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  The skipper stopped for breath, scowling. Tommy Dort inconspicuously put his own hands on the belt of his spacesuit He waited, hoping desperately that the trick would work.

  “He says, sir,” reported the helmet phones, “that all you say is true. But that his race has to be protected, just as you feel that yours must be.”

  “Naturally!” said the skipper angrily, “but the sensible thing to do is to figure out how to protect it! Putting its future up as a gamble in a fight is not sensible. Our races have to be warned of each other’s existence. That’s true. But each should have proof that the other doesn’t want to fight, but wants to be friendly. And we shouldn’t be able to find each other, but we should be able to communicate with each other to work out grounds for a common trust. If our governments want to be fools, let them! But we should give them the chance to make friends, instead of starting a space war out of mutual funk!”

  Briefly, the space phone said:

  “He says that the difficulty is that of trusting each other now. With the possible existence of his race at stake, he cannot take any chance, and neither can you, of yielding an advantage.”

  “But my race,” boomed the skipper, glaring at the alien captain, “my race has an advantage now. We came here to your ship in atompowered spacesuits! Before we left, we altered the drives! We can set off ten pounds of sensitized fuel apiece, right here in this ship, or it can be set off by remote control from our ship! It will be rather remarkable if your fuel store doesn’t blow up with us! In other words, if you don’t accept my proposal for a commonsense approach to this predicament, Dort and I blow up in an atomic explosion, and your ship will be wrecked if not destroyed—and the Llanvabon will be attacking with everything it’s got within two seconds after the blast goes off!”

  The captain’s room of the alien ship was a strange scene, with its dull-red illumination and the strange, bald, gill-breathing aliens watching the skipper and waiting for the inaudible translation of the harangue they could not hear. But a sudden tensity appeared in the air. A sharp, savage feeling of strain. The alien skipper made a gesture. The helmet phones hummed.

  “He says, sir, what is your proposal?”

  “Swap ships!” roared the skipper. “Swap ships and go on home! We can fix our instruments so they’ll do no trailing, he can do the same with his. We’ll each remove our star maps and records. We’ll each dismantle our weapons. The air will serve, and we’ll take their ship and they’ll take ours, and neither one can harm or trail the other, and each will carry home more information than can be taken otherwise! We can agree on this same Crab Nebula as a rendezvous when the double-star has made another circuit, and if our people want to meet them they can do it, and if they are scared they can duck it! That’s my proposal! And he’ll take it, or Dort and I blow up their ship and the Llanvabon blasts what’s left!”

  He glared about him while he waited for the translation to reach die tense small stocky figures about him. He could tell when it came because the tenseness changed. The figures stirred. They made gestures. One of them made convulsive movements. It lay down on the soft floor and kicked. Others leaned against its walls and shook.

  The voice in Tommy Dort’s helmet phones had been strictly crisp and professional, before, but now it sounded blankly amazed.

  “He says, sir, that it is a good joke. Because the two crew members he sent to our ship, and that you passed on the way, have their spacesuits stuffed with atomic explosive too, sir, and he intended to make the very same offer and threat! Of course he accepts, sir. Your ship is worth more to him than his own, and his is worth more to you than the Llanvabon. It appears, sir, to be a deal.”

  Then Tommy Dort realized what the convulsive movements of the aliens were. They were laughter.

  It wasn’t quite as simple as the skipper had outlined it. The actual working-out of the proposal was complicated. For three days the crews of the two ships were intermingled, the aliens learning the workings of the Llanvabon’s engines, and the men learning the controls of the black spaceship. It was a good joke—but it wasn’t all a joke. There were men on the black ship, and aliens on the Llanvabon, ready at an instant’s notice to blow up the vessels in question. And they would have done it in case of need, for which reason the need did not appear. But it was, actually, a better arrangement to have two expeditions return to two civilizations, under the current arrangement, than for either to return alone.

  There were differences, though. There was some dispute about the removal of records. In most cases the dispute was settled by the destruction of the records. There was more trouble caused by the Llanvabon’s books, and the alien equivalent of a ship’s library, containing works which approximated the novels of Earth. But those items were valuable to possible friendship, because they would show the two cultures, each to the other, from the viewpoint of normal citizens and without propaganda.

  But nerves were tense during those three days. Aliens unloaded and inspected the foodstuffs intended for the men on the black ship. Men transshipped the foodstuffs the aliens would need to return to their home. There were endless details, from the exchange of lighting equipment to suit the eyesight of the exchanging crews, to a final check-up of apparatus. A joint inspection party of both races verified that all detector devices had been smashed but not removed, so that they could not be used for trailing and had not been smuggled away. And of course, the aliens were anxious not to leave any useful weapon on the black ship, nor the men upon the Llanvabon. It was a curious fact that each crew was best qualified to take exactly the measures which made an evasion of the agreement impossible.

  There was a final conference before the two ships parted, back in the communication room of the Llanvabon.

  ‘Tell the little runt,” rumbled the Llanvabon’s former skipper, “that he’s got a good ship and he’d better treat her right.”

  The message frame flicked wordcards into position.

  “I believe,” it said on the alien skipper’s behalf, “that your ship is just as good. I will hope to meet you here when the double star has turned one turn.”

  The last man left the Llanvabon. It moved away into the misty nebula before they had returned to the black ship. The vision plates in that vessel had been altered for human eyes, and human crewmen watched jealously for any trace of their former ship as their new craft took a crazy, evading course to a remote part of the nebula. It came to a crevasse of nothingness, leading to the stars. It rose swiftly to clear space. There was the instant of breathlessness which the overdrive field produces as it goes on, and then the black ship whipped away into the void at many times the speed of light.

  Many days later, the skipper saw Tommy Dort poring over one of the strange objects which were the equivalent of books. It was fascinating to puzzle over. The skipper was pleased with himself. The technicians of the Llanvabon’s former crew were finding out desirable things about the ship almost momently. Doubtless the aliens were as pleased with their discoveries in the Llanvabon. But the black ship would be enormously worth while—and the solution that had been found was by any standard much superior even to a combat in which the Earthmen had been overwhelmingly victorious.

  “Hm-m-m. Mr. Dort,” said the skipper profoundly. “You’ve no equipment to make another photographic record on the way back. It was left on the Llanvabon. But fortunately, we have your record taken on the way out, and I shall report most favorably on your suggestion and your assistance in carrying it out. I think very well of you, sir.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Tommy Dort.

  He waited. The skipper cleared his throat.

  “You . . . ah . . . first realized the close similarity of mental processes between the aliens and ourselves,” he observed. “What do you think of the prospects of a friendly arrangement if we keep a rendezvous with them at the nebula as agreed?”

  “Oh, we’ll get along all right, sir,” said Tommy. “We’ve got a good start toward friendship. After all, since they see by infrared, the
planets they’d want to make use of wouldn’t suit us. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t get along. We’re almost alike in psychology.”

  “Hm-m-m. Now just what do you mean by that?” demanded the skipper.

  “Why, they’re just like us, sir!” said Tommy. “Of course they breathe through gills and they see by heat waves, and their blood has a copper base instead of iron and a few little details like that. But otherwise we’re just alike! There were only men in their crew, sir, but they have two sexes as we have, and they have families, and . . . er . . . their sense of humor—In fact—”

  Tommy hesitated.

  “Go on, sir,” said the skipper.

  “Well—There was the one I called Buck, sir, because he hasn’t any name that goes into sound waves,” said Tommy. “We got along very well. I’d really call him my friend, sir. And we were together for a couple of hours just before the two ships separated and we’d nothing in particular to do. So I became convinced that humans and aliens are bound to be good friends if they have only half a chance. You see, sir, we spent those two hours telling dirty jokes.”

  Intelligence Test

  by HARRY WALTON

  TWO miles out of town on a main road, the lunch room drew trucking trade because there was plenty of space to park the huge trailer trucks. But there were none tonight, a hot night, sticky with the memory of a broiling day. A Sunday night, when there weren’t many trucks out, and families were driving home to a cold supper and television.

  Every time headlights swung around the curve of the highway, Schmidt raised his head with the last despairing energy of hope.

  Like an automation, the girl wiped a few dishes that were already dry. She was pretty in a way, and might have been remarkably pretty if she had chosen to smile.

  “Somebody will stop and help us, Daddy.”

  Schmidt, sitting on a stool at his own counter, shook his head.

  “Kathie, maybe nobody will come . . . I want to pray, but I don’t know—maybe this is something you should not pray about.”

  “For all we know, Daddy, it may have happened before. Maybe nobody ever heard about it because . . .”

  The reason that occurred to her was not reassuring. Her father stared into the pool of coffee.

  “It began after six,” he murmured. “Just after you put gas in the blue roadster. Then when I wanted to go out to lock the pump . . .”

  “That’s only two hours ago, Daddy.” And she added, with almost childish petulance, “If only the radio worked.”

  Her father drank the coffee as if seeking strength in it. “The tubes light, like always. But it doesn’t play. It is as if we are in a bubble, a vacuum—”

  The words shook her because they echoed her own sense, crystallizing the dread of the past hundred minutes.

  Outside a pair of headlights swung off the road, rolled past the gas pump, and stopped. A car door clicked open and slammed shut. Inside, the two watched a man approach, tall, lanky, a human silhouette that might be old or young, handsome or ugly. The cardboard figure approached the door, and those within froze in an agony of anticipation.

  The door was flung open, and the man stepped in, the screened panel slamming to behind him.

  “You still open? Don’t need any gas, but I could go for coffee, sinkers, maybe a sandwich.”

  He was young, and if not handsome, at least not ugly. He was like a gust of wind from an open plain. Kathie felt she could have kissed him just for being what He was—an everyday male.

  She drew coffee from the urn, an enormous old-fashioned one much too big for the place. Her father stared at the man wordlessly. After Kathie had slid the coffee onto the counter, Schmidt got off the stool and went to the door. His daughter watched him with quick glances, so that the customer would not notice. But he did.

  “You closing up? I won’t keep you long. Just let me swallow this—and if you have a ham sandwich, I’ll take it along.”

  At the door Schmidt turned away as if cringing under an invisible blow. She said mechanically, “Oh, we’re open until midnight. Take your time. It won’t matter—I mean, we live right here.”

  The customer nodded and started on the sandwich. Schmidt came back to the counter, shaking his head slightly as he climbed back on the stool. The man munched ham on rye, sipped coffee, and slid the cup back for a refill.

  “Say, maybe you can help me. I’m with the Eagle. Know anything about that flying saucer story that started a couple days ago?”

  “The one Mr. Wilcox saw?” Kathie asked.

  “Sure. You know this Wilcox?”

  “He eats here sometimes. If he says he saw something, I guess he did.”

  He finished the sandwich, unconscious of their stare. It struck him as he finished the second cup of coffee.

  “Say, what’s up? Have I got spots or something?”

  The girl, managing a half smile, shook her head.

  “Guess you wanted to close early. Sorry I kept you.” He handed her a dollar, and she made change as if he were any other customer.

  “Be seeing you,” he said over his shoulder as he got to the door.

  He fumbled for the handle of the screen door. Unable to find it, he pushed on the flimsy panel itself. He turned grinning.

  “Okay, what’s the gag? I knew something was funny when I came in. You’ve got shockproof glass in that doorway. I suppose the back door is nailed shut. What do you want, my dough?”

  Jake Schmidt shook his head. The girl looked stunned.

  “What sort of frame-up it this?” roared the man.

  Schmidt lay a veined hand on his shoulder.

  “There is no frame-up. Do not talk like that to my daughter.”

  “Then you tell me. What’s your racket?”

  “It is no racket. It is worse—a disaster.”

  The girl came out and stood between them. “Let me, Daddy. Look here, Mister—”

  “Ed Kelland.”

  “Look at this, Mr. Kelland.”

  She whipped a cover off a table, an oversize cloth that had hung almost to the floor. Then she dragged the table itself to one side. Kelland’s brow puckered at sight of the thing that had been under it.

  A cube about eighteen inches on a side, translucently opaque like a luminous china egg. A featureless geometric entity, floating in space a foot above the floor.

  Kelland walked around it, stooped, and felt under it with a hand. He reached toward it, thought better of touching it, and substituted a pencil for his finger. The pencil stopped three inches from the cube. He pushed; the point shattered against nothingness.

  Kelland faced the others. “Go ahead, tell me.”

  “There isn’t much,” said Kathie. “About six tonight I put gas in a car and came inside. My father was reading. Ten minutes later he decided to lock the gas pump. When he tried to get out of the door, he couldn’t—and then we saw this thing.”

  “How did it get here?”

  “I told you—it was simply here. Nobody—nothing came in the place after me. We don’t know what it is, or why we can’t leave the house. After a while we couldn’t stand looking at—that thing. So we hid it with the table.”

  “You couldn’t get out, but I came in . . .”

  “If we had dreamed you could, we would have stopped you. Don’t you see? We wanted somebody to come along, find us, and get help. Now you’re trapped along with us.”

  The young man mopped his forehead with a rumpled handkerchief. “Now wait—this is pretty hard to swallow. How about the back door?”

  “See for yourself. Through there.”

  Kelland looked at her, hesitated, and went through the door at the end of the counter. In less than a minute he came back, walked to an open window, and after a little tugging unhooked the screen. The warm darkness outside chirruped with insects.

  The screen hit something solid when he tried to push it away. His outstretched arm flattened against a vertical wall—invisible, icy smooth.

  Grinning ruefully, he replaced th
e screen. “Not that I thought you hadn’t tried, but it’s every man see for himself, in a case like this.”

  Schmidt nodded soberly. “We have not sat here idly. Every window is the same. There are only two doors—we have no cellar, no windows in the attic. The house is built on solid concrete—a slab. We could try to chop through. I have a heavy clever.”

  “Let’s see it,” said Kelland.

  He took the thing from Schmidt and braced himself before the screen door. The big blade flashed down—and soundlessly thudded into the unseen barrier. Again and again Kelland swung it, his blows vigorous but ineffective. On the eighth he suddenly cried out and dropped the clever.

  “The thing’s hot! Don’t touch it,” he warned as the girl bent over. “It just seemed to sink into something soft but rock solid—if you can imagine that. On the last whack, it suddenly got too hot to hold.”

  He grinned, blew on his palm. “As a rescuer, I’m not so hot. What’s your name?”

  “Kathie Schmidt. My father’s name is Jacob. I help him here evenings, but I go to State College daytimes.”

  “How about the phone, Kathie?”

  “We thought of it.”

  “Dead, huh? And you have no idea who or what could be doing this?”

  Schmidt said wearily, “You ask who could do what cannot be done?”

  Kelland shrugged. “If you had any idea—no matter how far-fetched. Otherwise you start with the unknown—an equation full of X’s.”