This e-text was produced from “Worlds of If” November 1961.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.copyright on this publication was renewed.
He had betrayed mankind, but he was not afraid of theconsequences—ever!
They caught up with him in Belgrade.
The aliens had gone by then, only a few shining metal huts in theSiberian tundra giving mute evidence that they had been anything otherthan a nightmare.
It had seemed exactly like that. A nightmare in which all of Earth stoodhelpless, unable to resist or flee, while the obscene shapes slitheredand flopped over all her green fields and fair cities. And the awakeninghad not brought the reassurance that it had all been a bad dream. Thatif it had happened in reality, the people of Earth would have beencapable of dealing with the terrible menace. It had been real. And theyhad been no more capable of resisting the giant intelligences than achild of killing the ogre in his favorite fairy story.
It was an ironic parallel, because that was what finally saved Earth forits own people. A fairy story.
The old fable of the lion and the mouse. When the lion had exhausted hisatomic armor and proud science against the invincible and immortalinvaders of Earth—for they could not be killed by any means—the mouseattacked and vanquished them.
The mouse, the lowest form of life: the fungoids, the air of Earthswarming with millions of their spores, attacked the monstrous bodies,grew and entwined within the gray convolutions that were their braincenters. And as the tiny thread-roots probed and tightened, the aliensscreamed soundlessly. The intelligences toppled and fell, and at lastthat few among them who retained sanity gathered their lunatic brethrenand fled as they had come.
If he had known the effect the fungoids would have on them, he wouldhave told them that too. He had told them everything else, when he hadbeen snatched from a busy city street, a random specimen of humanity tobe probed and investigated.
They had chosen well. For the payment they offered him he was willing tobarter the whole human race. As far as it lay in his power he did justthat.
He was not an educated man, though he was intelligent. It was child’splay to them to strip his mind bare; but they had to know theintangibles too, the determined will of humanity to survive, theprobabilities of the pattern of human behavior in a situation whichhumanity had never before faced. He told them all he could, gladly andwillingly. He would have descended to any treachery for the vastglittering reward they tempted him with.
It wasn’t easy for the Yugoslavs to guard him and, anyway, their heartsweren’t in the task. His treachery, the ultimate treason, the betrayalof the whole human race, was commonly known.
Inevitably the mob got him and killed three policemen in the process.When they had sated their anger a little and the traitor had lost mostof his clothes and the thumb of his right hand, they dragged him to thejunction where the Danube meets the Sava and held him under the graywaters with long poles, as if he was some poisonous reptile.
He lay supinely on the bed of the river and smiled evilly while ahundred thousand people writhed in neural agony.
Twenty-four hours later the neural plague had spread to Zagreb and intoAlbania as far as Tirana. When it crossed to Leghorn in Italy theBalkans held twenty million lunatics and the Danube was an artificiallake a hundred miles wide.
They had used a “clean” bomb. So they were able to bring a loudspeakervan to its edge and boom at hi