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What changes does Barry Barr undergo throughout the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Lost Tribes of Venus by Erik Fennel.
Relevant chunks:
THE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS
By ERIK FENNEL
On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr—Earthman transmuted—swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.
It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.
In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.
The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.
Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.
The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.
Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.
Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.
"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes," the captain said meaningfully.
Robson Hind cleared his throat. "We can change accelerators in two hours," he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.
It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.
At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.
The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.
" There's metal in the field! " His voice was high and unsteady.
Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.
Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.
"It must be cleared. From the outside."
Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.
Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.
The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.
Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.
"I'm assigned, not expendable," he protested hastily. "If there were more trouble later...." His face was pasty.
Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.
"For the safety of the ship." That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.
For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.
He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.
But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.
"Nick, will you help me button up?" he asked with forced calmness.
For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.
Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive—
The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.
Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.
First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.
Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step—to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.
Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.
But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.
On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.
Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed—most particularly a launching ramp—and to study native Venusian materials.
Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.
Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.
She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.
But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.
The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.
Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.
But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.
He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.
Then it was done.
As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.
Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.
"I could eat a cow with the smallpox," Barry declared.
Nick grinned. "No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there."
Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.
"Say," he asked anxiously. "What's haywire with the air?"
Nick looked startled. "Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago."
Barry shrugged. "Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout."
He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.
He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.
The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!
Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.
A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.
Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.
"You're almost in," a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. "Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!"
The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.
Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.
"Airlock open. Both doors."
Venusian air poured in.
"For this I left Panama?" one of the men yelped.
"Enough to gag a maggot," another agreed with hand to nose.
It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.
But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.
The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.
Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!
Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.
Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.
"Dorothy!" he said fervently.
Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.
Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.
By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.
"Water!" Barry croaked.
The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.
"Doctor," he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. "What are my chances? On the level."
Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. "There's not a thing—not a damned solitary thing—I can do. It's something new to medical science."
Barry lay still.
"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes," the doctor continued, "and you know as much—more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief."
Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.
"What are these changes?" he asked. "What's this?"
"Those things seem to be—" the doctor began hesitantly. "Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills."
Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.
"But there must be—"
Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.
II
Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit—but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.
When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.
"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry," he began.
"Stuff it," the sick man interrupted. "I want favors. Can do?"
Nick nodded vigorously.
"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open."
Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.
It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.
"Got a pencil?" he asked.
He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.
"Think you can get materials?"
Nick glanced at the sketch. "Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it."
"Two days?"
Nick looked insulted.
He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.
Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.
Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.
"Perfect. Now put the window back."
Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.
A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.
The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.
It was abnormal.
But so was Barry Barr.
With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.
Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him—her face with the exotic high cheek-bones—her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair—lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil—her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman—her slender yet firmly lithe body.
After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.
But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.
Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.
Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.
Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.
One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.
Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.
The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.
Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.
Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.
In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.
The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.
Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.
The most important question—that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians—remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.
Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.
But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.
Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.
"Barry! Barry!" she whispered. "I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more." Tears glistened in her eyes.
"Huh?" he grunted. "Who? Me?"
"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off—oh, the most piteous letter!"
Barry was fully awake now. "I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia," he shouted. His lips thinned.
"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!" he declared grimly.
"Robson wouldn't!" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.
Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.
"I believe you, Barry."
She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.
When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.
The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.
But even with his trickery Hind had lost.
He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.
The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.
He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.
Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.
Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.
The door was locked!
He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.
He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.
Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.
He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in—but it was not enough!
He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.
There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.
Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.
Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.
Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.
III
Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.
Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.
Then dozens of them—hundreds—were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.
For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.
Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.
He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.
He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.
He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.
Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.
Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.
Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.
Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.
Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.
Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.
Human—or nearly so—the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.
It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.
Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.
Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.
Barry stared through the reddening water.
Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.
But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.
One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.
One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.
He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.
Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.
Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.
The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.
Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.
Question:
What changes does Barry Barr undergo throughout the story?
Answer:
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[
"Barry Barr transforms from a regular human male to a creature that breathes underwater and requires moisture to survive. After being exposed to Sigma radiation while removing particles from the outer hull of Four, Barry began to feel changes in his body. Air felt dry and hot in his lungs and he quickly developed shortness of breath. Fainting spells ensued and breathing difficulties. Once they arrived on Venus, Dr. Carl Jensen gave a grave diagnosis of the unknown. Barry developed dark marks on both sides of his neck, which soon transformed into gills. Webbing grew between his fingers and toes, and his revulsion to dry air only grew. He built a moisture machine to keep in his room so he could breathe comfortably. But it still wasn’t enough. On the night he was trapped inside of the dry room, he broke out and escaped to the water. Although his lungs weren’t fully adjusted to breathing water, he took off like a rocket and battled several Venusian creatures with ease. Barry goes from completely human to a humanoid merman of sorts. ",
"After volunteering for the spacewalk to remove the meteorite debris, Barr wakens from a nap unusually hungry and has trouble breathing the air on the ship. As he tries to eat, he notices a sense of heat and dryness that bothers him so much that it becomes difficult to breathe. When his meal is over, he loses consciousness just after it dawns on him that the Kendall-shield on his spacesuit had leaked. Barr suffers delirium, fever, fainting spells, and unquenchable thirst; all the while, breathing becomes increasingly difficult for him. After drawing a plan, his friend Nick builds a humidifier for Barr, which keeps his room so humid that water is dripping off the walls; this enables him to breathe more freely. When he gets a glass of water, he pours it down his throat while breathing, meaning the water goes into his lungs. The doctor doesn’t know what is happening to Barr, but he tells him that if a normal person poured water in their lungs like that, they would die of a coughing spasm or congestive pneumonia. Once they land on Venus, however, Barr can breathe easily due to the humid air. Barr also has rudimentary gills growing on the sides of his neck, and webbed skins begin growing between his fingers and toes as his gills develop further. When Hinds cuts off the humidifier to Barr’s room and locks him in, Barr would have died if he hadn’t been able to break the window and get out. Even then, his gills have developed so much that the Venusian air doesn’t completely take care of his needs. Not until he submerges himself in the water of the slough can Barr breathe freely. When he makes his way to the ocean, he encounters creatures who are nearly human but who, like Barr, have webbed fingers and toes, so it appears that Barr has become a Venusian.\n",
"Barry had been chosen for the Five Ships Plan because of his structural engineering expertise as well as his experience in tropical climates. His job in the Venus Colony would be to repurpose the ships that would be left behind on Venus into useful items as well as to study native Venusian materials. After stepping out into space to remove the debris from the outside of Number Four, Barry succumbs to Sigma radiation poisoning and begins to physically transform. At first, he has difficulty breathing in the air pumped through the spaceship. When Number Four lands on Venus, he is pleased to discover the thick humidity eases the choking in his throat. But the water in the atmosphere is not enough, and he continues to experience severe pains in his body as the change continues. Dr. Carl Jensen helps him through this process; he initially identifies the darkening patch on the sides of his neck as rudimentary gills. In addition, Barry develops webbed feet. Although his love for Dorothy has motivated Barry to push through adversity to arrive safely on Venus, he begins to realize that his physical developments are going to become a permanent barrier between his old reality and his new one. He can no longer breathe on land, so he desperately plunges into the water. As he swims into the ocean, his lungs fill with water and he can breathe easier. He also runs into the elusive Venusian natives, who look much like humans with bodies adapted to life underwater. This will likely become Barry's new home.",
"Before the story begins, Barry volunteers for the Five Ship Plan with his experience in tropical conditions making him a good fit. At the Training Base, he meets Dorothy Voorhees who he falls for, but Robson Hind is also interested, so Barry doesn't trust Robson. At the start of the story, Barry wakes up with the ship in free fall and works with the rest of the crew to stabalize whatever systems they can. After he is exposed to Sigma radiation, it gets harder and harder for him to breathe over time. In the early stages, he faints a lot, and develops a fever, becomes delirious, and has an unquenchable thirst. When he is exposed to Venusian air, it becomes easier for him to breathe and his chest pains become more manageable. After he passes out again, he starts inhaling water to put it straight into his lungs, surprising his doctor, which leads to him noticing the gills developing on his neck. His hands and feet grow webs as his gills developed further, and his depression gets worse through the transformation. He wakes up one day to find his machine has been turned off, andd has to break out of the room and jump into the water to save himself, where he learns that his gills work perfectly well. He finds he is much more comfortable underwater even though he still needs more time to adapt to these changes, as his lungs are still strained very quickly which impacts his endurance."
] |
63932
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THE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS
By ERIK FENNEL
On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile swamp meets hostile sea ... there did Barry Barr—Earthman transmuted—swap his Terran heritage for the deep dark waters of Tana; for the strangely beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the idling drivers.
It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.
In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment before the main circuit breakers could clack open.
The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.
Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.
The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open. Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was close behind him.
Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony, hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had lost its usual ruddiness.
Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared minor. They had been lucky.
"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes," the captain said meaningfully.
Robson Hind cleared his throat. "We can change accelerators in two hours," he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to order his crew into action.
It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite Hind's shouted orders.
At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he threw in the accelerator switch.
The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing, and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.
" There's metal in the field! " His voice was high and unsteady.
Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.
Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.
"It must be cleared. From the outside."
Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.
Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.
The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.
Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.
"I'm assigned, not expendable," he protested hastily. "If there were more trouble later...." His face was pasty.
Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.
"For the safety of the ship." That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.
For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.
He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.
But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.
"Nick, will you help me button up?" he asked with forced calmness.
For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.
Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive—
The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.
Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.
First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.
Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step—to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.
Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.
But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.
On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.
Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed—most particularly a launching ramp—and to study native Venusian materials.
Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.
Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of loneliness had come to an end.
She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone, and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.
But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.
The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.
Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.
But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.
He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into stuttering action.
Then it was done.
As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to start according to calculations.
Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.
"I could eat a cow with the smallpox," Barry declared.
Nick grinned. "No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job of work out there."
Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.
"Say," he asked anxiously. "What's haywire with the air?"
Nick looked startled. "Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago."
Barry shrugged. "Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout."
He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe.
He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.
The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!
Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.
A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.
Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame.
"You're almost in," a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. "Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!"
The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.
Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.
"Airlock open. Both doors."
Venusian air poured in.
"For this I left Panama?" one of the men yelped.
"Enough to gag a maggot," another agreed with hand to nose.
It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.
But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.
The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.
Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!
Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp, extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.
Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk. Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one particular figure among the men and women who waited.
"Dorothy!" he said fervently.
Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.
Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.
By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.
"Water!" Barry croaked.
The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water directly into his lungs.
"Doctor," he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. "What are my chances? On the level."
Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. "There's not a thing—not a damned solitary thing—I can do. It's something new to medical science."
Barry lay still.
"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes," the doctor continued, "and you know as much—more about your condition than I do. If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems to give you relief."
Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each side itched infuriatingly.
"What are these changes?" he asked. "What's this?"
"Those things seem to be—" the doctor began hesitantly. "Damn it, I know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills."
Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond shock.
"But there must be—"
Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.
II
Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr. Jensen had mentioned during a second visit—but for that to happen he must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.
When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine. Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.
"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry," he began.
"Stuff it," the sick man interrupted. "I want favors. Can do?"
Nick nodded vigorously.
"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open."
Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp, malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.
It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he was not an engineer for nothing.
"Got a pencil?" he asked.
He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need detailed drawings.
"Think you can get materials?"
Nick glanced at the sketch. "Hell, man, for you I can get anything the Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it."
"Two days?"
Nick looked insulted.
He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was ready.
Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that fell toward the metal floor.
Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.
"Perfect. Now put the window back."
Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window might invite disaster.
A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water from the floor.
The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet from the short exposure.
It was abnormal.
But so was Barry Barr.
With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.
Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though she were with him—her face with the exotic high cheek-bones—her eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair—lips that seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to fulfil—her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy from some venturesome Irishman—her slender yet firmly lithe body.
After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.
But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged animal.
Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.
Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.
Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog, the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last, beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm, almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.
One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had established a tenuous foothold.
Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.
The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away from base had been judged too hazardous.
Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an adequate though monotonous food source.
Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately they were harmless and timid.
In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.
The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew with a vigor approaching fury.
Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it, and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel the beasts.
The most important question—that of the presence or absence of intelligent, civilized Venusians—remained unanswered. Some of the men reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have established contact.
Barry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and dark parallel lines appeared.
But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.
Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming. Dorothy was leaning over him.
"Barry! Barry!" she whispered. "I can't help it. I love you even if you do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more." Tears glistened in her eyes.
"Huh?" he grunted. "Who? Me?"
"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted off—oh, the most piteous letter!"
Barry was fully awake now. "I'm not married. I have no child. I've never been in Philadelphia," he shouted. His lips thinned.
"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!" he declared grimly.
"Robson wouldn't!" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.
Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.
"I believe you, Barry."
She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a woman, as well as a toxicologist.
When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging Robson Hind's features.
The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the Five Ship Plan.
But even with his trickery Hind had lost.
He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.
The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead tubelight was off.
He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.
Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead, cut off outside his room.
Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call for help.
The door was locked!
He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had been removed.
He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.
Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again. A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.
He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden Venusian air poured in—but it was not enough!
He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of approaching unconsciousness.
There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.
Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.
Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.
Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the brackish, silt-clouded water.
III
Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless void between Earth and Venus.
Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat worm between his fingers.
Then dozens of them—hundreds—were upon him from all sides. He was wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his eyelids.
For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.
Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one the worms dropped off.
He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier here, and clearer.
He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of direction.
He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and ceased. He sank.
Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.
Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat. One figure drifted limply bottomward.
Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the Earthman.
Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.
Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking and clawing.
Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.
Human—or nearly so—the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face was coarse and savage.
It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched a short tube from its belt.
Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.
Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone. He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.
Barry stared through the reddening water.
Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's spear from the mud and raised it defensively.
But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the other was upon her from behind.
One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.
One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic necklace the girl wore but it did not break.
He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear. The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.
Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.
Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in its belly.
The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.
Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.
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Why is John Smith interested in holes?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Holes and John Smith by Edward W. Ludwig.
Relevant chunks:
He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was —whoops!...
The Holes and John Smith
By Edward W. Ludwig
Illustration by Kelly Freas
It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:
"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience."
Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water—and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the "root-of-all-evil" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.
We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me—Jimmie Stanley—and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:
"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury."
But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.
Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.
"Where ees museek?" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.
I gulped. "Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute."
Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.
"Ees no feedle man, ees no job," he squeaked.
I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, "Ees too loud, too fast," or "Ees too slow, too soft." The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.
"But," I added, "even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you." I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. "You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?"
Ke-teeli snorted. "Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek."
Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. "Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here."
"Sure," said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. "I think I hear him coming now."
Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.
"Five meenutes!" he shrieked.
"Eef no feedle, den you go!" And he whirled away.
We waited.
Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.
"Well," he muttered, "there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there—"
"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City," suggested Hammer-Head.
"Using what for fare?" I asked.
"Your brains?"
Hammer-Head groaned. "No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too."
The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.
Then it happened.
From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.
The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.
His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.
The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.
"Hello," he puffed. "I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union." He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. "I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan."
A moment's silence.
"Your plan?" I echoed at last.
"How to get back home," he snapped as if I should have known it already.
Hummm, I thought.
My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.
"We'll talk about your plan at intermission," I said, shivering.
"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?"
"I know everything ," said John Smith.
I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.
And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.
Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then—
My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.
The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.
First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.
But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.
I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.
I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.
We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .
We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.
"If I didn't hear it," I gasped,
"I wouldn't believe it!"
"And the fiddle's so old, too!" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.
"Old?" said John Smith. "Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence." He patted the thing tenderly. "I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one."
I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.
"Isn't right for what?" I had to ask.
He turned his sad eyes to me.
"For going home," he said.
Hummm, I thought.
We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I mean, his Zloomph —with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.
But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.
"Nice clarinet," he mused. "Has an unusual hole in the front."
Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. "You—you mean here? Where the music comes out?"
John Smith nodded. "Unusual."
Hummm, I thought again.
Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. "What's the matter, John?"
He pointed.
"Oh, there," I said. "A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages."
"Even there," he said softly,
"even there...."
There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.
It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.
Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.
At intermission I said, "How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?"
He shook his head.
"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?"
His grunt was negative.
"Then some old-fashioned beer?"
He smiled. "Yes, I like beer."
I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.
"John," I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, "where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night."
John yawned. "Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan."
"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot."
He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.
"I don't know," he finally drawled.
"It'd be a steady job, John." Inspiration struck me. "And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,
'copter landing—if we ever get a
'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages."
His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.
He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:
"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing."
"What do you like to do, John?"
His string-bean of a body stiffened.
"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan."
Oh Lord, that plan again!
I took a deep breath. "Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting."
He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. "The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand."
Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.
"Trouble is," he went on, "there are so many holes in this universe."
"Holes?" I kept a straight face.
"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows—they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes—millions and millions of holes!"
I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.
His voice trembled with emotion.
"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is—"
"But, John," I said as patiently as possible, "what have these holes got to do with you?"
He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.
"What have they to do with me?" he shrilled. "I can't find the right one—that's what!"
I closed my eyes. "Which particular hole are you looking for, John?"
He was speaking rapidly again now.
"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark—and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole—I fell through."
I closed my eyes. "Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole—is that why you have to find it?"
"Oh I didn't lose anything important," he snapped, " just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited."
His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. "But there's still time for my plan to work out—with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it."
"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one."
He nodded. "But it can't be too far away."
"I'd like to hear more about it," I said. "But if you're not going to play with us—"
"Oh, I'll play with you," he beamed. "I can talk to you . You understand."
Thank heaven!
Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.
John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.
Goon-Face was still cautious.
"Contract?" he wheezed. "Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?"
"Oh, sure," I said. "He'll stay—just as long as you want him."
"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract."
"Sure. We'll get him to sign it." I laughed hollowly. "Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli."
Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.
A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.
"This is the first time he's talked to anybody," Fat Boy breathed.
"I—I'm scared.
"Nothing can happen," I said, optimistically. "This'll be good publicity."
We watched.
John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.
John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.
John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.
The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.
John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.
"He's doing it," Hammer-Head groaned. "He's telling him!"
I rose swiftly. "We better get over there. We should have known better—"
We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.
"He wouldn't listen," he said, weakly. "I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole."
I patted him on the back. "No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll—well, we'll help you."
"We're working on a plan, too," said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.
"We're going to make a more scientific approach."
"How?" John asked.
Fat Boy gulped.
"Just wait another day," I said.
"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work."
"No, I guess not," he sighed. "I'll stay—until tomorrow."
All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?
Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.
It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.
John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.
"John!" I cried. "You're drunk!"
His watery eyes squinted at me.
"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!"
"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory."
His body trembled. "No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter."
"Then what is it, John?"
"It's my body. It's—"
"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?"
His face was white with terror.
"No, my— my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?"
He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.
I patted him gingerly on the arm.
"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now."
We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.
I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph —steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.
Then—he was gone.
John just slipped out of my grasp— Zloomph and all—and was gone—completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing—nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.
"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it."
John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....
Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, "No beeg feedle, no contract."
Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.
We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.
Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.
And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.
... THE END
Question:
Why is John Smith interested in holes?
Answer:
|
[
"John Smith is interested in holes because he wants to go back to his own time dimension. He explains to Jimmie that his colleagues did not believe that before the tapes, instruments that played music existed. He further details that on his way back to the University with his instrument, the Zloomph, he fell through a hole and out of his own time dimension. He states that a researcher is to blame for not securing a force field over the hole to prevent someone from falling through. John Smith is interested in holes because he believes that any hole could potentially bring him back to his own time dimension so that he can prove that this theory was credit. He does not want people to think that he was wrong. ",
"He is interested in the holes because he needs to find the correct one in order to go home. He mentions that the foundation of their cultures is based on the history of all the time dimensions. The different dimensions are interwoven and the holes can provide insights into the different dimensions. Similar to time or space travel. Back in his time, he was proving a point to the University, but some researcher forgot to set a force-field for the hole, thus, he fell through the hole into Jimmie’s time. He needs to go back immediately. If he doesn’t, the University will think that he cannot prove his theory and ran away. But because everything are made up of holes – even his body has holes – John becomes worried of not able to find the correct one. ",
"John Smith desperately wants to return home and believes that finding the right hole is the way. There are many time dimensions interwoven through the ages and the holes let people travel between and study them. Such a hole may be anything, so it's almost impossible to find the inter-dimensional one. John fell into one in the dark in his dimension, that way he showed up in this place, but he wants to return, so he studies every hole. The fall prevented John from proving his point about ancient history to some scientists and he doesn't want them to consider him a coward. He needs to return to his dimension and prove the point. ",
"John Smith is interested in holes because he believes that he can return to his time dimension through the right one. During his conversation with Jimmie, he explains that holes are a first-hand method of studying time dimensions and cultures. All of the objects around them, including the beer bottles, doors, caves, animal holes, mines, faces, and clothes, all have millions of holes. However, even with all of these holes, John is desperate because he cannot find the right one to return home. He blames his initial travel on some fool of a researcher who forgot to set a force-fold over the hole that he fell through in his dimension. "
] |
32667
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He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was —whoops!...
The Holes and John Smith
By Edward W. Ludwig
Illustration by Kelly Freas
It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place:
"A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience."
Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water—and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the "root-of-all-evil" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert.
We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me—Jimmie Stanley—and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth:
"The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury."
But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent.
Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur.
"Where ees museek?" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home.
I gulped. "Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute."
Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather.
"Ees no feedle man, ees no job," he squeaked.
I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, "Ees too loud, too fast," or "Ees too slow, too soft." The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled.
"But," I added, "even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you." I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. "You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?"
Ke-teeli snorted. "Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek."
Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. "Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here."
"Sure," said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. "I think I hear him coming now."
Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon.
"Five meenutes!" he shrieked.
"Eef no feedle, den you go!" And he whirled away.
We waited.
Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale.
"Well," he muttered, "there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there—"
"Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City," suggested Hammer-Head.
"Using what for fare?" I asked.
"Your brains?"
Hammer-Head groaned. "No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washed-up interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too."
The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano.
Then it happened.
From the entrance of The Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass than a bass.
The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face.
His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty.
The bass thumped down upon the bandstand.
"Hello," he puffed. "I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union." He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. "I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan."
A moment's silence.
"Your plan?" I echoed at last.
"How to get back home," he snapped as if I should have known it already.
Hummm, I thought.
My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South.
"We'll talk about your plan at intermission," I said, shivering.
"Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ?"
"I know everything ," said John Smith.
I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare think what kind of soul-chilling tones might emerge from its ancient depths.
And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro.
Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then—
My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet.
The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard.
First they went Boom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom , and then, boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles.
But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string.
I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm.
I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.
We finished On An Asteroid With You , modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan .
We waited for the applause of the Earth people and the shrilling of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle.
"If I didn't hear it," I gasped,
"I wouldn't believe it!"
"And the fiddle's so old, too!" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk.
"Old?" said John Smith. "Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph . This is the only one in existence." He patted the thing tenderly. "I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one."
I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle.
"Isn't right for what?" I had to ask.
He turned his sad eyes to me.
"For going home," he said.
Hummm, I thought.
We played. Tune after tune. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars . He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I mean, his Zloomph —with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing.
But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.
"Nice clarinet," he mused. "Has an unusual hole in the front."
Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. "You—you mean here? Where the music comes out?"
John Smith nodded. "Unusual."
Hummm, I thought again.
Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. "What's the matter, John?"
He pointed.
"Oh, there," I said. "A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages."
"Even there," he said softly,
"even there...."
There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana.
It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play.
Conclusion: If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo.
At intermission I said, "How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?"
He shook his head.
"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?"
His grunt was negative.
"Then some old-fashioned beer?"
He smiled. "Yes, I like beer."
I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool.
"John," I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, "where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night."
John yawned. "Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan."
"Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot."
He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration.
"I don't know," he finally drawled.
"It'd be a steady job, John." Inspiration struck me. "And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef,
'copter landing—if we ever get a
'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages."
His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor.
He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue:
"No, I don't ... care much ... about playing."
"What do you like to do, John?"
His string-bean of a body stiffened.
"I like to study ancient history ... and I must work on my plan."
Oh Lord, that plan again!
I took a deep breath. "Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting."
He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. "The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand."
Oh, oh , I thought. But you still have to eat. Remember, you still have to eat.
"Trouble is," he went on, "there are so many holes in this universe."
"Holes?" I kept a straight face.
"Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows—they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes—millions and millions of holes!"
I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.
His voice trembled with emotion.
"Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is—"
"But, John," I said as patiently as possible, "what have these holes got to do with you?"
He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence.
"What have they to do with me?" he shrilled. "I can't find the right one—that's what!"
I closed my eyes. "Which particular hole are you looking for, John?"
He was speaking rapidly again now.
"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark—and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole—I fell through."
I closed my eyes. "Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole—is that why you have to find it?"
"Oh I didn't lose anything important," he snapped, " just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited."
His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. "But there's still time for my plan to work out—with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it."
"Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one."
He nodded. "But it can't be too far away."
"I'd like to hear more about it," I said. "But if you're not going to play with us—"
"Oh, I'll play with you," he beamed. "I can talk to you . You understand."
Thank heaven!
Heaven lasted for just three days. During those seventy-two golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells.
John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes.
Goon-Face was still cautious.
"Contract?" he wheezed. "Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?"
"Oh, sure," I said. "He'll stay—just as long as you want him."
"Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract."
"Sure. We'll get him to sign it." I laughed hollowly. "Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli."
Just a few minutes later tragedy struck.
A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.
"This is the first time he's talked to anybody," Fat Boy breathed.
"I—I'm scared.
"Nothing can happen," I said, optimistically. "This'll be good publicity."
We watched.
John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook.
John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble.
John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly.
The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously.
John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly.
"He's doing it," Hammer-Head groaned. "He's telling him!"
I rose swiftly. "We better get over there. We should have known better—"
We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon.
"He wouldn't listen," he said, weakly. "I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole."
I patted him on the back. "No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll—well, we'll help you."
"We're working on a plan, too," said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.
"We're going to make a more scientific approach."
"How?" John asked.
Fat Boy gulped.
"Just wait another day," I said.
"We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work."
"No, I guess not," he sighed. "I'll stay—until tomorrow."
All night the thought crept through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay? What can we tell him? What, what, what?
Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind: finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life.
It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment.
John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying.
"John!" I cried. "You're drunk!"
His watery eyes squinted at me.
"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!"
"But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory."
His body trembled. "No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter."
"Then what is it, John?"
"It's my body. It's—"
"Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?"
His face was white with terror.
"No, my— my body's full of holes . Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?"
He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation.
I patted him gingerly on the arm.
"Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. C'mon now."
We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I.
I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph —steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street.
Then—he was gone.
John just slipped out of my grasp— Zloomph and all—and was gone—completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing—nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.
"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it."
John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....
Tonight is our last night at The Space Room . Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, "No beeg feedle, no contract."
Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.
We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.
Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.
And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.
... THE END
|
What is Daniel Oak’s job?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about His Master's Voice by Randall Garrett.
Relevant chunks:
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL
HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT · SCIENCE FICTION
Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like "Who are you?"
By RANDALL GARRETT
I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.
When I entered the office, he was
[3]
sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:
"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?"
I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. "Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will."
He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass
[4]
again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.
Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.
Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.
I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.
He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.
"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble."
"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst," I said, keeping my voice level.
[5]
"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed." His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.
He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. "I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract."
I just continued to keep my voice calm. "If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win."
"Mr. Oak," he said heavily, "I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one."
I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.
"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point," I told him.
"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage."
"My honor and ethics are in fine shape," I said, "but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite
[6]
the same as yours. Get to the point."
He took another sip of Madeira. "The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.
"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.
"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?"
"Is that question purely rhetorical," I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. "Or are you losing your memory?" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.
My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. "Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey."
"Your robotocists can change that," I said. This time, I was giving him my version of "genuine" innocence.
[7]
A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.
He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. "No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated."
"Then why don't they do that?"
"There are two very good reasons," he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. "In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent."
"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst." He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.
"But," I went on, "hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you
[8]
money?"
"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I think."
"Perfectly. It's mutual."
He ignored me. "I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either." He scowled at me.
"It seems," he went on, "that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes."
"I can't say that I blame him," I said. "What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?"
"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System." He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. "Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!"
What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,
[9]
but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.
"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak."
"In other words, I've got you over a barrel."
"I don't deny it."
"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus."
"How much?"
"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it."
He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: "I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking."
"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording," I said, "but it's a deal. Is there anything else?"
"No."
"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel."
"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak," he said. And the soft oiliness
[10]
of his voice was the oil of vitriol. "Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside."
I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.
And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.
Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.
For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life—air, some water, and a very little food—still costs more than a Rolls-Royce
[11]
automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.
They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.
I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.
Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.
Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of
[12]
various sub-governments all over the System.
And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.
The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of
[13]
the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.
The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.
McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor
[14]
did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.
Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.
But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders— fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.
That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.
And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.
For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.
First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.
Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .
[15]
Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.
Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term "human being" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.
A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, "human beings" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.
And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.
With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.
If one human being says "jump left," and another says "jump right," the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending
[16]
on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.
So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.
If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.
The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. "Very well," they'd said, "if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person."
As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute "Daniel Oak" for "human being" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.
When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a
[17]
bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.
Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.
Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.
Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.
But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a
[18]
week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.
I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.
After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.
"Have a good trip, Oak?" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.
"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip," I said, shaking his extended hand.
"That's the definition of a good trip," he told me.
"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep."
"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?"
"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?"
"My treat," he said. "Come on."
I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.
[19]
Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold "union suit" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.
A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a "safe" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.
I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender
[20]
and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.
I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.
Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said
"O'Banion's Bar," and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.
We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.
"Oak," he said, "I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble."
"Yeah? What kind?" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.
"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.
"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around
[21]
here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell—or sabotage—around this planetoid just now!"
"Now wait a minute," I said, still playing ignorant, "I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents."
"Perfectly true," he said agreeably. "We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while." He chuckled wryly. "We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works." Then he looked sharply at me. "I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible."
"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?"
He took a hefty slug of his drink. "They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about."
"So? What does this have to do with me?"
He put his drink on the table. "Oak, I want you to help me." His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. "I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my
[22]
pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation."
"And you're going to go against his orders?"
"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can."
I grinned at him. "The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire."
He nodded perfunctorily. "I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that."
"Thanks." There wasn't much else I could say.
"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you—"
I shook my head, cutting him off. "Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want
[23]
me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.
"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are
[24]
not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.
"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't
[25]
possibly work for you."
He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. "I see. Yeah, I get your point." He scowled down at his drink.
" But ," I said, "it would be a pleasure
[26]
to work with you."
He looked up quickly. "How's that?"
"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire
[27]
you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.
"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?"
His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. "Loud and clear. It's a deal."
I held up a hand, palm toward him. "Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?"
"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures."
"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle."
Question:
What is Daniel Oak’s job?
Answer:
|
[
"Daniel Oak states that he has an office in New York and describes himself as a Confidential Expediter. He has worked with Ravenhurst before and the story begins with an understanding that Daniel recently completed a job for Ravenhurst. He later mentions that he is a double agent. Daniel works for the Political Survey Division branch of the System Census Bureau for the UN government. Unbeknownst to most of the System’s citizens, the Political Survey Division is the Secret Service arm of the UN government. \n\nA flitterboat is a more economical option than a full spaceship. It is described as having a single gravitoinertial engine. It is meant to have the most basic necessities that are needed for a person to survive their journey, which includes oxygen, water, and the requirement of food necessary. The flitterboat is not necessarily more affordable, but it does provide the purpose of transporting from one Belt to another Belt. Daniel Oak details how a vacuum suit is needed to be worn in a flitterboat.\n",
"Daniel is, officially, a confidential expediter. In this role, he helps to ensure the rapid completion of projects to which his employers have assigned him. Typically, his job involves finding other people who are able to fulfil the request initially assigned to him, and collecting his fee. \nIn the case of the McGuire project, which involves the construction of a sophisticated spaceship operating system capable of understanding and speaking English, Daniel is also operating in his capacity as an agent of the Political survey Division. The PSD is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN government, and is often thought to be responsible for surveying the state of political systems throughout the System. However, in reality the PSD more closely resembles a secret service of the UN. \n",
"Daniel Oak's official job title is a Confidential Expediter. His job consists of helping others complete tasks, usually hiring a third party and collecting a fee. Daniel Oak is also an agent of the Political Survey Division, a Secret Service organization. In the story, Daniel Oak has been hired by Ravenhurst directly in order to ensure that his company, Viking Spacecraft, succeeds in business with the development of the new McGuire model. He is hired specifically to prevent sabotage to McGuire, as sabotage would lead to the downfall of the Viking business.",
"Daniel Oak is a confidential expediter who helps people to get their things done. So normally he would find someone who is an expert in the area that his customers are looking for, then pair them and then collect the fees. Interestingly, now he is a double agent. He was working for Ravenhurst where he had to prevent sabotage. However, during that job, he was not successful since he did sabotage their robot, McGuire. Because he is the first one that the robot spoke to after it is activated, thus McGuire only listens to the order given by him. Moreover, since costly thus not worthwhile , and McGuire’s build in program does not allow tampering. \n\nCurrently, Ravenhurst is telling Oak to go to Ceres to help with the roboticists build MGYR-8. Because Raverhurst wants it to be not only fast and safe, but also wants it to become something that can be used commercially. And later, when he arrives in Ceres, Brock asks him for help. While he didn’t agree to do so, he did suggest they work together, since they are all working for Ravenhurst, there should not be a conflict of interest. "
] |
48513
|
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
ILLUSTRATED BY KRENKEL
HIS MASTER'S VOICE ANALOG SCIENCE FACT · SCIENCE FICTION
Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like "Who are you?"
By RANDALL GARRETT
I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.
When I entered the office, he was
[3]
sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:
"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?"
I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. "Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will."
He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass
[4]
again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.
Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.
Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.
I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.
He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.
"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble."
"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst," I said, keeping my voice level.
[5]
"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed." His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.
He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. "I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract."
I just continued to keep my voice calm. "If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win."
"Mr. Oak," he said heavily, "I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one."
I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.
"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point," I told him.
"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage."
"My honor and ethics are in fine shape," I said, "but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite
[6]
the same as yours. Get to the point."
He took another sip of Madeira. "The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.
"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.
"Now, it appears that you , Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?"
"Is that question purely rhetorical," I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. "Or are you losing your memory?" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.
My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. "Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey."
"Your robotocists can change that," I said. This time, I was giving him my version of "genuine" innocence.
[7]
A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.
He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. "No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated."
"Then why don't they do that?"
"There are two very good reasons," he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. "In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent."
"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst." He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.
"But," I went on, "hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you
[8]
money?"
"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I think."
"Perfectly. It's mutual."
He ignored me. "I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either." He scowled at me.
"It seems," he went on, "that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes."
"I can't say that I blame him," I said. "What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?"
"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System." He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. "Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!"
What's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody , I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud,
[9]
but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.
"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak."
"In other words, I've got you over a barrel."
"I don't deny it."
"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus."
"How much?"
"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it."
He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: "I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking."
"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording," I said, "but it's a deal. Is there anything else?"
"No."
"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel."
"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak," he said. And the soft oiliness
[10]
of his voice was the oil of vitriol. "Your compassion for your fellowman is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to subside."
I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.
And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.
Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on my way to Ceres.
For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life—air, some water, and a very little food—still costs more than a Rolls-Royce
[11]
automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in the Belt.
They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.
I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.
Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter ; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.
Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of
[12]
various sub-governments all over the System.
And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.
The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of
[13]
the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.
The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.
McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor
[14]
did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.
Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.
But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders— fast ! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.
That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.
And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.
For more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.
First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.
Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law .
[15]
Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.
Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term "human being" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.
A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, "human beings" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.
And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.
With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.
If one human being says "jump left," and another says "jump right," the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending
[16]
on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.
So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.
If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.
The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another tack. "Very well," they'd said, "if we can't define all the members of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only from that person."
As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute "Daniel Oak" for "human being" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.
When I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats, sitting on a
[17]
bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until you hit the next beacon station.
Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres, lock, stock, and mining rights.
Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership. There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to that, too, before very long.
Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.
But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981, and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a strain that takes a
[18]
week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.
I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.
After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.
"Have a good trip, Oak?" he asked, trying to put a smile on his scarred, battered face.
"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip," I said, shaking his extended hand.
"That's the definition of a good trip," he told me.
"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath and some sleep."
"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want a drink?"
"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?"
"My treat," he said. "Come on."
I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.
[19]
Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold "union suit" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other colors.
A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt. You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might have to get into a vac suit fast. In a "safe" area like the tunnels inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away from his vac suit.
I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right; I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I have spent summers in nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves with lavender
[20]
and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.
I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.
Brock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said
"O'Banion's Bar," and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.
We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock opened up with his troubles.
"Oak," he said, "I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant because I want you to know that there may be trouble."
"Yeah? What kind?" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.
"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation, which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of precious metals.
"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell around
[21]
here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we can't stand any hell—or sabotage—around this planetoid just now!"
"Now wait a minute," I said, still playing ignorant, "I thought we'd pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not Thurston's agents."
"Perfectly true," he said agreeably. "We managed to block any attempts of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we hadn't for a while." He chuckled wryly. "We went all out to keep the McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the works." Then he looked sharply at me. "I covered that, of course. No one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible."
"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?"
He took a hefty slug of his drink. "They're around, all right. We have our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing about."
"So? What does this have to do with me?"
He put his drink on the table. "Oak, I want you to help me." His onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly into my own. "I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have to come out of my
[22]
pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he doesn't like your methods of operation."
"And you're going to go against his orders?"
"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can."
I grinned at him. "The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she sneaked aboard McGuire."
He nodded perfunctorily. "I was. I still think you should have told me what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that."
"Thanks." There wasn't much else I could say.
"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could offer you—"
I shook my head, cutting him off. "Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons. In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want
[23]
me to work for you, then it would be unethical for me to take the job.
"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my services are
[24]
not necessary to the survival of the individual, except in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a lawyer when it's a charity case.
"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't
[25]
possibly work for you."
He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very slowly. "I see. Yeah, I get your point." He scowled down at his drink.
" But ," I said, "it would be a pleasure
[26]
to work with you."
He looked up quickly. "How's that?"
"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire
[27]
you because you're working for Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we co-operate.
"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?"
His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. "Loud and clear. It's a deal."
I held up a hand, palm toward him. "Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal' involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?"
"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts and figures."
"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle."
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Why is Mr. Crandon an important character in the story?
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| ["Mr. Crandon is a member of POSAT, and he is also a professor, published author, and researcher. Do(...TRUNCATED)
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51336
| "What is POSAT?\n \n \n By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n \n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n \n [Transcriber(...TRUNCATED)
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What is the significance of the mystery metal from the starship?
| "After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question ab(...TRUNCATED)
| ["The mystery metal is significant because it initially attracted the crew’s interest due to their(...TRUNCATED)
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63867
| "CAPTAIN MIDAS\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at(...TRUNCATED)
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| "After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question ab(...TRUNCATED)
| ["George Faircloth and Marge Faircloth are husband and wife. They have married for 8 years. Their re(...TRUNCATED)
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51321
| "PRIME DIFFERENCE\n \n \n By ALAN E. NOURSE\n \n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n \n [Transcriber's Note:(...TRUNCATED)
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What is the relationship between Jon Karyl and his Steel-Blue (the one that he initially meets)?
| "After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question ab(...TRUNCATED)
| ["Jon is initially curious about the Steel-Blue that he first meets in the space station. When he no(...TRUNCATED)
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29159
| "ACID BATH\n \n\n By VASELEOS GARSON\n \n \n The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd devel(...TRUNCATED)
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Describe John Smith and his instrument.
| "After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question ab(...TRUNCATED)
| ["John Smith is a human from Earth that is described as a very shot guy with a broad face and light (...TRUNCATED)
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32667
| "He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little (...TRUNCATED)
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What is the plot of the story?
| "After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question ab(...TRUNCATED)
| ["An army ship lands near a settlement, and people look out their windows, grumbling about its prese(...TRUNCATED)
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50848
| "SOLDIER BOY\n \n \n By MICHAEL SHAARA\n \n Illustrated by EMSH\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext(...TRUNCATED)
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What is the significance of the Misty Ones in the story?
| "After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question ab(...TRUNCATED)
| ["The Misty Ones are a group of highly feared beings, thought to be supernatural in some way at the (...TRUNCATED)
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63521
| "\n\n\n\nProduced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online\nDistributed Proofreading Team at http:/(...TRUNCATED)
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