50 Short Science Fiction Tales by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov [Asimov, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

watching the back of his head with frightened eyes. “But,

of course, you can’t violate the security rules, can you?

You can’t tell me anything about it at all. . . .”

He shrugged, turning around. “There’ll be a newscast at

six o’clock. In ten minutes. Wherever there’s a radio or

television set on Earth, everybody will hear what we found

out in that interview. Perhaps not quite everything, but

almost everything.”

“Oh?” she said in a surprised, small voice. She looked at

him in silence for a moment, her eyes growing more

frightened. “Why would they do a thing like that?”

“Well,” said the professor, “it seemed like the right thing

to do. The best thing, at any rate. There may be some panic,

of course.” He turned back to the window and gazed out on

the street, as if something there were holding his attention.

He looked thoughtful and abstracted, she decided. But then

a better word came to her, and it was “resigned.”

“Clive,” she said, almost desperately, “what happened?”

He frowned absently at her and walked to the radio. It

began to make faint, humming noises as the professor

adjusted dials unhurriedly. The humming didn’t vary much.

“They’ve cleared the networks, I imagine,” he remarked.

The sentence went on repeating itself in his wife’s mind,

with no particular significance at first. But then a meaning

came into it and grew and swelled swiftly, until she felt her

head would burst with it. They’ve cleared the networks. All

over the world this evening, they’ve cleared the networks.

Until the newscast comes on at six o’clock . . .

“As to what happened,” she heard her husband’s voice

saying, “that’s a little difficult to understand or explain.

Even now. It was certainly amazing—” He interrupted

himself. “Do you remember Milt Caldwell, dear?”

“Milt Caldwell?” She searched her mind blankly. “No,”

she said, shaking her head.

“A rather well-known anthropologist,” the Professor

informed her, with an air of faint reproach. “Milt got

himself lost in the approximate center of the Australian

deserts some two years ago. Only we have been told he

didn’t get lost. They picked him up—”

“They? ” she said. “You mean there’s more than one?”

“Well, there would be more than one, wouldn’t there?” he

asked reasonably. “That explains, at any rate, how they

learned to speak English. It made it seem a little more

reasonable, anyhow,” he added, “when it told us that.

Seven minutes to six . . .”

“What?” she said faintly.

“Seven minutes to six,” the Professor repeated. “Sit

down, dear. I believe I can tell you, in seven minutes,

approximately what occurred. . . .”

The Visitor from Outside sat in its cage, its large gray

hands slackly clasping the bars. Its attitudes and motions,

the professor had noted in the two minutes since he had

entered the room with the other men, approximated those of

a rather heavily built ape. Reporters had called it “the Toad

from Mars,” on the basis of the first descriptions they’d had

of it—the flabby shape and loose, warty skin made that a

vaguely adequate identification. The round, horny head

almost could have been that of a lizard.

With a zoologist’s fascination in a completely new genus,

the professor catalogued these contradicting physical

details in his mind. Yet something somewhat like this

might have been

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