Atomic Julie's Galactic Bedtime Stories - ULTIMATUM by Roger D. Aycock (Roger Dee)

How can you tell an alien from a madman?

 

ULTIMATUM

By ROGER DEE

In a dingy little Indiana hotel room the fate of
three worlds suddenly hung in precarious balance!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1950.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

---

Winant followed the lanky sheriff down the jail corridor past rows of empty, plank-walled cells and drew a sharp breath of relief when they found the last cubicle still tenanted.

"That's Uncle Ivor, all right," Winant said. "Sorry he caused you so much trouble, sheriff, but I'll be glad to pay his fine. What's the charge against him?"

The sheriff rubbed a palm across his drooping mustaches and looked doubtfully at the old man who sat on the edge of the cell bunk, the bald dome of his head cradled dejectedly in his hands.

"You couldn't rightly say there is a charge, mister," he admitted. "Your uncle popped into Ben Stuart's Drop Inn restaurant night before last with a little black box under his arm, naked as a jaybird and talking like a crazy man.

"'I'm a visitor from Mars,' he says. 'Take me to your president, and quick!' Ben thought he was crazy, or drunk, and ran him out with a meat cleaver, and the old duck went down to the Warner Hotel and pulled the same goofy act. Pop Warner called me, and I went down and threw the old coot into the cooler. I knew right off that he was cracked, because I even had to show him how to put on the clothes I brought him. And the wingding he pitched when I took that black box away from him—wow!"

Winant shook his head. "Poor Uncle Ivor," he said commiseratingly. "The last time he got away from us he thought he was Mahatma Ghandi, and tried to buy a bus ticket from Cincinnati to New Delhi, India. I found him, finally, in Evansville, Indiana. It's amazing how he got this far south, but then a mentally-unbalanced person can do surprising things, sometimes."

The sheriff snorted. "Unbalanced, hell," he said. "The old coot's crazy as a bed-bug. Just got in from Mars, he says, and he wants the president of the United States—on the double!"

He unlocked the door and Winant went inside.

"It's all right now, Uncle Ivor," he said gently. The old man raised a wrinkled, leathery face and stared at him uncomprehendingly. "Let's go over to my hotel and get a good meal and a hot bath," Winant urged. "Then we'll go home again. Ready, now?"

A few minutes later in the jail office the sheriff pocketed the bill Winant gave him and handed over a small lacquered metal box that was surprisingly heavy for its size.

"Here's your uncle's radio," he said. "New-fangled model, I reckon. I couldn't make head nor tail of it, so I just left it alone."

Winant lifted the hinged cover and looked inside the box at the neat array of tiny meters and knobs that covered the control panel.

"A wise decision, sheriff," he said dryly. "Wiser, perhaps, than you'll ever know."

---

The old man stood in the center of Winant's hotel room, the sheriff's ill-fitting denims hanging on his slight frame like the castoff clothing of a scare-crow.

"The box," he said. His voice, after talking for so long, was a hoarse, rasping croak. "Give me the box."

Winant sat in a decrepit wicker chair, holding the box in his lap, his eyes missing no detail of the old man's shrunken figure with its bald dome-like head and wrinkled parchment face.

"I'll give you the box when you tell me something that makes sense," he said. "What you've just told me is nothing but a rehash of the story you told the sheriff—that your name is Yardana and that you are an envoy from Mars, sent to Earth to help scientific authorities develop safe atomic power. Look—I'm a news writer, down here to investigate the rumors of a blue meteorite landing in the hills just north of here and to check up on the comic accounts I read of your appearance. I went to a lot of trouble and some risk to get you out of jail, and I want a reasonable story for my trouble. What about it, now?"

The old man wrung his hands. "Give me the box. Give me the box!"

"Later," Winant promised. "When you give me the real story behind this thing I'll not only give you back your box, I'll give you a lift out of this burg as well."

He looked at the old man sharply. "How could a Martian speak the kind of English you've been using? Why should a Martian look so much like an ordinary human being? It doesn't add up."

"We are of the same root stock," Yardana said. "Intelligent life follows the same evolutionary pattern, no matter where it develops, so long as conditions are the same. As for the language, my people have followed your experiments with electro-magnetics since their beginning