proof. The photographs. A competent cameraman ought to be able to figure out just how you caught that Martian on film and duplicate the conditions. It’s evidence.”

  "Evidence can cut both ways,” the man in brown said. "What I’m hoping is that the Martians don’t really like to kill—unless they have to. I’m hoping they won’t kill without proof. But—” He tapped his wristwatch.

  "There’s two of us now, though,” Lyman said. "We’ve got to stick together. Both of us have broken the big rule—don’t look now—”

  The bartender was at the back, disconnecting the jukebox. The man in brown said, "We’d better not be seen together unnecessarily. But if we both come to this bar tomorrow night at nine for a drink—that wouldn’t look suspicious, even to them.”

  "Suppose—” Lyman hesitated. "May I have one of those photographs?”

  "Why?”

  "If one of us had—an accident—the other one would still have the proof. Enough, maybe, to convince the right people.”

  The man in brown hesitated, nodded shortly, and opened his watchcase again. He gave Lyman one of the pictures.

  "Hide it,” he said. "It’s—evidence. Til see you here tomorrow. Meanwhile, be careful. Remember to play safe.”

  They shook hands firmly, facing each other in an endless second of final, decisive silence. Then the man in the brown suit turned abruptly and walked out of the bar.

  Lyman sat there. Between two wrinkles in his forehead there was a stir and a flicker of lashes unfurling. The third eye opened slowly and looked after the man in brown.

  Henry Kuttner (1914—58) was one of the first full-time science-fiction writers, a superprolific contributor to the pulps who used so many pseudonyms (nearly thirty are known) that for many years any new writer to enter the field was automatically assumed to be a pen name of Henry Kuttner. When this happened to Jack Vance, he is reputed to have remarked that if he had to be someone’s pseudonym, there were few writers whose pseudonym he’d rather be than Kuttner’s. But to some extent Kuttner’s own reputation was overshadowed by such practices. Readers often complained that Henry Kuttner wasn’t nearly as good a writer as Lewis Padgett, even though the two were one and the same. It was as Padgett that Kuttner took a boozy turn, with a series about a drunken inventor named Gallagher, who made brilliant inventions while under the influence but couldn’t remember the details when he sobered up. The most famous of these is "The Proud Robot,” which can be found in the perpetually in-print Adventures in Time and Space edited by Healy and McComas. The series was collected in the now (alas) quite rare Robots Have No Tails (1952).