A.E. Van Vogt - Short Stories Part 1

Van Vogt, AE.

Short Stories.

1. The Rat and the Snake.

2. Ersatz Eternal.

3. The Cataaaa.

4. Resurrection.

5. The Barbarian.

A.E. Van Vogt.

THE RAT AND THE SNAKE.

Mark Gray's main pleasure in life was feeding rats to his pet python.

He kept the python in a blocked-off room in the old house in which he lived alone. Each mealtime, he would put the rat in a narrow tunnel he had rigged, At the end of the tunel was an opening. The rat, going thiough the narrow s.p.a.ce into the bright room beyond, automatically spring-locked a gate across the opening.

It would then find itself in the room with the python, with no way of escape.

Mark liked to listen to its squeaks as it became aware of its danger, and then he would hear its mad scurring to escape the irresistible enemy.

Sometimes he watched the exciting scene thiough a plate-gla.s.s window, but he actually preferred the sound to the fight, conjuring his own delectable mental pictues, always from the viewpoint of the python.

During World War Ill, the O.P.A. forgot to put a ceiling price on rats. The catching of rats got no special priority. Rat catchers were drafted into the armed forces as readily as the other people. The supply of rats grew less. Mark was soon reduced to catching his own rats; but he had to work for a living in the ever-leaner times of war, so that there were periods of time when the python was fed infrequently.

Then one day Mark, ever searching, glimpsed some white rats through a window of an old commercial-style building.

He peered in eagerly, and though the room was dimly lighted with wartime regulation bulbs, he was able to make out that it was a large room with hnndreds of cages in it and that each of the cages contained rais.

He made it to the front of the building at a dead run. In pausing to catch his breath, he noticed the words on the doors CARRON LABORATORIES, Research.

He found himself presently in a dim hallway of a business office.

Because everybody was clearly working twice as hard because of the war, it took a little while to attract the attention of one of the women employees; and there were other delays such as just sitting and waiting while it seemed as if he was the forgotten man. But after all those minutes he was finally led into the office of a small, tight-faced man, who was introduced as Erie Plode and who listened to his request and the reason for it.

When Mark described his poor, starvng python, the small man laughed a sudden, explosive laughter, But his eyes remained cold. Moments later he curtly rejected the request.

Whereupon he made a personal thing out of it. "And don't get any ideas," he snarled. "Stay away from our rats. If we catch you filching around here, we'll have the law on you."

Until those words were spoken, Mark hadn't really thought about becoming a rat-stealing criminal. Except for his peculiar love for his python, he was a law-abiding, tax-paying n.o.body.

As Mark was leaving, Plode hastily sent a man to follow him. Then, smiling grimly, he walked into an office that had printed on the door: HENRY GARRON, Private.

"Well, Hank," he said gaily. "I think we've got our subject."

Carron said, "This had better be good since we can't even get prisoners of war a.s.signed us for the job."

The remark made Plode frown a little. He had a tendency toward ironic thoughts, and he had often thought recently, "Good G.o.d they're going to use the process on millions of the unsuspecting enemy after we get it tested, but they won't give us a G.D. so-and-so to try it out on because of some kind of prisoner of war convention."

Aloud, he said smugly, "I suppose by a stretch of the imagination you could call him human.'

"That bad?"

Plode described Mark and his hobby, finished, "I suppose it'a a matter of point of view, But I won't feel any guilt, particularly if he sneaks over tonight and with criminal intent tries to steal some of our rats." He grinned mirthlessly, "Can you think of anything lower than a rat stealer?"

Henry Carron hesitated but only for moments. Millons of people were dead and dying, and a test absolutely had to be made on a human being.

Because if something went wrong on the battlefield, the effect of surprise might be lost with who knew what repercussions.

"One thing sure," he nodded "there'll be no evidence against us. So go ahead."

It seemed to Mark, as he came stealthily back that night, that these people with their thousands of rats would never miss the equivalent of one rat a week or so, He was especially pleased when he discovered that the window was unlocked and that the menagerie was unguarded. No doubt, he thought good-humoredly, babysitters for rats were in scarce supply because of the wartime worker shortage.

The next day he thrilled again to the familiar sound of a rat squeaking in fear of the python. Toward evening his phone rang. It was Erie Plode.

"I warned you," said the small man in a vicious tone. "Now you must pay the penalty."

Plode felt better for having issued the warning. "Be it on his own soul," he said sanctimoniously, "if he's there."

Mark hung up, contemptuous. Let them try to prove anything.

In his sleep that night he seemed to be suffocating. He woke up, and he was not lying on his bed but instead was on a hard floor. He groped for the light switch but could not find it. Them was a bright rectangle of light about twenty feet away. He headed for it.

Crash! A gate slammed shut behind him as he emerged.

He was in a vast room, larger than anything he had ever seen. Yet it was vaguely familiar. Except for its size it resembled the room in which he kept his python.

On the floor in front of him, an object that he had noticed and regarded as some sort of a leathery rug, thicker than he was tall, stirred and moved toward him.

Realization came suddenly, horrendously.

He was the size of a rat. This was the python slithering across the floor with distended jaws.

Mad squealing as Mark Gray experienced the ultimate thrill of the strange method by which he had enjoyed life for so many years ...

Experienced it this one and only time from the viewpoint of the rat.

A.E. Van Vogt.

ERSATZ ETERNAL.

Grayson removed the irons from the other's wrists and legs. "Hart!"

he said sharply.

The young man on the cot did not stir. Grayson hesitated and then deliberately kicked the man. "d.a.m.n you, Hart, listen to me! I'm releasing you - just in case I don't come back "

John Hart neither opened his eyes nor showed any awareness of the blow he had received. He lay inert; and the only evidence of life in him was that he was limp, not rigid. There was almost no color in his cheeks.

His black hair was damp and stringy.

Grayson said earnestly, "Hart, I'm going out to look for Malkins.

Remember, he left four days ago, intending only to be gone twenty-four hours."

When there was no response, the older man started to turn away, but he hesitated and said, "Hart, if I don't come back, you must realize where we are, This is a new planet, understand. We've never been here before.

Our ship was wrecked, and the three of us came down in a lifeboat, and what we need is fuel. That's what Malkins went out to look for, and now I'm going out to look for Malkins."

The figure on the cot remained blank. And Grayson walked reluctantly out the door and off toward the hills. He had no particular hope.

Three men were down on a planet G.o.d-only-knew-where - and one ofthose man was violently insane.

As he walked along, he glanced around him in occasional puzzlement.

The scenery was very earthlike: trees, shrubs, gra.s.s, and distant mountains misted by blue haze. It was still a littie odd that when they had landed Malkins and he had had the distinct impression that they were coming down onto a barren world without atmosphere and without life.

A soft breeze touched his cheeks. The scent of flowers was in the air. He saw birds flitting among the trees, and once he heard a song that was startingly like that of a meadow lark.

He walked all day and saw no sign of Malkins. Nor was there any habitation to indicate that the planet had intelligent life. Just before dusk he heard a woman calling his name.

Grayson turned with a start, and it was his mother, looking much younger than he remembered her in her coffin eight years before. She came up, and she said severely, "'Billie, don't forget your rubbers."

Grayson stared at her with eyes that kept twisting away in disbelief.

Then, deliberately, he walked over and touched her. She caught his hand, and her fingers were warm and lifelike.

She said, "I want you to go tell your father that dinner is ready."

Grayson released himself and stepped back and looked tensely around him. The two of them stood on an empty, gra.s.sy plain. Far in the distance was the gleam of a silvershining river.

He turned away from her and strode on into the twilight. When he looked back, there was no one in sight. But presently a boy was moving in step beside him. Grayson paid no attention at first, but presently he stole a glance at his companion.

It was himself at the age of fifteen.

Just before the gathering night blotted out any chance of recognition, he saw that a second boy was now striding along beside the first. Himself, aged about eleven.

Three Bill Graysons, thought Grayson. He began to laugh wildly.

Then he began to run. When he looked back, he was alone. Sobbing under his breath, he slowed to a walk, and almost immediately heard the laughter of children in the soft darkness. Familiar sounds, yet the impact of them was stunning.

Grayson babbled at them, "All me, at different ages. Get away! I know you're only hallucinations."

When he had worn himself out, when there was nothing left to his voice but a harsh whisper, he thought, Only hallucinations? Am I sure?

He felt unutterably depressed and exhausted. "Hart and me," he said aloud wearily, " we belong in the same asylum."

Dawn came, cool; and his hope was that sunrise would bring an end to the madness of the night. As the slow light lengthened over the land, Grayson looked around him in bewilderment. He was on a hill, and below him spread his home town of Calypso, Ohio.

He stared down at it with unbelieving eyes, and then, because it looked as real as life, he started to run toward it.

It was Calypso, but as it had been when he was a boy. He headed for his own house. And there he was; he'd know that boy of ten anywhere. He called out to the youngster, who took one look at him, turned away, and ran into the house.

Grayson lay down on the lawn, and covered his eyes. "Someone," he told himself "something is taking pictures out of my mind and making me see them."

It seemed to him that if he hoped to remain sane - and alive - he'd have to hold that thought.

It was the sixth day after Grayson's departure. Aboard the lifeboat, John Hart stirred and opened his eyes. "Hungry," he said aloud to no one in particular. He waited he knew not for what and than wearily sat up, slipped off the cot, and made his way to the galley. When he had eaten, he walked to the lock-door, and stood for a long time staring out over the earthlike scene that spread before him. It made him feel better, vaguely.

He jumped abruptly down to the ground and began to walk toward the nearest hilltop. Darkness was falling rapidly but it did not occur to him to turn back.

Soon the ship was lost in the night behind him.

A girlfriend of his youth was the first to talk to him. She came out of the blackness. and they had a long conversation. In the end they decided to marry The ceremony was immediately completed by a minister who drove up in a car and found both families a.s.sembled in a beautiful home in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. The clergyman was an old man whom Hart had known in his childhood.

The young couple went to New York City and to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon, then headed by aere-taxi for California to make their home.

Suddenly there were three children, and they owned a hundred-thousand-acre ranch with a million cattle on it, and there were cowboys who dressed like movie stars, For Grayson, the civilization that sprang into full-grown existence around him on what had originally been a barren, airless planet had nightmarish qualities. The people he met had a life expectancy of less than seventy years. Children were born in nine months and ten days after conception.

He buried six generations of one family that he had founded. And then, one day as he was crossing Broadway - in New York City - the small st.u.r.diness, the walk, and the manner of a man coming from the opposite direction made him stop short.

"Henry!" he shouted. "Henry Malkins!"

"Well, I'll be - Bill Grayson."

They shook hands, silent afler the first excited greeting. Malkins spoke first. "There's a bar around the corner."