The Fredric Brown Megapack by Fredric Brown

that an otherwise dying race might live and multiply again.
    Each planet would gain greatly, and neither would lose.
    And tonight was the night when Earth would make its first sighting shot. Its next shot, a rocket containing Earthmen, or at least an Earthman, would be at the next opposition, two Earth years, or roughly four Martian years, hence. The Martians knew this, because their teams of telepaths were able to catch at least some of the thoughts of Earthmen, enough to know their plans. Unfortunately, at that distance, the connection was one-way. Mars could not ask Earth to hurry its program. Or tell Earth scientists the facts about Mars’ composition and atmosphere which would have made this preliminary shot unnecessary.
    Tonight Ry, the leader (as nearly as the Martian word can be translated), and Khee, his administrative assistant and closest friend, sat and meditated together until the time was near. Then they drank a toast to the future—in a beverage based on menthol, which had the same effect on Martians as alcohol on Earthmen—and climbed to the roof of the building in which they had been sitting. They watched toward the north, where the rocket should land. The stars shone brilliantly and unwinkingly through the atmosphere.
    * * * *
    In Observatory No. 1 on Earth’s moon, Rog Everett, his eye at the eyepiece of the spotter scope, said triumphantly, “Thar she blew, Willie. And now, as soon as the films are developed, we’ll know the score on that old planet Mars.” He straightened up—there’d be no more to see now—and he and Willie Sanger shook hands solemnly. It was an historical occasion.
    “Hope it didn’t kill anybody. Any Martians, that is. Rog, did it hit dead center in Syrtis Major?”
    “Near as matters. I’d say it was maybe a thousand miles off, to the south. And that’s damn close on a fifty-million-mile shot. Willie, do you really think there are any Martians?”
    Willie thought a second and then said, “No.”
    He was right.
    IMAGINE
    Imagine ghosts, gods, and devils.
    Imagine hells and heavens, cities floating in the sky and cities sunken in the sea. Unicorns and centaurs. Witches, warlocks, djinns, and banshees.
    Angels and harpies. Charms and incantations. Elementals, familiars, demons.
    Easy to imagine, all of those things: mankind has been imagining them for thousands of years. Imagine spaceships and the future.
    Easy to imagine; the future is really coming and there’ll be spaceships in it. Is there then anything that’s hard to imagine?
    Of course there is.
    Imagine a piece of matter and yourself inside it, yourself aware, thinking and therefore knowing you exist, able to move that piece of matter that you’re in, to make it sleep or wake, make love or walk uphill.
    Imagine a universe—infinite or not, as you wish to picture it—with a billion, billion, billion suns in it. Imagine a blob of mud whirling madly around one of those suns.
    Imagine yourself standing on that blob of mud, whirling with it, whirling through time and space to an unknown destination. Imagine!
    IT DIDN’T HAPPEN
    Although there was no way in which he could have known it, Lorenz Kane had been riding for a fall ever since the time he ran over the girl on the bicycle. The fall itself could have happened anywhere, any time; it happened to happen backstage at a burlesque theater on an evening in late September.
    For the third evening within a week he had watched the act of Queenie Quinn, the show’s star stripper, an act well worth watching, indeed. Clad only in blue light and three tiny bits of strategically placed ribbon, Queenie, a tall blond built along the lines of a brick whatsit, had just completed her last stint for the evening and had vanished into the wings, when Kane made up his mind that a private viewing of Queenie’s act, in his bachelor apartment, not only would be more pleasurable than a public viewing but would indubitably lead to even greater pleasures. And since the finale number, in