CHANGE OF VENUE

Originally published in Fantastic, July 1957.

You need a powerful television antenna down east in Camden, Maine, to get any kind of reception at all, and that’s what the gadget on top of Hal Parsons’ house looked like. But it wasn’t. It was part of what Hal called his sky trap. And after his disappearance, we got to calling it the Mars machine, in a skeptical Yankee sort of way.

We all knew him as Hal despite the string of degrees he was entitled to use after his name. He was gaunt, stooped-over and fiftyish. He’d never been known to crack a smile but he had one of those deadpan senses of humor that we can appreciate in these parts.

Hal was an outsider, like myself. He came from the west—Boston, I think. He settled down here so he could fool around with some of his ideas after a spell of teaching in one of the universities. Taught a lot of fuddy-duddy subjects, he once said; didn’t have any free time to do the things he wanted to. He’d been a frugal man, a bachelor, and he’d come down here with his savings and bought a small house on a neck of land that formed one side of the cove where I keep my tourist boat.

My schooner cruises are a seasonal business and in early spring or late fall Hal would come out with me on my windjammer and we’d sail around Penobscot Bay, just the two of us, looking over one island or another. He thought he might buy one some day and settle down to do a little farming or lobstering as a sideline to his experiments.

He never did, though. A pity, too. Hal could have made a go of it, I’m sure. He accomplished everything he ever set his mind to. That was his undoing, I guess. He started fooling around with those Martians and couldn’t break off while it was still safe.

Up on the second floor of his house he had a contraption he showed off to me whenever I wanted another look at it. It was all metal and glass and I used to tell him it looked like one of those things in a horror movie. Hal called it an energy converter. It went up like an inverted funnel through the roof and connected with the thing that looked like a television antenna but wasn’t.

* * * *

Hal had a theory about thought waves. It didn’t sound much crazier than some of the stories these Down Easters tell and it was a deal more scientific. Hal said thought waves were electrical impulses which could be gathered from all over and stored up for future use. I don’t recollect all the details but he said something about the thought waves being in bands and varying in strength,, depending on what was being thought about.

He had a metallic helmet connected to the machine. A fine net of copper wires covered the helmet. Hal said it gave him an inkling of what the world was thinking about. I suppose I could have tried it out if I’d wanted to, but I never asked and Hal never offered.

Hal said the strongest impression he got through the helmet was of food. The world was apparently a pretty hungry place. The next strongest was the money band. I guess we always knew people were greedy, but Hal claimed he was the first one to discover it scientifically.

There were a lot of other strong wavebands—vanity, love, death and so on. And way down the list, coming through pretty weak, was the Martian band, mixed up with some others.

Hal isolated it, finally, well enough to get something to work on but he couldn’t entirely eliminate an undertone of weird murmurings that made no sense to him at all. He figured them out, after a while, but he got a shock doing it.

The way he explained it to me, in a gruff, take-it-or-leave-it way, was that people’s thoughts about Martians were all mixed up with the thoughts of Martians.

Of the Martians themselves, that is.

This is all what Hal Parsons told me, before he vanished from among us. I’m just retelling it, not saying I believe it.

There’s plenty of thinking about Mars these days, it being the nearest planet and those fellows down in Washington and Cocoa, Florida, fooling around with who knows what ideas—but this was thinking from the planet itself, apparently, carried across space and down along the antenna and into Hal’s upside-down funnel.

Hal had this condenser thing attached to his machine and one night, after watching dials and making notes till he was foggy-headed, he left the machine running and went to bed.

He was pretty excited the next day. I was never sure whether he said he went to bed wearing that copper-wired helmet or whether he just had a nightmare. Anyhow he got impressions of Martians all night long—of tall Martians, small Martians, Martians on wheels, skinny Martians, finny Martians, Martians malign and benign, purple Martians, Martians that looked like people, Martians that looked like hell.

That was the way he put it, making it a kind of half joke but never cracking a smile.

* * * *

Hal didn’t let me stay long that day. He was too busy. He’d trapped some thoughts, he said. They’d been energized and were buzzing around in a scientific prison. The next step was to pick out a hunk of energy and materialize it.

He said something about never having liberated an impression before and that it might be dangerous. He said he was pretty sure he had a Martian (so to speak) in his trap and naturally he wanted to see what it looked like. And have a talk with it, if possible.

Then he shooed me out the door.

I took some customers out on a cruise that afternoon and I was gone for a week. Out on the bay, under sail, Hal’s fooling around seemed to be something pretty preposterous and I’d pretty much forgotten about it by the time I got back. Then, with the passengers ashore, the boat had to be made shipshape for the next batch, and it was another day before I rowed across the cove to Hal’s house.

The house looked empty, somehow, before I even got to the door. It stood all alone out on the point with its antenna sticking up into the sky and when I knocked there was no answer. The door wasn’t locked and I went in. Hal wasn’t anywhere in the house.

I looked all through it, something making me save the top-floor workroom till last. That was empty, too, and quiet.

* * * *

The big machine was smashed—not like you’d take a crowbar and bust something all up, but as if it had been sort of sucked together from inside and twisted. Some of the glass was broken and some of it had melted and hardened again into brittle puddles on the floor.

I couldn’t find a body. Hal’s bags were still there, and so was the big trunk he’d come to Camden with years ago. His Sunday suit was hanging behind a door in his bedroom, a little in need of a pressing but nothing that would have kept him from wearing it to one of those science conferences he sometimes went to.

Finally I went back to the wrecked workroom among the litter in a big roll-top desk near a window overlooking the bay I found a notebook—a kind of journal, I guess. Most of it was in shorthand but toward the end of the written-in part there were several sentences in longhand.

Now Hal’s handwriting, what I’d seen of it before, never was much and this writing in the notebook was worse, like he’d put down the words in a hurry with somebody joggling his elbow.

What it said was this, as nearly as I can recollect:

It said that Hal had caught himself a Martian, a real-in-the-flesh specimen, with his sky trap. It wasn’t big by a long shot but it was plenty mad for its size, which was somewhere around seven inches tall. He didn’t like being trapped one bit and as soon as they got the hang of each other’s language the Martian let Hal know about it.

The creature—Hal didn’t describe it apart from the size—stayed mad, too, all through the two days he was there. He worked with Hal, or on him, in a kind of cold fury, the writing said, till they found a way to reverse Hal’s sky trap.

Apparently the Martian wasn’t satisfied with that. In the first place it wanted to be sure Hal wouldn’t fool around with his contraption again—wouldn’t go yanking him or his friends through space to a planet they didn’t care for.

So the Martian arranged to smash the machine on his way back through it.

Then Hal was going to be changed into energy so he could go back with him.

He had committed a crime, you see, and when he got to Mars, Hal was going to go on trial for kidnapping.

That was all there was in the notebook except for a few more words that ended in a squiggle, as if Hal had been snatched away still holding his pen.

The words were, I think, “I’m going to need a good lawyer.”

It sounds like Hal, anyway. If he ever comes back, I’ll know he found one.