Watkins laughed. “Superstitious little fellow, aren’t you?”
“But not incompetent,” Rajcik said, smiling.
“Can’t you two quit it?” Somers demanded, and both men turned, startled, to face him.
“Behold!” Rajcik said. “The sleeper has awakened.”
“After a fashion,” said Watkins, snickering.
Somers suddenly felt that if death or rescue did not come quickly, they would kill each other, or drive each other crazy.
“Look!” Rajcik said.
A light on the computer’s panel was flashing green.
“Must be a mistake,” said Watkins. “Green means the problem is solvable within the conditions set down.”
“Solvable!” Rajcik said.
“But it’s impossible,” Watkins argued. “It’s fooling us, leading us on—”
“Don’t be superstitious,” Rajcik mocked. “How soon do we get the solution?”
“It’s coming now.” Watkins pointed to a paper tape inching out of a slot in the machine’s face. “But there must be something wrong!”
They watched as, millimeter by millimeter, the tape crept out. The computer hummed, its lights flashing green. Then the hum stopped. The green lights blazed once more and faded.
“What happened?” Rajcik wanted to know.
“It’s finished,” Watkins said.
“Pick it up! Read it!”
“You read it. You won’t get me to play its game.”
Rajcik laughed nervously and rubbed his hands together, but didn’t move. Both men turned to Somers.
“Captain, it’s your responsibility.”
“Go ahead, Captain!”
Somers looked with loathing at his engineer and navigator. His responsibility, everything was his responsibility. Would they never leave him alone?
He went up to the machine, pulled the tape free, read it with slow deliberation.
“What does it say, sir?” Rajcik asked.
“Is it—possible?” Watkins urged.
“Oh, yes,” Somers said. “It’s possible.” He laughed and looked around at the hot, smelly, low-ceilinged little room with its locked doors and windows.
“What is it?” Rajcik shouted.
Somers said, “You figured a few thousand years to return to the Solar System, Rajcik? Well, the computer agrees with you. Twenty-three hundred years, to be precise. Therefore, it has given us a suitable longevity serum.”
“Twenty-three hundred years,” Rajcik mumbled. “I suppose we hibernate or something of the sort.”
“Not at all,” Somers said calmly. “As a matter of fact, this serum does away quite nicely with the need for sleep. We stay awake and watch each other.”
The three men looked at one another and at the sickeningly familiar room smelling of metal and perspiration, its sealed doors and windows that stared at an unchanging spectacle of stars.
Watkins said, “Yes, that’s the sort of thing it would do.”
THE WAVERIES, by Fredric Brown
Definitions from the school-abridged Webster-Hamlin Dictionary 1998 edition:
wavery (WA-ver-i) n. a vader-slang
vader (VA-der) n. inorgan of the class Radio
inorgan (in-OR-gan) n. noncorporeal ens, vader
radio (RA-di-o) n. 1. class of inorgans 2. etheric frequency between light and electricity 3. (obsolete) method of communication used up to 1977
* * * *
The opening guns of invasion were not at all loud, although they were heard by millions of people. George Bailey was one of the millions. I choose George Bailey because he was the only one who came within a googol of light-years of guessing what they were.
George Bailey was drunk and under the circumstances one can’t blame him for being so. He was listening to radio advertisements of the most nauseous kind. Not because he wanted to listen to them, I hardly need say, but because he’d been told to listen to them by his boss, J. R. McGee of the MID network.
George Bailey wrote advertising for the radio. The only thing he hated worse than advertising was radio. And here on his own time he was listening to fulsome and disgusting commercials on a rival network.
“Bailey,” J. R. McGee had said, “you should be more familiar with what others are doing. Particularly, you should be informed about those of our own accounts who use several networks. I strongly suggest…”
One doesn’t quarrel with an employer’s strong suggestions and keep a five-hundred-dollar a week job. But one can drink whisky sours while listening. George Bailey did. Also, between commercials, he was playing gin rummy with Maisie Hetterman, a cute little redheaded typist from the studio. It was Maisie’s apartment and Maisie’s radio (George himself, on principle, owned neither a radio nor a TV set) but George had brought the liquor. “—only the very finest tobaccos,” said the radio, “go dit-dit-dit nation’s favorite cigarette—”
George glanced at the radio. “Marconi,” he said. He meant Morse, naturally, but the whisky sours had muddled him a bit so his first guess was more nearly right than anyone else’s. It was Marconi, in a way. In a very peculiar way.
“Marconi?” asked Maisie. George, who hated to talk against a radio, leaned over and switched it off.
“I meant Morse,” he said. “Morse, as in Boy Scouts or the Signal Corps. I used to be a Boy Scout once.”
“You’ve sure changed,” Maisie said.
George sighed. “Somebody’s going to catch hell, broadcasting code on that wave length.”
“What did it mean?”
“Mean? Oh, you mean what did it mean. Uh—S, the letter S. Dit-dit-dit is S. SOS is dit-dit-dit dah-dah-dah dit-dit-dit.”
“O is dah-dah-dah?”
George grinned. “Say that again, Maisie. I like it. And I think you are dah-dah-dah too.”
“George, maybe it’s really an SOS message. Turn it back on.”
George turned it back on. The tobacco ad was still going. “—gentlemen of the most dit-dit-dit-ing taste prefer the finer taste of dit-dit-dit-arettes. In the new package that keeps them dit-dit-dit and ultra fresh—”
“It’s not SOS. It’s just S’s.”
“Like a teakettle or—say, George, maybe it’s just some advertising gag.”
George shook his head. “Not when it can blank out the name of the product. Just a minute till I—” He reached over and turned the dial of the radio a bit to the right and then a bit to the left, and an incredulous look came into his face. He turned the dial to the extreme left, as far as it would go. There wasn’t any station there, not even the hum of a carrier wave.
But: “Dit-dit-dit,” said the radio, “dit-dit-dit.”
He turned the dial to the extreme right. “Dit-dit-dit.” George switched it off and stared at Maisie without seeing her, which was hard to do.
“Something wrong, George?”
“I hope so,” said George Bailey. “I certainly hope so.”
He started to reach for another