Miss Macy sniffed. “Why is everyone worrying so? They’re not doing anything to us, are they?”
In the cities, elsewhere, there was blind panic. But not in Miss Macy’s garden. She looked up calmly at the monstrous mile-high figures of the invaders.
A week ago, they’d landed, in a spaceship a hundred miles long that had settled down gently in the Arizona desert. Almost a thousand of them had come out of that spaceship and were now walking around.
Read MoreMy name is Joe. That is what my colleague, Milton Davidson, calls me. He is a programmer and I am a computer program. I am part of the Multivac-complex and am connected with other parts all over the world. I know everything. Almost everything.
I am Milton’s private program. His Joe. He understands more about programming than anyone in the world, and I am his experimental model. He has made me speak better than any other computer can.
“It is just a matter of matching sounds to symbols, Joe,” he told me. “That’s the way it works in the human brain even though we still don’t know what symbols there are in the brain. I know the symbols in yours, and I can match them to words, one-to-one.” So I talk. I don’t think I talk as well as I think, but Milton says I talk very well. Milton has never married, though he is nearly forty years old. He has never found the right woman, he told me. One day he said, “I’ll find her yet, Joe. I’m going to find the best. I’m going to have true love and you’re going to help me. I’m tired of improving you in order to solve the problems of the world. Solve my problem. Find me true love.”
I said, “What is true love?”
Read MoreJack Weaver came out of the vitals of Multivac looking utterly worn and disgusted.
From the stool, where the other maintained his own stolid watch, Todd Nemerson said, “Nothing?”
“Nothing,” said Weaver. “Nothing, nothing, nothing. No one can find anything wrong with it.”
“Except that it won’t work, you mean.”
“You’re no help sitting there!”
“I’m thinking.”
“Thinking!” Weaver showed a canine at one side of his mouth.
Read More“The Russians,” said Dowling, in his precise voice, “used to send prisoners to Siberia in the days before space travel had become common. The French used Devil’s Island for the purpose. The British sailed them off to Australia.”
He considered the chessboard carefully and his hand hesitated briefly over the bishop.
Parkinson, at the other side of the chessboard, watched the pattern of the pieces absently. Chess was, of course, the professional game of computer-programmers but, under the circumstances, he lacked enthusiasm. By rights, he felt with some annoyance, Dowling should have been even worse off; he was programming the prosecution’s case.
Read More“It’s an interesting theory,” said Arnold, “but I don’t see how you could ever prove it.” They had come to the steepest part of the hill and for a moment Webb was too breathless to reply.
“I’m not trying to,” he said when he had gained his second wind. “I’m only exploring its consequences.”
“Such as?”
“Well, let’s be perfectly logical and see where it gets us. Our only assumption, remember, is that the universe is infinite.”
“Right. Personally I don’t see what else it can be.”
“Very well. That means there must be an infinite number of stars and planets. Therefore, by the laws of chance, every possible event must occur not merely once but an infinite number of times. Correct?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then there must be an infinite number of worlds exactly like Earth, each with an Arnold and Webb on it, walking up this hill exactly as we are doing now, saying these same words.”
Read MoreThe space suits we use on the station are completely different from the flexible affairs men wear when they want to walk around on the moon. Ours are really baby space ships, just big enough to hold one man. They are stubby cylinders, about seven feet long, fitted with low-powered propulsion jets, and have a pair of accordion-like sleeves at the upper end for the operator’s arms.
As soon as I’d settled down inside my very exclusive space craft, I switched on power and checked the gauges on the tiny instrument panel. All my needles were well in the safety zone, so I lowered the transparent hemisphere over my head and sealed myself in. For a short trip like this, I did not bother to check the suit’s internal lockers, which were used to carry food
and special equipment for extended missions.
It was at that moment, as I launched myself out into the abyss, that I knew that something was horribly wrong.
Read MorePeople of Earth, do not be afraid. We come in peace–and why not? For we are your cousins; we have been here before.
You will recognise us when we meet, a few hours from now. We are approaching the solar system almost as swiftly as this radio message. Already, your sun dominates the sky ahead of us. It is the sun our ancestors and yours shared ten million years ago. We are men, as you are; but you have forgotten your history, while we have remembered ours
We colonised Earth, in the reign of the great reptiles, who were dying when we came and whom we could not save. Your world was a tropical planet then, and we felt that it would make a fair home for our people. We were wrong. Though we were masters of space, we knew so little about climate, about evolution, about genetics…
Read MoreHis eyes were open several seconds before the alarm was supposed to go off. Beside him, his wife touched his arm. He knew what she was going to say.
“Are we still going?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said and he felt her fingers grip his arm even more tightly.
“You’re certain we can get on the spaceship without anyone noticing?” she asked.
Read More“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.”
Fredric Brown, Knock
There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”
Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn’t in the two sentences at all; it’s in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.
But it wasn’t horrible, really.
Read MoreDwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe — ninety-six billion planets — into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment’s silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”
“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay. “Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.
Fredric Brown (1906-1972) was an American science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fiction writer, who was well known for his use of humour and his mastery of the so-called “short-short” form of story-telling. His short-short story, “Answer”, was first published in 1954 in the collection Angels and Spaceships.
Cyborg Ink 